Battle cry

A battle cry is a yell or chant taken up in battle, usually by members of the same combatant group. Battle cries are not necessarily articulate, although they often aim to invoke patriotic or religious sentiment. Their purpose is a combination of arousing aggression and esprit de corps on one's own side and causing intimidation on the hostile side. Battle cries are a universal form of display behaviour (i.e., threat display) aiming at competitive advantage, ideally by overstating one's own aggressive potential to a point where the enemy prefers to avoid confrontation altogether and opts to flee. In order to overstate one's potential for aggression, battle cries need to be as loud as possible, and have historically often been amplified by acoustic devices such as horns, drums, conches, carnyxes, bagpipes, bugles, etc. (see also martial music).

Battle cries are closely related to other behavioral patterns of human aggression, such as war dances and taunting, performed during the "warming up" phase preceding the escalation of physical violence. From the Middle Ages, many cries appeared on standards and were adopted as mottoes, an example being the motto "Dieu et mon droit" ("God and my right") of the English kings. It is said that this was Edward III's rallying cry during the Battle of Crécy. The word "slogan" originally derives from sluagh-gairm or sluagh-ghairm (sluagh = "people", "army", and gairm = "call", "proclamation"), the Scottish Gaelic word for "gathering-cry" and in times of war for "battle-cry". The Gaelic word was borrowed into English as slughorn, sluggorne, "slogum", and slogan.

Thomas J. Bergersen

Thomas Jacob Bergersen (born July 4, 1980) is a Norwegian composer, multi-instrumentalist, and the co-founder of the production music company Two Steps From Hell. He is best known for writing music for high-profile theatrical trailers.

Bergersen started his musical career as a demoscener, writing tracked modules under the name Lioz in the group Index. The release of a 2007 trance-genre single titled "Remember September" saw Bergersen team with fellow Norwegian artist Boom Jinx.

In May 2010, Bergersen and his business partner, Nick Phoenix, released a debut public Two Steps From Hell album titled Invincible, featuring some of their most popular tracks, including "Freedom Fighters", "Moving Mountains", and "Heart of Courage". Several additional commercial album releases have since followed, including Archangel and SkyWorld. Bergersen also performed in a 2013 live concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall alongside Phoenix, confirming at least one future concert planned for Europe, intending to begin touring at some point in 2015.

Nick Phoenix

Nick Phoenix is a London-born composer and a co-founder of the trailer music production company Two Steps from Hell. He has written music for a number of high profile trailers, with over 1000 noted scores and placements in total.

Since 1997, he has been involved in composing film trailer music and producing virtual instrument libraries for East West Records.

In 2006, he formed Two Steps from Hell with his business partner, Thomas Bergersen, and the two publicly released the album Invincible in 2010. Several additional commercial album releases have since followed, including Archangel and SkyWorld, each of which has charted on the iTunes top 100 in the Soundtracks category. Phoenix also performed in a 2013 live concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall alongside Bergersen, confirming at least one future concert planned for Europe.

In 2013, he released a solo hybrid electronic/orchestral album titled Speed of Sound.

His band, Crater Mountain, released its classic rock-genre debut album Hillbilly Starship in 2014, with plans to begin live performances in the fall of that year.

Imagine Dragons

Imagine Dragons is an American rock band from Las Vegas, Nevada. Imagine Dragons' lineup consists of lead vocalist Dan Reynolds, guitarist Wayne "Wing" Sermon, bassist Ben McKee and drummer Daniel Platzman. The band gained exposure following the release of their debut studio album, Night Visions (2012) and first single "It's Time". The band's second studio album Smoke + Mirrors reached number one on the Billboard 200, Canadian Albums Chart, and UK Albums Chart.Night Visions peaked at number two on the weekly Billboard 200 and UK Albums Chart. According to Billboard, Imagine Dragons topped the year-end rock rankings for 2013;Billboard named them "The Breakthrough Band of 2013", and Rolling Stone named their single "Radioactive" "the biggest rock hit of the year".MTV called them "the year's biggest breakout band".

Imagine Dragons won two American Music Awards for Favorite Alternative Artist, a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance, five Billboard Music Awards, and a World Music Award. In May 2014, the band was nominated for a total of fourteen different Billboard Music Awards, including Top Artist of the Year and a Milestone Award, recognizing innovation and creativity of different artists across different genres.

Angel Haze

Raykeea Roes Wilson (born July 10, 1992), better known by the stage name Angel Haze, is an American rapper and singer. In 2012, Haze released the EP Reservation for online and later signed a record deal with Universal Republic Records before it converted to Republic Records. On December 31, 2013, Haze released the debut album Dirty Gold, which features the singles "Echelon (It's My Way)" and "Battle Cry". In 2015 the project Back to the Woods was made available as a free download.

Early life

Raykeea Roes Wilson was born on July 10, 1992, in Detroit, Michigan to a military family. Wilson is a mix of African and Native American ancestry and a self-taught speaker of Tsalagi. Haze was raised in the Greater Apostolic Faith, but is no longer practicing. An interview with The Guardian, stated: "we all lived in the same community, within 10 minutes of each other. You weren't allowed to talk to anyone outside of that, you weren't allowed to wear jewelry, listen to music, to eat certain things, to date people...you weren't allowed to do pretty much anything." However, after a pastor threatened Wilson's mother, the family left the church and moved to Brooklyn, New York when Haze was 16 years old. Haze soon began delving into the world of secular music.