Upset, April 2023

Howdy.

April 2023

If we were forced to make a list of new musical royalty, there’s probably one name that would stick out from the crowd when it came to the last decade. In the mid-00s Pete, Patrick, Hayley and Gerard were all sprinkled with the star power to make them identifiable from a single name. From this generation, one man has quite clearly gobbled the lot. Awsten Knight is a force of nature. Waterparks are back on the cover of Upset, and they’re coming for our fish and chips. This will not stand, Awsten. We fight at dawn.

RIOT! 4. FIDLAR 12. LIES 20. SNAYX 22. Black Honey ABOUT TO BREAK 26. Pool Kids 29. Coach Party FEATURES 30. Waterparks 40. Bury Tommorrow 46. Manchester Orchestra 52. The Van Pelt REVIEWS 56. Fall Out Boy TEENAGE KICKS 58. Bar Stool Preachers

Stephen Ackroyd @stephenackroyd Editor

UPSET Editor Stephen Ackroyd Deputy Editor Victoria Sinden Associate Editor Ali Shutler

Scribblers Alexander Bradley, Connor Fenton, Jack Press, Jamie MacMillan, Kelsey McClure, Rob Mair, Sam Taylor Snappers Alice Bailey, Jamie MacMillan, Leila Rummery, Martyna Bannister, Mimi Hong, Sarah Louise Bennett, Shervin Lainez PUBLISHED FROM WELCOMETOTHEBUNKER.COM PO BOX 420, HASTINGS, TN34 9LZ

All material copyright (c). All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of The Bunker Publishing Ltd. Disclaimer: While every effort is made to ensure the information in this magazine is correct, changes can occur which affect the accuracy of copy, for which The Bunker Publishing Ltd holds no responsibility. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of Dork or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally.

THE MONTH IN ROCK

THAT’S LIFE...

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A much-needed refresher in how to have fun: it’s the long-awaited return of chaotic punks FIDLAR. Words: Jack Press. Photos: Alice Baxley.

→ The dumbest thing you could do is take FIDLAR too seriously. The Californian punks don’t do deep. They smoke toads, and argue over 90s pop culture. If it doesn’t crack them up, they’re keeping schtum.

Spending their afternoons sticking it to post-tour sickness, the trio of Zac Carper, Brandon Schwartzel, and Max Kuehn play it cool.

Dusting off the cobwebs with comeback EP ‘That’s Life’, the trio say goodbye to founding member Elvis Kuehn and the mad scientist studio experiments of 2019’s ‘Almost Free’ and say hello to three chords and the truth. “’Almost Free’ was us reacting to touring so much.

It was like, ‘let’s go into the studio and do the studio stuff we aren’t allowed to do’ because we’re constantly touring,” Max says in a rare moment of reflection from the band. “’That’s Life’ feels like a reaction to not being able to tour and being in the studio for too long, where you’re like, ‘let’s make some loud, fun shit that’ll go off live’ – it’s a product of where we’re at and what we’re doing.”

Like snorting speed, the aggro-punk of comeback single ‘FSU’ is a giveaway for anyone guessing where they’re at after a global pandemic and four years away. We think? Zac claims it made the cut first because “that was the dumbest one, gotta set the palate right away”, but for Brandon, it was a way of kicking the door back open.

“Since we hadn’t done anything for a while, if we’re gonna kick the door open, ‘FSU’ seems like the best song to obliterate. It’s the biggest punch we had of just being like, ‘wow, what the fuck, that’s gnarly’,” says the bassist, with Max jumping in to say that “coming out of quarantine, that’s how we all felt - fuck this whole thing, we’re pissed. ‘FSU’ went off at the first couple of shows; it was fucking crazy to see Upset 5

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people shout all the words and go off on it.”

Being pissed off is punkrock 101, but for FIDLAR, it was beginning to feel like they were the punchline to someone else’s joke. Starting with the pandemic slamming shut the doors to their tour bus for three years, it’s no surprise they’re dropping F-bombs in every line of ‘FSU’ like they’re leading the blitz.

“That time was weird because, in January 2020, we were like, let’s just do a reset of our socials; let’s just start afresh. Then the whole world 6 Upset

shut down,” muses Max, the irony of closing the ‘Almost Free’ cycle by being locked up not lost on him. “It was like this weird in between – should we work on stuff? Are we even allowed to work on stuff? Do people even care anymore? It was a rough time.”

“It was a weird coincidence that the world shut down right after we finished touring that record and had decided to start fresh. How do you start again when you can’t tour, and you can’t be in a room together everyone’s telling you not to

IF I DON’T CRACK UP, IT’S NOT GOOD; IT’S GONE"

Z AC CA R P E R

do stuff. Yeah, it was hard.”

FIDLAR aren’t a band built for difficult conversations.

If a song doesn’t have them breaking their backs laughing, they’re throwing it in the trash. It’s an official rule, according to Zac. “If I

don’t crack up, it’s not good; it’s gone.” Yet, as the world went back to normal, they had to have one with co-vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist Elvis Kuehn, who decided it was time to duck out.

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“The conversation was like, we’re pretty ready to get going again, and he was like, ‘I’m not there, so go for it’. It was a bit of a shock, but we were all ready to move; we were all excited to book some shows, write some songs, and start the engine back up since we hadn’t been running in a while,” Brandon says matter-of-factly as the question falls to him, the others juggling it like a hot potato. “We were all on team move forward, and he was like, ‘I just can’t do it anymore; I want to do my own things’.”

“You can’t blame him,” interjects Zac, like a friend saving you from small talk. “We don’t blame him for anything. He wants something different, so we just have to accept it. We were like, what does this mean for the three of us?

But he made it very clear we could go for it. There’s no ill will or anything like that; he’s always welcome.”

When your co-vocalist calls time on your band, getting the engine back up and running is easier said than done. While their previous two albums tackled their turbulent journeys to getting sober, ‘That’s Life’ came from cracking up and falling back on old habits – only this time, it was like teaching old dogs new tricks.

Having spent 2020 caravanning with friends throughout the East and West Coasts, Mexico, and Hawaii, Zac culminated the chaos with a DMT ceremony spent in Lake Powell. The psychedelic trip is said to help you separate the gap between who you think you are and who you really are.

But for Zac, smoking the toad was like finding his way back to FIDLAR. “At that time, it was wobbling a bunch, I wasn’t doing anything with FIDLAR – it was this weird time where we didn’t know what we were doing, so I fucking smoked the toad, and it fucking

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shook my brain, dude, that shit changed my life,” smirks Zac, suddenly springing to life as his bandmates look on in silence. “I was sitting on a fuck tonne of songs, I didn’t stop writing, but a lot of them were just written on fucking ukulele and not really in the fucking thought process of being FIDLAR. “Having this crazy brain reset really helped me.

Before that, all I was doing was songwriting for a bunch of DJs in hip-hop and all this hyperpop stuff coming out, and then after doing this smoking the toad thing, I realised that none of these people can do what I do, and what we’re good at is playing shows. That’s what that experience made me miss. I was getting lost, thinking, am I just going to write songs for other people?”

It’s as serious as the conversation gets, because when topics turn to the title of the EP, ‘That’s Life’, it’s back to being a band on the run. “Me and Max were just stoned in his studio, and he has a tattoo that says, ‘that’s life’, and it’s a skate video we all grew up watching.”

“It can mean a lot of things. There’s something about the pandemic and Elvis leaving and the band being like, ‘what is even being a band?’ It felt fitting to be like, fuck it, let’s just make these songs and go play some shows, and it’s like what we love doing, that’s life.”

FIDLAR aren’t here to change the world; they’re here to wake, bake, and skate. The plan for FIDLAR 2.0 is there is no plan, kind of. “Just keep playing, keep writing music and putting shit out. It’s that simple,” says Brandon, as Zac drops the elevator pitch. “We write songs, we record them, and release them so people can come to shows and buy our t-shirts.” ■ FIDLAR’s EP ‘That’s Life’ is out 17th March.

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BIG PICTURE

Rolo Tomassi stormed London’s Electirc Ballroom

If there’s one band you can count on for a 5-star show, it’s Rolo Tomassi. As they hit the capital for another rousing performance, we sent our intrepid snapper Sarah Louise Bennett down to capture the action in all its glory.

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Mike and Nate Kinsella - long-standing members of American Football et al - have teamed up for a new project: introducing LIES. Words: Rob Mair. Photos: Shervin Lainez.

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→ Cousins Nate and Mike Kinsella have been collaborating for more than 25 years across several projects, short-lived and long.

As such, they joke about a “familial telepathy” between themselves, which has come to the fore previously, especially on the likes of the more recent American Football records.

But LIES – the new project for the duo that exists in the same world as American Football, Owen and Birthmark but which lives on a previously unexplored continent – is an entirely different beast to the brethren.

‘Lies’, the newly-formed duo’s debut album, is as much about Nate’s musicianship, arranging skills and innate musicality as it is about Mike’s lyrics and unmistakable vocals.

It means each takes equal billing in a project designed to make the most out of the protagonists’ skills.

The result is an album as much indebted to pop music as it is emo or math-rock.

Indeed, Mike will mention the influence of Depeche Mode, but it’s just as easy to see LIES living in the same space as Stars or the New Pornographers as it is Cap’n Jazz.

