If you're expecting Jamie Campbell Bower’s solo music to sound like it crawled out of a Hellmouth, you’re not far off. After the dissolution of his band Counterfeit and the seismic impact of his role as Vecna in Stranger Things, Bower has emerged with a sound that's raw, cinematic, and — in his words — “daggery.”
The cover of “Run On (God’s Gonna Cut You Down)” feels like a funeral dirge for the algorithm era — heavy, haunted, and absolutely live. “I want anything that I do now musically to feel very organic,” Bower says. “I’d rather it be nasty and crappy and feely than perfect and shiny and emotionless.” He brought in Mikey Demus and Arya Goggin of Skindred to play on the track, insisting on real-time takes with no Frankenstein edits. “I can hear an edit — and I don’t want to hear a f***ing edit.”
The B-side, “The Devil in Me,” plays like a communion with that same dark preacher energy, and together the tracks drop listeners into a mythic battle between sacred and profane. That’s no accident. Bower has been constructing an entire world around his solo work, inspired in part by Dante’s Inferno and the Nine Circles of Hell — a world he says he’s still deep in the process of defining.
“I probably have 40 tracks I’d be happy to record,” he says, “but only a handful that would make a cohesive album. So right now, I’m just building the world, telling the story, and letting it guide me.” And if an album happens out of that, great. If not, he’s not bothered. “My goal as an artist is not just to put a song on Spotify. I want everything around it to be a story.”
That sense of story — of total immersion — also guided his transformation into Stranger Things’ Vecna, a character Bower treats with as much vocal precision as his music. “I started with this idea of a monster voice,” he says, “but it felt fake. So I relaxed. Let the larynx open. Let the diaphragm do the work. Suddenly, the voice came from a place of real connection.”
It’s a voice that’s become instantly iconic — guttural, eerie, strangely calm — and yes, musical. “There’s definitely a musicality to it,” he admits. “And when I’m down in that register, that’s when I’m most truthful.” That’s also where the line between music and acting blurs: both are rooted in deep emotional frequency. “We're all vibrating at a frequency,” Bower says. “And I want to capture that moment — that vibration — when it’s real.”
As for how much his acting and music intersect, Bower doesn’t force it — but he doesn’t ignore it either. “Vecna appeared to me,” he says. “I didn’t chase that part. But it aligned with the same beliefs and experiences I was having. You can’t close your mind to that.”
The references bleed together — Leonard Cohen, gospel dirges, black metal bands like Darkthrone and Carpathian Forest (his Vecna prep playlist), Kate Bush’s resurgence, and even Placebo’s cover of “Running Up That Hill.” He also throws out a wildcard: Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA.” “Just in case I wanted to be naughty,” he laughs.
Still, the music is no side hustle. For Bower, it’s a lifeline. “When Counterfeit ended, I had to ask, ‘Who am I making this for?’ And when the answer was ‘me,’ everything opened up.” That shift — from crowd-pleasing to soul-searching — is at the heart of his new chapter. “It’s about surrender,” he says. “Mass surrender. And I want to stay there for as long as I can.”
If the devil’s in the details, Jamie Campbell Bower is giving him a run for his money.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
