Spring King

Two years on from the release of their debut record, the Manchester four piece return with another riff filled mosh pit inducing record, ‘A Better Life’, due to be released on 17th August. We sat down with drummer/vocalist Tarek Musa and guitarist Pete Darlington to talk about what to expect from the band’s second album, how the band has changed it’s approach since the release of ‘Tell Me If You Like To’ and why Pantera and Papa Roach helped shape the new record, kind of.

Q: Are there any new influences that have come in to this record?

Pete: For me personally I was listening to a lot of heavier music, not that you’d be able to tell necessarily, but bands like Pantera and System of a Down, not because I wanted to make guitar sounds like that but I wanted to get an idea on how they put riffs together and I think ‘Animal’ was the first time where we captured the new energy that we wanted to capture and the guitar lines are influenced by the heavier stuff I was thinking about at least.

Tarek: For me I was listening to a lot of heavier tunes as well when we started writing this record, maybe not as heavy as Pantera but indulging in the old days of listening to the likes of Papa Roach and Foo Fighters, but then I was still also listening to the new Arcade Fire record and a lot of pop music so my head was kind of a mix of both worlds. It was like trying to keep it heavy but also doing something that’s quite catchy; I like writing songs that are poppy and hooky but heavy.

Q: Your live shows are always manic, did you see that as a priority when writing the new record?

Pete: When we write a lot of the time I’m thinking about how it’s going to translate live, if it’s going to be worthy of a mosh pit. I feel like on this record we have a lot more moments where I wish now in retrospect we had a bit of a break because the new live set is just gonna be ridiculous; it’s just non-stop with a couple of little breaks here and there.

Tarek: I think this time around we wanted to bring the manic nature of the live set into the recording a bit more to try and capture that live energy. I think the first record was a bit more of a studio record but this time round there’s more voices on the record and there’s more harmonies by the band and it’s been more collaborative. Songwriting wise I think it captures the live sound which is something we aimed to do and it’s definitely upped the energy across the record; we all need to get pretty fit in order to pull it off every night.

Q: How do you feel this record has changed the band’s sound?

Tarek: It’s definitely a much more defined and crafted sound, I think the songwriting on this record is way above the first and it reflects the maturity that we’ve developed over the past few years. I think we’ve achieved something that when we were in the writing room maybe none of us expected we would have done, it’s a really good moment for us because it’s something I didn’t think we’d do and I’m really proud of it.

Q: Are there any specific ideas you wanted to express?

Pete: The overall thing that we wanted to get across was that the world’s in a strange place, there’s a lot of negative shit going on and there’s a lot of bands writing about that in an angry way but we wanted to flip it on it’s head and take all that negativity, write about it but try to present it with a positive spin on it, in a kind of idealistic way. It was like the world’s fucked but here’s a crazy positive record that you sing a long to, jump to and have a good time and lose yourself in.

Words by Callum McCormack | Illustration by REN