Throughout writing the songs, where tracks and ideas would be shared as digital files between each other during the pandemic lockdowns, it meant often going through dozens of different iterations, taking forward new ideas and walking back on old ones until every avenue had been exhausted. Unsurprisingly, there were disagreements along the way, with Nate and Mike seeing a different future for each track.

Even then, despite this “familial telepathy”, there’s only one way to settle such creative disputes. “Fisticuffs,” deadpans Mike, to laughter from Nate.

Of course, Mike is joking.

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IT’S GREAT TO WORK WITH MIKE AND HAVE HIM BE OPEN TO ALL MY FUCKING BATSHIT IDEAS"

N AT E K I N S E L L A

There’s a love and craft that sits behind ‘Lies’, and that goes back to the notion of trying every conceivable idea to see what works and what doesn’t. These don’t sound like songs wrestled or bludgeoned into existence but coaxed out into the daylight by painstaking perseverance.

“It’s good when you get to the point where you start removing things,” continues Nate. “I think it’s super important to be able to try everything that you’re thinking of because if you don’t try it and hear it, you’re always going to be left with the idea that the song isn’t finished.”

“We’d have this long practice session on Sunday, like five hours over Zoom,” continues Mike. “And a lot of it would technically be a waste of time – I guess technically isn’t the right word, because technically, it wasn’t a waste of time – because we would literally walk ourselves back. We’d be like, ‘let’s try this, this, and this.’ And then we’d figure out we were way closer to what we wanted than we thought. But we’d do this with the verses, chorus, and bridge. So, if you do that every time, then you’ve pretty much got the song.”

This attention to detail manifests in countless ways throughout the record, but the most noteworthy is the use of a party horn on ‘Broken’. It barely lasts for a couple of beats but

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can only exist on a record that combines a musical fearlessness and an appreciation that tonguein-cheek sarcasm can play a role in driving the lyrical message home. It’s the sort of accoutrement that would be jarring on an Owen or American Football record, but that fits with the off-kilter pop vibe the Kinsellas were going for.

“Nate said he heard this party horn thing in his head, as the lyric is ‘congratulations’ – but it’s not a happy ‘congratulations’, it’s a sarcastic ‘congratulations’.

It’s a very deflated sound,” says Mike. “Nate said he had this idea, it made it into the track on something like mix 27, and by mix 31, it wasn’t there anymore. He was like, ‘I’m not sure, I’m not sure’, and I was like, ‘No! It needs the party thing’.

“It took a long time to finish these songs, but I wanna do it all again because it was so loose and easy.”

“It’s great for me to be able to work with Mike and to have him be open to all my fucking batshit ideas,” laughs Nate. “A lot of people would be like ‘…yeah, I don’t know, man….’ It’s a good fit.”

This process pays off handsomely throughout ‘Lies’, resulting in the ultimate headphone experience, where songs feature depths and layers sonically, offsetting Mike’s typically thoughtful and forthright lyrics. Nate talks about defining the song’s character, which in turn influenced – and was influenced by – Mike’s songwriting.

It means the songs themselves are something of an ouroboros, with each subsequent mix or iteration consuming the one that went before. Each new influence helped build the picture and rewrite the journey of the songs as they developed.

An example would be the occasional R&B-style drum beats that creep in or the use of a woodblock. Here, LIES

are drawing on all sorts of disparate cultural references and are committed to finding space for them within the songs where it feels appropriate.

Of course, it’s much easier to do that in a new act compared to one where there is an established dynamic and an established sound, like American Football, for example, so it’s easy to see why it’s crucial to see LIES as a band in their own right, rather than as a side-project that happened in the period where it was challenging to create an American Football record.

“We – as in Mike and I – are a band,” considers Nate carefully. “We made some recordings, but it’s like if you’re a painter. You go and see the painting when it’s hung on the wall. People don’t go and see the painter paint. The difference is we now need to figure out how we play all this live, and that’s the funny aspect of it.

“But in the studio, when you’re using production as a tool, it adds a whole other dimension to the sound, and there’s all the cultural stuff that comes alongside these production choices. So you hear a woodblock with reverb on it, and it might trigger so many associations and memories – like this is what things sounded like in the 90s – and it’s fun to play with that and see where you can take it. We can do that here.

“American Football has carved out its own cultural space, and it is hard to branch out from that when the established space is so strong and defined.”

Indeed, when Nate talks about building the character of the songs, American Football’s heritage and identity serve as a useful counterpoint. They’re defined by the guitar-drums-bass dynamic, with the occasional opportunity to embellish the sounds of the songs with horns or strings or vibraphone. But the magic

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formula ultimately remains the same.

For LIES – when removed from these constraints – the ambition becomes limitless.

This means odd bedfellows live next to each other in the track-listing, scattered to challenge and entice. Take, for example, the glossy, glacial ‘Camera Chimera’, which is sandwiched between the atmospheric, percussive pop of ‘Broken’ and ‘Summer Somewhere’, which sounds like the Postal Service from an alternate universe.

“I love having two songs next to each other that aren’t part of the same world,” says Nate. “There’s this sound artist called Holly Herndon, and she works with a lot of AI stuff.

I was reading an interview with her, and she was talking about using the album format as a Trojan Horse – like you can hide anything in there, it shows up, and the doors bust open, and you can do whatever you want.

“So, when the songs were coming together, I’d think about ‘well, what kind of outfit does this song need to wear?

What colour clothes would it wear? Are they walking? Are they running? Where are they going?’ And then that would inform the instruments. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It sounds like a dozen people are playing at times.”

To this end, ‘Lies’ features 12 expertly sculpted characters as well drawn as anything you’d find in literature. They exist – and are confined to – the space available to them, but they’re so fully formed there’s not a moment where they lack character. This can be attributed to the meticulous love and detail each has been garnished with.

Even though LIES may have been born from another project, it’s to their credit that they’ve managed to break from those confines and deliver an album so expertly defined at the first attempt. ■ LIES’ self-titled album is out 31st March.

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BIG PICTURE

Hot Milk brought it to London’s KOKO

January can be tough to get excited about. Xmas done, a full twelve months ahead, all the spare cash spent on presents and booze. But February? By February, all excuses are out. And what better way to kick start the second month of the year with Hot Milk at London’s justrefurbished KOKO. Photo: Sarah Louise Bennett.

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Photo: Leila Rummery.

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EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEW EP FROM...

Charlie Herridge runs us through the fast rising duo’s new EP, ‘Weaponized Youth: Part 1’ → The Concept Behind’ Weaponized Youth’ The concept came about from an idea for a music video. I had pictured in my mind a video where kids all mobilised en mass to stage a coup against the adults. Tired of how things are being run, they take over, round up all the weapons and burn them as an end to conflict. I then had a little phrase, “We’re the weaponized youth”, in my mind and nothing else. The lyrics came much later; Ollie and I spent a couple of days in a rehearsal room going over the riffs. I knew I wanted it to cover a lot of the topical moments over the previous years, and it became a huge release, reflecting on Brexit Britain, fake news, Trump’s America, and generally sum up the feelings of today’s youth. → A Spontaneous Track Fast forward a couple months later, we were in the studio recording the EP and running surprisingly ahead of schedule, so we thought we’d try and squeeze in another track and write it there and then on the spot. We had a few ideas we’d been experimenting with, so we just decided to start laying down parts as we went in the studio. I threw in a few melody ideas, and we carved out the drums and then had the core of what would go on to become the titular track, ‘Weaponized’, on the EP. It was a spontaneous song born out of the concept above. → Recording & Drilling Into Breeze Blocks We recorded the EP at Brighton Electric Studios. Before we went in, we sat down with producer Josh Harrison with our songs purposely not fully formed to allow more creative ideas from a producer’s perspective. The songs turned out completely differently to how we originally imagined, and it was an exciting process to embrace change in the room and work collaboratively. As a band, we also really like to experiment during the recording process (and have fun), so for one of the tracks ‘Drill’ (feat. on

the LTD vinyl for the EP), we decided to take things literally and record us drilling into a breeze block which we then ran through various compressors, and it became a key part and sound on the final recording. We learnt to never be precious about our song parts… you may just end up making something better and way more exciting, and working with the right producer can bring the best out of you. → Music Videos And Building A Coffin As a band, we’ve always been heavily involved in the direction or at the helm of filming our own music videos.

For our first single from the EP ‘Work’, we shot the video on the hottest day of 2022, so we started filming at sunrise to beat the heat, especially for Big Ron’s (Charlie’s dog) acting debut. We were absolutely cooking for our parts later in the day. Albeit a simple idea, for anyone who’s seen a live show, we love a high-energy performance and wanted to encapsulate some of that and persona in the video whilst also giving a snapshot of our lives behind closed doors. Featuring some of Newhaven and Seaford’s finest locations…

For ‘Deranged’, we needed a video with a fast turnaround, so Charlie came up with the concept of just filming it on his phone, dug a hole (grave) in his back garden, hand-built a coffin out of an old door, roped in some mates and a neighbour, and we began filming a couple days later on Christmas Eve. Due to running out of time, Charlie ended up having to take the coffin with him across the border to see family in France and shot the remaining video in a run-down shack he found nearby, creating the maddest contraption to hold his phone, you’ll ever see… It came out far better than we could ever have imagined. Who would have thought it would end up being featured on MTV and Kerrang! TV! Especially considering it had zero budget and was filmed on an iPhone…

‘Body Language’ was another lastminute one due to heavy touring

commitments for the start of this year, so we had to fit filming around our tours with Kid Kapichi and Panic Shack.

