On his full-length debut, the masked UK musician known as PRESIDENT seeks to maintain the impact of his 2025 EP, King of Terrors. A genre-bending combination of electronic dance music, modern R&B and crushing metalcore, Blood of Your Empire continues to explore the religious themes of the previous project. “I grew up in a very religious environment, and I realised that a lot of what I’d been taught growing up I’d been institutionalised into,” the artist tells Apple Music. “And when I started to question it, I had a real fucking breakdown, basically. A lot of the pillars of my life that I’d built upon—whether it be in a moral sense or just ‘What are we here for?’ and ‘What does it all mean?’—they started to tumble. That sent me down a super dark path, and I ended up in a really bad way. Part of the record is dealing with the nature of my thoughts on the whole religious thing,” he says. “And the other side is me dealing with how I deal with that.” The Deftones-on-the-dance-floor lead-off track “Angel Wings” is the first song PRESIDENT wrote for the album, and one that he says is emblematic of the project itself. “If anyone asked, ‘What does PRESIDENT sound like?’ I would direct them straight to that song,” he explains. He points to the song “Mercy” as a key to his personal reckoning. “When I wrote those lyrics, I was looking back at history,” he says. “I feel like there’s been more blood spilled in the name of religion than anything else in human history. That sounds like a slight on religion itself, but it’s actually a slight on man, because man has taken it upon himself to divert from the teachings of religion and use them for his own greed and power.” He cites the hip-hop-influenced “dark heaven” as the song in which he takes the most explicit aim at his religious programming. “It’s the most direct comment about faith being my absolute truth and then moving to a more open-minded state,” he says. “I’m not saying that I’m not religious anymore. I’m just saying that I’m going through this journey that I should have had by myself rather than being influenced by others.” “DOOM LOOP” is about trying to be present in our age of constant distraction. “I think social media is something that just can drag you away,” he says. “There’s a great saying I heard the other day: ‘These are the good old days.’ And this is directed at me as much as anyone else. If this is our only chance of this life, and there’s nothing afterwards, then fucking get hold of it.”