We drove down south from Sheffield on our one day off to film the first half, then straight back on tour. For the second day of filming, we’d got back from Cardiff the same afternoon and then set off for Europe after filming that night. The concept was very rough, and we were struggling for inspiration due to the exhaustion from tour, so we asked the chat GPT AI to write the concept for us… It’s being edited as we speak, but look out for that around the EP release. → Not-For-Profit - Austerity Records We’re releasing a limited-edition vinyl version of the EP with local independent label called Austerity Records. Garry and Jim, who are behind the not-for-profit label, were at one of our first-ever gigs and have believed in us since day one. Big shout out to the Austerity gang; it’s people like this who give new bands a platform, and we have a lot to thank them for. The ‘Hot Pink’ Vinyl sold out on pre-order too (!) and features artwork on the inner sleeve which perfectly depicts the concept behind ‘Weaponized Youth’ we explain above.

She’s a beauty!! → Bedroom Riffs & Shower Ideas The bulk of the tunes were written in Ollie’s bedroom with his encyclopaedia of ready-to-go riffs and then often finished off in my shower, where I tend to have most of my best ideas.

I’m always struck with a melody or riff and end up leaping out to grab my phone and record it quickly before it disappears. Ollie has great fun at times trying to transpose my phone rambling into an actual, workable part of the song.

SNAYX’ debut EP ‘Weaponized Youth: Part 1’ is out now.

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Black Honey are back, and they’ve brought their best album so far with them.

Words + photos: Jamie MacMillan.

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→ There’s an old saying about how stars, real stars, can light up a room as soon as they enter it; their personality and charm instantly shining from deep within them.

That is most definitely the case today in a photo studio near Brixton, London, as the various members of Black Honey begin to drift in. Dressed head to paw in a beautiful, luxurious white coat and taking her place in front of the camera like she was born to do this, this is Zero the dog’s hour, and she will do whatever it takes to take the spotlight away from a band who are gunning for another chart success with their third album, ‘A Fistful Of Peaches’.

The momentum is strong going into this. After their spiky self-titled debut album only just sneaked into the charts on its release back in 2018, the pendulum swung wildly in the opposite direction for the follow-up ‘Written & Directed’. Kicking the doors in at Number 7, its (deserved) success came as much of a surprise to the band as anyone. “Oh, we had peak imposter syndrome,” laughs frontperson Izzy Bee Phillips as we catch up with the band down the pub postshoot. “We just felt that we had blagged it somehow, like what is going on??”

The celebrations for that came at a strange and troubled time, however, for both the band and everyone else. Externally, the world was limping back to postCovid normality, but the group were still wrestling with the repercussions of their guitarist Chris Ostler suffering from a serious injury - a herniated disc in his neck had affected his spinal cord severely, and he was admitted to hospital for emergency surgery after beginning to lose mobility. As the band announced in terrifying detail some months later, his surgeon had warned him prior that the worst-case scenario was permanent paralysis.

The guitarist is in top form during our photoshoot

PEOPLE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO BE WHOEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT TO BE"

IZZY BEE PHILLIPS but leaves the interview to the others. And although the band are plainly still concerned for their friend’s health, they say today that it has given them a whole new perspective. “I think it’s made us better people,” admits Izzy before drummer Alex Woodward continues. “You never think it’s gonna be you,” he says. “And then, when it does happen to you, it’s like, fuck. It becomes even more important to be personable or in touch with the people supporting you because everyone’s going through the same shit.”

“We’re a group of four people and this horrible health thing happened to one of us,” chips in bassist Tommy Taylor thoughtfully.

“I’m sure for everyone in a group of four people or family, this is the kind of shit that happens to everyone; it’s almost a reminder to respect and reflect, I guess - you never know what people have got going on in their lives.”

Describing having Chris back in the band as “like a miracle”, Izzy also considers how it has changed their viewpoint. “People have so much shit in their lives that you don’t ever think about or even acknowledge,” she says.

“Their lives are so difficult and complex that it reminds you of everyone’s humanity and makes you more kind.”

All of this personal emotional trauma came on top of what had already been a horrendous year for, well, everyone. Izzy had found it largely impossible to write during lockdown, the only

exception being the darkly vulnerable ‘Nobody Knows’, its lyrics detailing the still all-too-familiar memories of staring at four walls and contemplating planes flying overhead with nobody inside. But that was it, as she describes a period where nothing could inspire her to write. The band did what everybody else did, of course, jumping on livestreams to keep their all-important fan community strong and together.

“I think we got closer to a lot of people that listen to our music then,” remembers Tommy. “You got in the habit of doing them and speaking to these people. I hated them.” “You mean you hated the Zooms, not speaking to the people, right?” checks Izzy quickly on accidental cancellation watch before concluding, “I think it’s the final death of the separation between artists and fans.”

After the success of ‘Written & Directed’, another unexpected obstacle creeping up on the band quickly was a sense of expectation and the easy temptation to do it again. But ‘A Fistful Of Peaches’ swerves it totally. “There was so much chaotic artistry that went into album two that it would have been hard to do again,” explains Izzy. “I love that one of my biggest critiques is that I don’t do one thing and that I’m doing too many. One day it’s disco, and currently I’m having a post-punk era, obviously. It’s just impossible for me to do the same thing twice; I can’t even sing the

same vocal take twice, let alone write songs that are coherent!”

“I think the great people who do really well just move around,” continues Alex. “If you stay safe, it’s exactly that. Safe. What’s next? What can you do to invigorate that next thing that you want to do? A lot of the time, you move around [in genre] subconsciously, and, hopefully, it all ties together in the end.”

Even in these genreblurring days, Black Honey stand out as one of those acts who like to skip around loose ideas of indie, pop and rock. So what kind of band do they see themselves as? “All of those, yeah, but a guitar band through and through,” says Izzy. “We flirted with pushing pop, and it didn’t land exactly how we wanted.

But at the heart of it, these are still kind of pop songs but just dressed up in a guitar band way.”

This album may see them move in a new direction again, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of their love of vintage culture. “We’ll always love that!” states Izzy.

“Looking back with rosetinted glasses is something that’s just been permanently injected into my veins since Lana Del Rey existed, and I fell in love with all of that. But there’s nothing creative about playing it safe.”

That word again. “Safe” feels like a dangerous word in Black Honey’s world.

“I remember being drunk backstage with Florence Welch once,” she continues (we’ve all been there). “And I said I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere. I feel like too much of a drag queen for rock and roll, and too much of a weirdo rock character for pop music.

And she just said, ‘If you’re not fitting in anywhere, then you’re doing something right’.

That’s the only space you need to be in.” Black Honey’s album ‘A Fistful Of Peaches’ is out 17th March. Read the full interview in the April 2023 issue of Dork.

Upset 25

THE BEST NEW TALENT.

26 Upset

Get ready: Pool Kids is a name you’re going to be hearing everywhere this year. → Florida-based emo math-

rock quartet Pool Kids are on their way to the UK. With a string of dates confirmed for April (supporting La Dispute) and May (headlining), they’re kicking up a fuss for the UK release of their self-titled album, out this spring via Big Scary Monsters. Christine Goodwyne spills the beans.

Hi Christine, how’s it going? What are you up to today?

I’m doing well today; a little stressed but having a good time. I’m currently in a green room in Nashville, on tour playing guitar and some backing vocals for our good friends in Woolbright. I play my last show with them in Atlanta tomorrow before Andy picks me up and drives me to Pool Kids practice before our tour supporting PUP and Joyce Manor! So yes, very stressed and busy, but I’m doing what I love, so it’s worth it.

What first sparked your interest in making

C H R I S T I N E G O O DW Y N E music? Did it come naturally for you?

My earliest memory of wanting to play music is probably from 3rd grade; I remember being in my bedroom air-guitaring to NFL beer commercials. Playing guitar has just always felt like what I was supposed to be doing, for as long as I can remember. Women in my family pushed me towards piano, so I took piano lessons, but a friend bought me a small First Act guitar in 5th grade, and I never looked back.

Can you remember the first-ever song you guys wrote together?

‘Further’ and ‘Waking Up’ were the first demos I brought to the full band to flesh out together. Our first record was just Caden and I, so our self-titled record is our first record as a full band, and it really shows. You can hear how much more thought and talent went into these songs than the last record.

Give us the potted history of Pool Kids what have you been up to so far?

Pool Kids started in

December 2016 in Tallahassee, FL. Caden and I were in another band (my first band) that had to break up because the primary songwriter turned out to not be a great person. We decided to continue on another project together that I would front, and we agreed to be extra careful about who we decide to bring in as the bassist and other guitarist.

We booked shows as a twopiece in my backyard until other people started to book us, finally found Nicolette and Andy, did a couple of hellish DIY tours that I booked myself, and finally started getting asked to hit the road opening for some awesome bands. We saved as much money as we could for those support tours and used it to record our second record, and here we are now, about to tour internationally for the first time! It will be my first time really leaving the States.

Is there a singular feeling or intent behind your songs? What do you tend to aim for?

Our songs don’t revolve around a singular feeling, but there are some recurring themes of self-reflection and frustration. I sometimes

Words: Sam Taylor. Photos: Mimi Hong.

Who are you all, and what are your roles within the group?

I’m Christine Goodwyne, on vocals and guitar. Then there’s Andy Anaya also on guitar, Nicolette Alvarez on bass, and Caden Clinton on drums. The four of us make up Pool Kids; this is the lineup we both write with and tour with. We are a long-distance band, but we meet up in Chicago before tours to marathon practice.

Luckily, we’re on the road a good amount, so we never go too long without seeing each other.

I’M DOING WHAT I LOVE, SO IT’S WORTH IT”

Upset 27

aim to convey some more complicated grey area feelings that I know other people can relate to but don’t necessarily hear in a lot of other music. For example, there are billions of songs about being sad after getting dumped, but a lot fewer describing the polarising, confusing, flipflopping emotions that happen throughout a mutual breakup. It can be hard to put into words sometimes.

What are you working on at the moment?

Right now, we’re working on the very first new song ideas for LP3. I only have one real demo as of right now, and we’ve worked it out as a full band, and I like where it’s heading. Now I just need to get some more demos out for us to work on. Other than writing, we’re working on making a self-contained IEM (in-ear monitoring) system, and working on developing our Patreon, which just launched this January.

Are you creative in non-musical ways too?

I personally have zero hobbies or creative outlets outside of music, other than some hand embroidery that I do for the band. I want to get into making/altering clothes, though, and I just got my first sewing machine.

Nicolette is also an illustrator and designs things for our Patreon and is thinking about getting into tattooing.

Andy has been toying around with photography and has taken some of the best pics of us on tour, and he’s also a great writer.

Caden also shoots film and builds/restores drums and percussion accessories.

Who else do you think is doing exciting things in music at the moment?

I think King of Heck is doing some really interesting things in music right now.

I feel like I’ve never heard 28 Upset

WE’RE WORKING ON THE VERY FIRST NEW SONG IDEAS FOR LP3"

C H R I S T I N E G O O DW Y N E anything like their most recent record before, and I can’t wait to hear more.

It scratches an itch I never knew I had.

You’re coming to the UK soon - have

you been before? Is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to seeing or doing while you’re here?

I have never left America other than one show we

played in Toronto recently in the middle of a tour! I’m so excited to play music and connect with people that live so far away. My grandfather used to always ramble about how people in Europe have urinals that are just out in the open, and people just pee in public?!

I would love to partake, but I’m assuming that’s only for men. Anyway, I’m most excited to just see all of the small little cultural differences like that; that’s so fun to me.

Pool Kids’ self-titled album is out 7th April.

→ Fresh from the release

of a brand new single, the take-no-prisoners ‘Micro Aggression’, and the unveiling of a headline tour for autumn, Isle of Wight up-and-comers and Chess Club Records signees Coach Party are breaking through.

Guitarist Steph Norris tells us more.

Hi Steph, how’s it going? What are you up to today?

Hello! It’s going pretty good; we’ve just come back home after a couple of Irish dates and picked up Harry [my dog] from my mum’s, so a nice reunion has been had.

Today we’re at the studio recording guitars.

Introduce your band - who are you all, and what are your roles within the group?

We are four friends: Jess (bass, vocals), Guy (drums), Joe (guitar) and me. Our roles, I would say, are: Jess, comedian; Joe, tea maker; Guy, driver and interview replier (but I’m taking this one, don’t fuck this up,

Steph); me, food finder.

You guys have been making waves for a few years now - can you remember the first time it felt like you had a shot at making the band a success?

We are still very much looking for that shot, but signing our first EP up to Chess Club has to be the moment we realised we could actually take this somewhere.

What have been your highlights since then?

Playing sold-out shows on our headline tours has definitely been a highlight.

We’ve also been incredibly fortunate with the support tours we’ve been offered… stay tuned!

Tell us about your single ‘Micro Aggression’ - was there a particular event that inspired it?

It sparked from day-to-day life and meeting those people that you just don’t

Words: Sam Taylor. Photos: Martyna Bannister.

PLAYING SOLDOUT SHOWS ON OUR HEADLINE TOURS HAS DEFINITELY BEEN A HIGHLIGHT"

STEPH NORRIS get on with. You know the ones.

What are you most drawn to writing songs about, generally? Are there recurring themes?

I guess we tend to always write about interactions with people; our next record heavily leans into that.

What’s your favourite thing about being a musician?

The mountains of cash.

Music aside, what do you do for fun?

Spend all our cash.

Is there anything else we should know?

Yes, there’ll be more music, more tours, more merch, more jokes, more driving, more Travelodges, and more Greggs sausage rolls.

Coach Party will tour the UK this autumn.

Upset 29

30 Upset

WATERPARKS - the most chaotic band on the planet - are back. But what’s the problem with fish and chips, Awsten?

Words: Jamie MacMillan.

Upset 31

few minutes into our chat with Waterparks and Upset is starting to feel nauseous. It’s nothing that effervescent frontman Awsten Knight has said or done, and those gentle souls of drummer Otto Wood and guitarist Geoff Wigington are incapable of making us feel poorly. It’s more that Awsten has been walking around his home in circles with us tagging along on Zoom for a while now. We’ve already been given a glimpse into his bathroom, which for *reasons* was also doubling up as a home cinema and where he was mid-tidy up when we joined him.

The band, fresh home after their latest tour (this one in support of You Me At Six), are already launching themselves into the next era while also catching up on their chores as Geoff and Otto join us from their respective cars a little later. They promise it’s not because they just miss life on the road, but we’re unsure if we believe them. “Are you guys sitting in the same car?” asks Awsten out of concern. “Have you just tilted the cameras at each other?” They’re not, and they haven’t. Geoff is doing the very rock and roll task of getting his windshield fixed, while Otto is “tidying” and

spelling out the letters “S, H, I, T” in case he offends anyone.

‘INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’, album number five from the Houston trio, as well as admirably keeping up their dedication to naming releases in alphabetical order, sees Awsten dig further into the recesses of his mind to shake out some more colourful (his hair is red this time, colour fans) genre-blurred anthems.

As we chat, he is still in tour recovery mode but thriving in his favourite time of any release - the bit before anyone can actually hear it and buy it.

“This is the BEST TIME for it,” he says excitedly. “Honestly, I put out the songs because we have to, and that’s just how creativity and capitalism works and shit. You have to put it out… But honestly, my favourite part is just demoing it and recording it. When I put it out, I kinda feel sad.”

Life since lockdown has been fairly manic. Headline tours here and at home, as well as that huge support tour with YMA6 have followed, the band whirling from zero to full speed in an instant. For a band that bind with their community so well, it’s been everything even if they do admit to some exhaustion, something that Geoff puts down to just being back on the road after being cooped up for all that time.

Awsten confides that it all felt a bit scary, meanwhile.

I FELT LIKE A LOT OF ‘GREATEST HITS’ WAS OVERLOOKED”

AW S T E N K N I G H T 32 Upset

I’VE HAD TO LEARN TO BE VERY SELFCRITICAL BECAUSE, AT THE END OF THE DAY, PEOPLE GET IT TATTOOED AND SHIT”

AW S T E N K N I G H T “Dude, I’m a germaphobe,” he says, “Especially while we’re out, because if I get ill… I’ve heard me sick on YouTube before. I’m like, if you’re out there doing whatever outside the bus until 2am, and you get sick, and then you go check my mic, you’re gonna fuck me up. And no one’s gonna believe that I got sick; it’s just gonna be like, ‘dang, he can’t do that live’.”

“A lot of it is the social anxiety, too,” says Geoff. “You just don’t know if you’re acting correctly. For me, not being around people for so long and then being thrown into the mix of it can be a little bit anxiety driving.”

Awsten just reckons Geoff forgot how to talk, but even for the frontman, one venue, in particular, took him by surprise. “I did NOT know the disparity of how overwhelming Ally Pally could be,” he laughs.

“I know it’s fucking crazy, but dude! I didn’t see the room beforehand; we didn’t soundcheck. I didn’t go out there and scope it out. I was like, fuck it… I’m just gonna go in there, and when I step out, I’m gonna feel something.”

Judging from his expression as he details exactly what he did feel when he stepped out in front of about 10,000 fans, that was somewhere in between abject terror and realising he’d probably quite like to visit the bathroom again one more time.

If you imagine Waterparks as a band that come to life on the road, embracing each country’s fans with open arms and diving headfirst into the culinary treats of each nation, then you’re half right - at least when it comes to the UK. Because Awsten’s got some serious (but good-natured) beef when it comes to our food. “What was patient zero?” asks Otto when the subject comes up (because, to be fair, we asked him what his problem was). “Patient zero was fish and chips!” spits Awsten.

“Stupidest fucking food ever.

And I was mad, because I was just like, ‘they love this, this is their shit, this is their number one’. And I tried it, and I was like, THIS?” At this point, he wanders into his kitchen and starts to produce various seasonings.

One spicy little number is called ‘Slap Yo Mama’. By now, Upset 33

we’re slightly regretting mentioning food, but decide to push it just a little bit further and ask if the band had tried any deep-fried food on their travels through Scotland. “Deep-fried pizza?” Awsten replies. “They only deep fry weird shit here if there’s like a Ferris wheel involved.”

He explains that he left some seasoning on their tour bus for the next artist before the conversation skips on to crowds and his theory that the colder the weather, the better the audience. “It’s strange,” he begins.

“Even in the American Northeast, where you are just miserable, it goes hard.

Berkeley, California, where the weather’s beautiful? Shitty crowd. And so, in the UK, you know what I’m saying?”

It’s the kind of hot take that the frontman is known for, even if he recently did announce that he’d muted the term on Twitter. We take the chance to ask him for his favourite hot take, and he doesn’t disappoint as the interview derails joyously. “Singers don’t get hit by cars,” he says snappily. Really?

“Everybody’s always scared to go, and I’m like, ‘come with me’,” he grins. “You won’t get hit by cars. Singers don’t get hit by cars. Our photographer really hates it, but he’s also just a hater. He doesn’t like me. But if it’s not true, then why haven’t I been hit by a car yet?”

“A much worse track record on planes, though,” muses Otto to general agreement before Awsten turns his attention to the drummer. “Otto is so scared of shit that’s already consumed him,” he says before spiralling off into a rage. “He’s such a bitch about getting Postmates because he’s afraid ‘they’ll’ track him. First off, LET ME REMIND YOU that for the last six years or some shit, it is literally… LOOK AT ME, OTTO… It is literally your job to tell people where you are AT ALL TIMES.” “You can understand my hesitation when you’re suggesting we put our teeth marks and thumbprints on shit?” argues Otto desperately, while Geoff looks on with a bemused expression that suggests he’s happy to be out of Awsten’s eye line. “They already have everything; they don’t need it!” shouts Awsten, so exasperated at this point that he can barely talk. “What do you think they’ll do with your teeth, Otto? SAY IT OUT LOUD!” After a long silence, the quiet answer from the drummer is a simple yet strange one as he murmurs, “a tooth bat”.

If that wasn’t odd enough, then Awsten disappearing and immediately reappearing on screen brandishing a 34 Upset

baseball bat with teeth sticking out of it sure makes it so. Otto says in reply that his hot take is that his body is his own, while pushing Geoff for his only makes him take aim at the UK for putting power switches on showers - Waterparks once

out, so it’s no surprise that spirits are so high in the band. It’s an exciting time - but one that’s usually laced with a sense that the frontman, in particular, is already looking forward to what’s next.

This time, unusually for him, there is

again doubling down on their vendetta against this nation. “Y’all do deserve better plumbing,” agrees Awsten thoughtfully.

We are talking on the brink of ‘INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’ coming

nothing left in the vault - he counts 99 different edits and demos that somehow got whittled down to a lean 11 tracks on the record, but that’s it. The sprawling explosion of ideas and influences that made up ‘GREATEST HITS’ has been

deliberately pared back this time round, Awsten describing it as a conscious decision.

“Normally, I don’t let the idea of doing something differently dictate stuff too much as far as how much is going on a

consume.”

He reels off what some of his favourite tracks were and what he loved about them, it clearly still being a record that he loves - despite saying earlier that the moment a record is out, he’s done

FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, I AM OUR A&R”

AW S T E N K N I G H T

record,” he explains. “But I felt like a lot of ‘GREATEST HITS’ was overlooked.

I loved all the songs, but it was all so under-appreciated that I was like, I’m not gonna do that shit again. Now I know what I can expect them to reasonably

with it.

“Making music is just for me,” he says. “It’s not like the songs go away.

I can make a fucking album right now that’s 200 songs long, and just give it to myself. So this time, I was just gonna

make sure that EVERYTHING on here is appreciated. I’m gonna make sure that the quality is up HERE, the fucking best.”

So, a little nip and tuck was added here and there and ‘INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’ began to come into shape.

“Not to discredit anybody or whatever,” he says at one point. “But for all intents and purposes, I am our A&R. I’ve got a grand vision for it, and I’m very intentional with it.”

Always in full control creatively, Awsten has let a little bit of daylight in as far as control goes, however. “I still make it a point to try and hear people out and trust opinions,” he says. “But at the end of the day, nobody can help you name your kid. And nobody gives a shit about your art as much as you do, so my lizard brain is saying, ‘You don’t fucking care as much as me, GET OUT!’ I’ve had to learn to be very self-critical because, at the end of the day, people get it tattooed and shit. It is REAL. So while you’re sitting on it, you need to be honest with yourself.”

This time around, Patent Pending’s Joe Ragosta was involved in the writing as well as the blackbear collab ‘FUCK ABOUT IT’. “He told me he was a fan of ‘GREATEST HITS’,” explains Awsten. “So I gave him that song. And he hit me on it when we were in Amsterdam on the last day of the tour; I went to sleep at about 3am, and when I woke up, I saw that he’d sent me his first go ten minutes later.

He was sending me voice memos, alt versions and different takes while I was flying home. He’s just fucking on it, you know? It was really cool.”

In between albums, Awsten began therapy. Today, we ask him how much of the new record was born from those sessions. “Oh yeah - a lot,” he answers.

“A lot of it came from me making realisations about myself that I wouldn’t Upset 35

36 Upset

Upset 37

38 Upset

YOU’LL NEVER WIN IN A FIGHT ONLINE, NO MATTER HOW RIGHT YOU ARE”

AW S T E N K N I G H T have made without them.

Understanding the way I feel the way I do about certain things, why I think the way or do, or how I fuck up relationships. Even with the songs, I can now step back and look at things from a bird’s eye view and almost see it on a timeline.”

He describes it all as a method of how he can win at life. “If someone wrongs you or you hate someone you work with, then the best thing you can do is not fucking freak out,” he explains. “It’s about asking, what does me winning in this situation look like? Because it’s easy to go, ‘FUCK YOU!’ He draws parallels with how he’s using it in both business and life and says it’s given him a greater sense of calm. One thing he is adamant about, however, is avoiding the rock cliche of saying that therapy has made this latest record his most honest yet. “I think saying that discredits the others, you know what I mean?” he says.

“I’ve always been very open, and it’s not necessarily that I’m more honest now. It’s just that I’ve learned more to be honest about. It’s like a more thorough honesty!”

‘RITUALS’ is one track that came directly from therapy, with its lyrics that “They’re killing me when I’m fast asleep / I could kill you all” painting a much darker

picture than usual, one of the malignant nightmares out to get him. “That was me just feeling cornered in my life and everybody in it and the expectations on me,” he explains. “I would be talking about it in therapy, and everything kept tracing back to the reason I’m so stressed and hurt by things being because of this inner child shit. It’s all on a subconscious level; if you can’t do something for friends or family, it kind of eats at you a bit? Why am I having nightmares every fucking night?”

Here, he stops himself for a while before continuing quietly and steering away from specifics. “You know, I feel like I give the people that listen to us a lot…” he says.

Elsewhere, ‘A NIGHT OUT ON EARTH’, a close relative of older favourites like ‘TANTRUM’ and ‘JUST KIDDING’, finds him singing about the link between his depression and turning it into a pop song. That topic of where the line is between what the fans expect from Awsten, and what he is willing to give of himself is obviously a subject matter that he has returned to on each record, and this one is no exception.

As he sings on ‘REAL SUPER DARK’, a track that channels an unproblematic Slim Shady in its balance between spite, venom and humour, “My fans

are the best / They’d love me more dead”. It’s obvious that fandom is still a tangled path that he’s making his way through.

“Oh, I’ve learned that it’s not going anywhere,” he shrugs today, “And, surprise, THERAPY! You can only control yourself, not anybody else. But I kind of knew that.” He draws parallels with online culture. “You’ll never win in a fight online, no matter how right you are,” he says. “The other day, I was like ‘, Dude, this album is so fucking personally mine, it’s not fucking yours’. Because people were bitching about the rollout of the album! I say to them, ‘It’s not your story; it’s not your fucking album.

No one’s making you listen to it’. And then they call me an asshole and I’m like… HOW!?

Some people are so online and so fragile, and I won’t win.

Ever. So when I’m having an irritating day or I’m in a bad fucking mood, I just try not to go on. But I’m not perfect.”

Last time we spoke on the ‘GREATEST HITS’ circuit, Awsten spoke about his issues with guilt that have been with him since childhood, without really elaborating. Here, he has pulled the curtains back a little further. “We switched a few times,” he remembers.

“But we definitely did church twice a week, and you just learn a lot of weird stuff. And when you’re older, when you start trying to actually dig into yourself and not just listen to what other people are claiming and instilling in you based on a fuckload of re-translations and some old fucking ideologies, you start seeing it in retrospect and realise all of this is fucking weird.”

Shrugging as he talks, he finishes simply. “There’s good stuff in there, like don’t murder?” he says with a grin.

“But you probably shouldn’t need anything to tell you not to do that. Some are just GIVENS.” Even the frog on the cover is a distillation of that

disconnect between old lore and reality, as the band explained on Twitter that “frogs in a biblical sense are seen as dirty, vile and impure” while elsewhere they are considered “signs of prosperity, fertility and luck”.

Awsten has always designed artwork for his demos and, with frogs being his favourite animal, dropped in an image for one of the tracks. “I got really curious about what things meant through the lenses of other beliefs, religions and cultures,” he remembers as he describes the ‘direct hit’ moment of realising the dual meaning of frogs when researching further.

Talk eventually turns to what those first listens of the album will be like when it finally arrives in the world and how much importance Awsten, in particular, places on that all-important occasion. “That time when you’ll hear it, and it always sounds different,” he explains.

“Certain things hit you differently, or you’ll hear a crazy-ass weird thing, and you go OOOH. And when you hear it again, it’s still cool, but the first time is a fully different experience.”

There’s something intrinsically Waterparks and Awsten-ish about that hunger and excitement for new things, a testament to a band that continually push things forward. “I think by the time it comes out, I can already tell he is ready to put more shit out,” nods Geoff, though life on the road and the frenetic pace of the last couple of years feels like it has left them all in need of a breather.

But with that, we take our leave with a firm promise to present them with better fish and chips next time they’re in the UK (something that gets taken as more of a threat than an offer).

Waterparks are back open and ready for the next wave of chaos. ■ Waterparks’ album ‘INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY’ is out 14th April.

Upset 39

40 Upset

Pulling themselves back from the brink, BURY TOMORROW return rejuvenated, and with one of their best albums yet.

Words: Jack Press.

Upset 41

ack in the summer of 2021, Bury Tomorrow had the world at their feet. With 2020’s ‘Cannibal’ gatecrashing the UK Top 10, along with major slots at festivals and sell-out gigs, the band had finally broken through. And then founding member, co-vocalist, and guitarist Jason Cameron departed the band during the pandemic days.

Suddenly, they hit the brakes, nearly slamming the door shut on close to two decades together.

“If I’m being brutally honest, the idea of not being a band was much more enjoyable than being a band,” reflects guitarist Kristan Dawson, who looks back on the past three years with just a sprinkle of sorrow. “We’d all reached a point where it’d not been working for so long that we’d resigned ourselves to the fact that Bury Tomorrow were better off being on hiatus, or not being a band anymore.”

With the world itself on hiatus, Kristan - joined by bassist Davyd WinterBates, drummer Adam Jackson, and vocalist Dani Winter-Bates - took the chance to take stock. As the ground was opening up, ready to swallow them whole, they suddenly saw the light.

“I didn’t think that Bury Tomorrow would survive that, so everything since then has been such a lesson in resilience, but also a lesson in gratitude, a lesson in grace, a lesson in just being a band again.

And now I get goosebumps thinking about the fact we get to do this again, and do it better than before.”

Hang on, if they were halfway to the hangman’s gallows, what changed?

First and foremost, they 42 Upset

found not one but two new members who’ve changed Bury Tomorrow’s DNA from the ground up: guitarist Ed Hartwell and keyboardist and vocalist Tom Prendergast. Fast forward a year and a half, and they’ve headlined a stage at Slam Dunk, stormed main stages at Download and Bloodstock, dropped standalone bangers ‘DEATH’ and ‘LIFE’, and recorded their seventh album, ‘The Seventh Sun’.

‘The Seventh Sun’ is a rich tapestry of woven soundscapes, seasoning the meat of their metalcore with lappings of synthladen melodies, melodeath tendencies, and a pop sensibility that sends shivers down your spine.

For a band seven albums in, changing their spots isn’t something as simple as setting overnight oats, so was an injection of new blood the spark they needed?

“100% in every way, and it’s no disrespect to our previous albums; I think they served a purpose in the time they were released, but this was our moment to try something different,” adds Dani, who comes alive as their next era enters the chat. “If we’d have come back and written the same album as ‘Cannibal’ again, I’d have wholly expected people to call us up on it, I’d have called us up on it.”

Before they could infuse Ed and Tom’s creative juices into their music, they had to change up their musical diet first. With some members feeling disenfranchised and others fearing complacency, change was compulsory for survival.

“I listen to it and hear how uninspired musically I was, it just didn’t resonate with me. It soundtracks a really miserable time in my life,” Kristan admits when considering ‘Cannibal’’s place in their catalogue.

THIS WAS OUR MOMENT TO TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT"

DA N I W I N T E R - B AT E S

“Whereas this, I was like, ‘I’m not just going to repeat a verse just because I’m scared to have an argument, or I’m uninspired, I’m just going to let loose and let my inspiration do the talking’.

That was met with Tom’s inspiration, with Dan’s, with Ed’s.”

When you’ve got a good thing going on, staying in the same lane is a simple thing to do. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, etc. But for Bury

Tomorrow, it wasn’t that anything was broken; they were just divinely uninspired to a hellish extent. “I just felt like Bury Tomorrow had become so set in its ways, and it’s felt so refreshing to finally incorporate more of that ambience, more of that soundscape, more of them electronics, more of them solos, more of them intricate riffs. I’m just so proud of it, I absolutely love it!”

“This album is helping

redefine who Bury Tomorrow is at a perfect juncture in our life. It would be very easy for a band of seven albums to start tailing off; let’s write seven more ‘Choke’s, let’s write another ‘Black Flame’, another ‘Lionheart’.

You’re just circling the drain, because you’re becoming a tribute band of your own band.”

‘The Seventh Sun’ is not a tribute to their past flames, but it is a

creative monument, a shrine to shining lights in their lives. With Ed and Tom shouldering some songwriting responsibility from Dani and Kristan, they were able to make every sound matter, and every note hit you in the heartstrings. Take ‘Wrath’, Side A’s closer created to capture the feelings of love, loss and life in a single soundscape, all in honour of a friend.

“My best friend’s dad passed very suddenly, and he was called Ralph, so I wanted to think of a word that sounded so much like Ralph, and I found the word ‘Wrath’, and I was thinking how cruel life can be,” Kristan shares, sobering the conversation up from its earlier excitement. “I wanted to write it for my friend Ben, with the perfect mix of metalcore riffs, melodic hardcore, and ambience to the point it truly made you feel something.

“At least, I wanted Ben to feel something because I felt something; I wanted to write a song that I know my friend Ben is gonna fucking love. It’s also my homage to Misery Signals’ ‘Of Malice And The Magnum Heart’, that album changed the way I feel about melody in aggressive music, so it’s a homage to every part of my life.”

In many ways, the magic of ‘The Seventh Sun’ is its homage to the sights and sounds that shaped them as musicians. ‘Majesty’ began life as an acoustic ditty Dani stole from Kristan and Tom’s pandemic sessions, and was originally rewritten, sounding “like Alice In Chains, and I fucking love Alice In Chains, but it was a bit too rock”, so they rewrote it some more, leaning into other loves. “It’s very inspired by ‘Alchemy Index’-era Thrice.” The whole experience was so mad that the end result can only be summarised by Kristan as a way to “tell I was smoking a Upset 43

44 Upset

IT’S NOT DEFINED

BY A GENRE; I DON’T WANT TO BE A METALCORE BAND, I JUST WANT TO BE A BAND"

K R I S TA N DAW S O N lot of weed in the studio”.

Like Kristan musically, Dani has been on an expedition of self-discovery since ‘Cannibal’, which he believes was his way of marking a milestone in his mental health journey. “I’ve literally given everything I can to bettering myself and trying to support others with mental health; this is literally my life.

“I’ve done the Coronation Street documentary, I’ve done 52 online safe spaces, I’ve done the physical safe spaces, I’ve worked in mental health, and now I’ve released the album; it was a stamp for me to personally say I’ve given everything I can in this space.”

So once you’ve given everything, once you’ve poured it into a solid gold record and shared it with the world, where do you go next?

“Moving into this new era, it’s understanding my own knowledge of the things around me. It’s like a look at the things that impact your mental health; it talks about the band itself and our life cycle; it talks about the world itself, the chaos that we live in. I think that’s really important because you can’t ascertain or understand chaos without one, living in

it, and two, being in a mental state that can make sense of it.”

While ‘The Seventh Sun’ sees Bury Tomorrow look outwards to the world around it, it’s still rooted in those same experiences Dani documented on ‘Cannibal’.

“There are still nods to that. ‘Recovery’ is a less than subtle nod to my own journey. It’s an articulation of ‘do we ever recover?’, because this is a long-term condition for me, and it’s how my mental health, my own outlook can perceive the world around me, and that’s not a bad thing; my conditions that I’ve got are not a bad thing. They present me with challenges, but they also present me with perspective and experience.”

Perspective isn’t twodimensional for Bury Tomorrow. They welcome anyone who listens to ‘The Seventh Sun’ to hear it however they want, but they’re under no illusions that like ‘Cannibal’ before it, it’ll be shrouded in the climate of the world right now. “’Cannibal’ was a perfect expression of how people were feeling, it’s almost like I’d started Covid - how can this come

out at the exact moment that everybody is feeling that exact thing, and that was what carried it a lot of the time.

“I think with this album, people will do the same. I genuinely think there’ll be moments where people go, ‘holy crap, that’s exactly how I’m feeling’, and sometimes that’ll be with the more on the money, on the nose lyrics, with ‘Wrath’ being in that space and other times they’ll be listening, and they’ll just go ‘wait a minute, I think that’s what he meant’.”

The way you interpret ‘The Seventh Sun’ is yours for the taking, but it runs deeper than just lyrics.

Kristan didn’t spend “two days straight in the studio with no sleep” slaving over single parts for Bury Tomorrow to be brushed off as just another metalcore band. They want you to understand there’s an evolution, a changing of the guard. “It’s not defined by a genre; I don’t want to be a metalcore band, I just want to be a band.”

“If people call us metalcore, they call us metalcore; if people call us metal, they call us metal; and if people call us rock, they call us rock,” adds Dani,

keen to reaffirm it doesn’t matter what you think, as long as you think something.

“We’ve been championing metalcore since 2006, I’ve recorded seven albums under the bracket of that, and I don’t have any negative connotations towards that word. But it’s really important we don’t pigeonhole ourselves into a place that stifles creativity.”

They’re not abandoning their roots; they respect the fact they “were over it from the beginning because the genre we picked was the most uncool at the time.

[Metalcore was] a dirty word in 2009; we were pretty much shot down in flames by everybody when we said our debut album was metalcore.”

But ‘The Seventh Sun’ is them acknowledging that their fans don’t just like metalcore. “I think it’d be doing all our fans a disservice to say they do just like metalcore. Look at all the new bands coming up that are pushing alternative music, taking metal out of it even wholly; bands like Spiritbox, Sleep Token, and Bad Omen are literally ruling the world”.

Instead of closing the door on two decades, Bury Tomorrow have risen from their own ashes through sheer perseverance.

“We’re just chasing what we perceive as greatness in regards to Bury Tomorrow; I’m not saying that like ‘oh, we were chasing greatness bro’, we were just so immersed in it,” professes Kristan, as Dani hits the finisher. “I want to show people, I want to share it, I want to leak the album. I don’t think it’s gonna feel like it’s been sat on a shelf for 12 months; I think people are going to be like, ‘holy crap, this is super current’, and I’m proud of that.” ■ Bury Tomorrow’s album ‘The Seventh Sun’ is out 31st March via Music For Nations.

Upset 45

VISIONS O

46 Upset

OF A LIFE Focussed on resilience, rebirth and self-redemption, MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA are back with a surprise new project.

Words: Alexander Bradley. Photos: Shervin Lainez

Upset 47

urprise! Manchester Orchestra are back with ‘The Valley of Vision’. Call it an EP. A minialbum. Whatever. The seamless six-track collection is the next chapter in the story Andy Hull and co have been telling since their reinvention on ‘A Black Mile to the Surface’ six years ago.

“I don’t really know exactly what it is yet. It doesn’t feel like an EP, it doesn’t feel like an album,” Andy considers as we discuss “the outfit” that this assembly of songs is wearing. Delving deeper, it becomes clear that maybe the appropriate label for ‘The Valley of Vision’ might exist outside the conventional terms we reserve for music.

“In a lot of ways, it feels like this floating piece of music to me. It feels like a bridge. I don’t know what it’s bridging to,” he ponders.

“The whole thing feels like floating and where I know our last album was dealing with grief and trauma, and this, to me, feels intentionally calm and hopeful.

“There is not a lot of anger here, at all.

This is like an acceptance album. And I think working on this album from that angle was healing to me. It feels like a record of healing.”

What you can’t call ‘The Valley of Vision’ is filler. You’d be right to be wary. A surprise album just 18 months after their last album?

Surely, it’s just what didn’t make it on the last album? The B-sides? Bumf? You’d be wrong, though.

Actually, ‘The Valley of Vision’ is the complete execution of what Manchester Orchestra wanted it to be. In the age of streaming, instant gratification and singles, it’s allowed the band to be free to tell the story they want to tell.

The singer explains, “This was more of an exercise in really committing to, regardless of the length of the project, what we felt was the right body of music. I would rather really perfect something that is 27 minutes, and it feels perfect to me than it to be 38 minutes just so we can call it an album.”

While sonically this EP remains as expansive and experimental as ever, the mood has shifted. Its predecessor, ‘The Million Masks of God’ was a weighty discussion with The Angel of Death that mirrored the band’s own journey through grief, which came with the passing of guitarist Rob McDowell’s father following a long-term illness.

As the first track, ‘Capital Karma’, opens 48 Upset

IT FEELS LIKE A BRIDGE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S BRIDGING TO"

A N DY H U L L

up on this EP, the long-term grief still lingers, but as the song stretches skyward, the first spring buds begin to show after a long, cold, winter. And from there, the tracks seamlessly flow together on a journey of rebirth before looping back poignantly and selfreferentially revisiting the final lines of ‘The Internet’, the closer on the band’s last record. But this time, in the last lines of ‘Rear View’, the EP’s dramatic parting gift, Catherine Marks, producer

of the last few MO records was enlisted to declare, “From the mountain tops / demons be gone / the curse is over” again and again.

“We’re looking at this bad experience and all of this stuff from a rear view. We are actively driving away from it,” Andy explains.

So what are Manchester Orchestra driving towards?

Who knows? Well, the band do; they’ve got the next 10-15 years mapped out, according to the singer. But, there hasn’t been a more

exciting time than right now in all 19 years of this band.

Perhaps it’s the nature of ‘The Valley of Vision’. They’ve become unpredictable. With only two weeks between its announcement and subsequent release, the heightened buzz around Manchester Orchestra is more palpable. Breaking the rules on how we define an album is exhilarating.

It opens up limitless possibilities on how and when they continue the story. Look at the way they dropped the standalone and beautifully devastating single ‘No Rule’ in November, which caught everyone off guard.

Underestimate Manchester Orchestra at your peril.

“There is a weird part of us that loves being underestimated. There is something nice about it.

You have no idea what we can do, and that’s what I’ve kept in my mind and in my back pocket the whole time,” Andy smiles.

And did we mention the film? Oh yeah, the visual accompaniment to ‘The Valley of Vision’. Hand in hand with the music goes an immersive cinematic experience. The film was created by Isaac Deitz, who executed the music video for ‘Telepath’ on the last album, and Andy jumped in to help with the editing too. In fact, the original film idea had been for the ‘Million Masks’ album, but VR headset listening parties were not the safest of ideas to come up with during the pandemic. So they saved it for this project instead, and, in Andy’s words, “it doesn’t take you away from the music at all; it’s enhancing it.”

The film will be released in a bunch of different formats, but it was also used and edited using cuttingedge VR technology in the hope of achieving complete escapism. The film leans

away from “hyper narration”, as Andy puts it, but instead, “we talked a lot about the themes of the record, and Isaac interpreted them in his own way.” In turn, the filmmaker spent the best part of a year travelling the US, finding the most stunning landscapes that could connect with the rhetoric that the band have conjured on their last few albums.

The film is the cherry on top of a stunning piece of work from Manchester Orchestra and only adds to the eagerness around the band. And they feel it too.

“There is more excitement and energy around the band than there has ever been and which is so cool for a bunch of dudes who still feel like there is still a lot of energy in the tank creatively,” he adds as we consider where the band goes from here.

It’s been a hot streak from Atlanta, Georgia’s finest rock experimenters over the last few years. The foundations that were set on their debut album back in 2006 still remain; quiet tension and tenderness, anthemic release and an insatiable appetite for inventiveness. But in recent years, they’ve become technically one of the most outstanding bands around.

For Andy Hull, it’s down to a few things. Firstly and mainly, it’s down to trust. “It’s a very weird thing being in a band in your youth because you don’t really know how to communicate with people in such an intimate and vulnerable place that is making art in front of your friends, and that is a tough thing. What can happen is defensiveness and resentment, and these things we were able to navigate in our early days, but we didn’t have the trust really there,” he admits.

“It was harder for us to make albums back then

Upset 49

ONCE YOU HAVE MADE THE SONG GREAT, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO GO AND GET WEIRD ON IT"

A N DY H U L L emotionally. They’re much harder now mentally!” he laughs. “But they were harder emotionally back then until I pushed through it. It felt like a battle every time.”

They’ve strived and battled to get to this point, not only as musicians but as people too. That’s going to happen when you spend nearly two decades together fine-tuning a line-up and growing up.

“The truth is, we are just better because we stayed together. We kept trying, and we kept going for it.

Our abilities get wider. I learned how to play piano.

That’s helpful! I should have learned that 15 years ago.

And once I learned piano it was like, ‘wow, 50 songs right here on this piano’.”

The same goes for all the band. Andy is quick to credit the band’s drummer, Tim Very, whose approach to drum loops and how to manipulate are second to none and have played a 50 Upset

huge part in the reinvented sound of Manchester Orchestra. They’ve all been on the same learning curve together.

While the addition of producer Catherine Marks’ involvement in the band’s direction from ‘A Black Mile’ onwards seems like the most monumental change in the band’s sound and Andy’s approach to songwriting, the singer thanks both fatherhood and the album previous as the lightbulb moment for him.

“I think, lyrically, I started to get into this zone where we are at with ‘Cope’, but it’s hard to tell that with ‘Cope’ because it sounds the opposite of that musically.

There is peace there.

There is the beginning of a negotiation with peace on that album.

“And when my daughter arrives, the axis of everything switches on its head and, all of a sudden, the work becomes even more valuable to me

because if I want to be away from this thing that I love and I’m obsessed with taking care of, then its really got to be worth my time. So I’ve really got to make the most of all of it.”

And make the most of it is exactly what they’ve done.

That’s not to say that Manchester Orchestra’s forward momentum is leaving a trail of dust away from the band that created ‘Mean Everything to Nothing’. In fact, there is still room for them to revisit those more direct, rampedup days of old.

“I could pop you in the face and scream in your face; I know I’ve got that trick right here, and I love that,” he teases.

“I love music like that. We haven’t made music like that in a long time. I would not be surprised if we dipped back into that zone in the future because we love heavy music. But what I think this whole thing - Phase 2 of this band - has been trying to reach those same moments of epic-ness and intimacy without having to bank on emotional outbursts.”

Instead of the “emotional outbursts”, the philosophy of late and where we land on ‘The Valley of Vision’ is to get weird and fail. If you were to imagine this EP as Michelangelo’s David, then the band built the slab of marble themselves before they took a chisel to it. The finished product continues their love affairs with restraint, cathedralhoused soundscapes and room for Andy Hull to perform the most subtle ASMR performance directly into the deepest cortex of your brain. But, before they reached that point, they threw every conceivable idea at the wall.

“You talk about restraint, but we practice the opposite of that when we are putting stuff together on a song,” Andy explains.

“We will legitimately add every idea we can think of.

John Congleton, the great producer, told us one time, ‘You’ve got to try the wrong idea. What do you think the worst thing to do would be and then try that?’ So it’s a lot of that.

“What does an accordion sound like through an octave pedal and a reverse delay? It sounds fucking weird, cool, let it be that.

And so we add all this stuff.

And then we start deleting.

Violently deleting just so many tracks and it shows us this identity of the song that we get to choose that we probably wouldn’t have for the first instrument to put on something. “’Quietly’ is a great example of that. It sounds like those drums are big, but that is Tim playing a snare drum with a cloth on it with two pencils. It is the quietest thing. We got really obsessed with that too. You don’t have to smack it hard for it to sound enormous.

We started nerding out about every little sound.

“Once you have made the song great, you have the right to go and get weird on it,” he reasons.

‘The Valley of Vision’ ends up being the gift that keeps on giving. Its surprise announcement and release would have been enough.

It’s a gift to behold this audio-visual experience in its full brilliance. The feelings of hope and rebirth are a gift, especially following the pain that consumed the last record.

The second track, ‘The Way’, repeatedly asks, “Can I start again?” and the answer is an overwhelming yes. And, the more you experience the coherent flow through these six tracks, the more you uncover those secret surprises where they “get weird on it”, as Andy puts it.

“The more you listen to it, the more that stuff will come out,” he promises.

“We just placed little gifts everywhere.” ■ Manchester Orchestra’s EP ‘The Valley Of Vision’ is out now.

Upset 51

ARTISANS T

Cult NYC favourites THE VAN PELT are brimming with new energy, returning to the fold with their first album in bloody ages.

Words: Rob Mair.

52 Upset

TO THE END

ostalgia’s a dangerous drug,” laughs The Van Pelt’s Chris Leo. “But I think that, for our generation, we got a pass with COVID. It’s easy to start dreaming about the glory years and to spend too much time thinking about how things used to be. But those two years of silence were a great time to put everything in its place.

“So yeah, I can feel like we’re nostalgic for the past – we all are in a lot of ways – but I feel like I was able to put it in the present tense.”

It would have been easy for The Van Pelt to cash in on nostalgia, especially given their legacy and influence. The group formed in New York in 1993 from the ashes of Chris’s former band, Native Nod, yet between 1993 and 1997, they burned bright and fast. Despite several line-up changes, they dropped their debut ‘Stealing From Our Favourite Thieves’ in 1996 and the defining ‘Sultans of Sentiment’ in

1997, alongside a handful of EPs and singles in their oh-so-short run.

They perhaps didn’t expect to be sat here, some 30 years later, talking about the re-emergence of the act, but, in a similar way to American Football, they’re a band whose legacy has grown in their absence. Celebrity fans include Frank Turner and BBC Radio 1 Rock Show host Daniel P Carter. Even Charlotte Church has written about how much she adores ‘Sultans of Sentiment’.

Yet the iconic indie/emo act have never been ones for an easy life.

Instead, after rallying for a handful of shows way back in 2014 – the results of which were recorded for posterity with their excellent ‘Tramonto’ live album – the quartet started to think about making new music but wanted to give themselves the space to explore what The Van Pelt should be once the rose-tinted glasses were removed.

The results are displayed on ‘Artisans & Merchants’, a record which possesses the same restless energy as their 90s pomp but refracts it through the language of today. It’s still unmistakably The

Van Pelt – for a band with such a unique sound and style, it couldn’t be anyone else – but it is like looking at them through a different lens.

Indeed, when Chris talks about bringing the present into the future, he’s bang on the money. He also talks about the sense of realising there was unfinished business with The Van Pelt – especially after their short 2014 reunion – meaning ‘Artisans & Merchants’ feels like the next novella from a band that’s constantly evolving, rather than just the next chapter.

Yet, the likelihood is that this reunion wouldn’t have happened at all if it wasn’t for some luck in 2014, with the group thinking they’d put a pin in it after a 2009 SXSW show.

With their records long out of print – and festering bad blood between the band and their old US label Gern Blandsten – Spanish label La Castanya stepped in to repress the ‘Stealing From Our Favourite Thieves’ and ‘Sultans of Sentiment’, bringing them to vinyl for the first time in two decades.

Then, they were approached to play All Tomorrow’s Parties’

Upset 53

notorious Jabberwocky festival in London. The festival itself – which started the death knell for the company – descended into a proto-Fyre Festival for bookish nerds in horn-rimmed glasses and cardigans.

Meanwhile, the bands – many of whom had already flown into the country by the time the festival was cancelled – were left to sort last-minute shows across the capital to mitigate their losses. The Van Pelt played two soldout, intimate shows, which reignited the group’s passion for the band.

“The energy was there in ‘14, but we were still working through a lot of kinks,” says Chris. “And identity wise, too; like ‘What are we doing? Who are we? What’s happening right now? I think we have a much clearer vision of all that now.”

Of course, the danger with resurrecting such a storied act – and one with a small and perfect catalogue – is that the fans who initially took the band to their hearts bite back if it doesn’t live up to expectations.

“If we moved at a more rapid pace, that fear would probably have been there,” says Chris when asked about the dangers of resurrecting such a beloved act. “Let’s say it was 2014, and we’d have said, ‘OK, let’s get together and let the songs write themselves’, and that record came out in 2017, and that momentum was rolling, then maybe we’d have had that fear. But right now, we’re all so defeated as human beings, as a band, and as a society at large that I don’t think anything could get in the way – like with COVID. So all of this really feels like a bonus.”

Instead, this extended break has allowed Chris and the group – Neil O’Brien, Brian Maryansky and Sean Greene to figure out how to bring the past to the present.

“It’s been a strange journey, but the process was sort of realising that The Van Pelt has its own identity, and 54 Upset

WE ALWAYS WANTED TO HAVE THE FREEDOM TO MOVE THE WAY WE WANT TO MOVE"

CHRIS LEO

that is something that’s larger than the sum of us four. So, it’s about being aware of that without doing something that is paint-by-numbers Van Pelt songs. We want to pump new energy into The Van Pelt but, at the same time, acknowledge that it has got its own soul.

“I actually think, though, the main concern of every resurrected band is, ‘Will anyone care about the new songs we’re doing?’ And so far, at the shows we’ve played, people have been awesome.

I don’t know if people are just more awesome now, but everyone’s been very supportive.”

Yet by taking appropriate time and care, ‘Artisans & Merchants’ stands as a monument to this approach.

It’s still thematically dense – and cuts like ‘Image of Health’, ‘Old Souls From Different Epochs’ and ‘Did We Hear The Same Song’ will resonate with long-time fans – but it eschews any sense of nostalgia to sound fresh and relevant. This is especially true on ‘Grids’ – an anxietyinducing trawl of a city, the absurdist ‘Cold Coconuts’ or reflective – but in no way nostalgic – ‘Punk House’.

Here, the band drifts through poorly-attended shows, sleeps on horrible floors, and meets douchebag promotors.

These, Chris says, were the highlights.

“I mean, the actual experiences of touring in those days were way worse than ‘Punk House’,” he laughs. “Our first tour, we had so many cancellations we eventually bought a fourperson tent that we ended up using six or seven nights.

And this was pre-internet. A lot of the time, we’d get there and realise the show was cancelled.”

Today, The Van Pelt don’t have to worry about such issues. Their forthcoming London show has already been upgraded, while there’s a sense of expectation around a whistlestop four-date UK and Euro run.

But that doesn’t also mean The Van Pelt are living a life of luxury. While the band is a going concern, it finds itself competing with the band members’ other jobs, which in the case of Chris, means running a wine import business and preparing to launch a bar in New Jersey.

While the ‘Artisans & Merchants’ of the title might reflect the different career paths of the band’s constituent members, it’s also a commentary on the dwindling American middle class and a bastardisation of the American dream. It might be easy to drown in

the polemic, but for artists, it ultimately circles back to the idea of making art in an environment which craves an end product – a commodification of craft, as it were.

“Even on our macro level, all this is important,” ponders Chris. “It’s not easy to come up with $3,000 to record an album – and it’s certainly not the easiest thing to justify to our wives,” he laughs.

“We must make The Van Pelt at least mildly fiscally responsible. Our shows need to pay for themselves; our recording needs to pay for itself. But to do that means writing songs and having some responsibility to get them out there.”

As such, it means The Van Pelt exist within a machine that focuses on product rather than process. Fortunately, they’re showing little signs of slowing down now that the gears are again turning. Chris says that another, weirder, album is already written, indicating a future for the band beyond this small run of shows.

“One of the main goals with this album is to have enough interest so that there might be some record label out there willing to release a second, but mostly we’re goalless. We kind of always have been. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve never signed to a major label because once you scale up, it’s just too easy to come crashing down. We just always wanted to have the freedom to move the way we want to move.”

Artisans to the end, The Van Pelt have always made music on their own terms, regardless of styles or trends. Three years too early to reap the benefits of the emo explosion, they have nevertheless been cited as a significant touchstone and influence for those that came after. Three decades later, they can finally reap the rewards. The Van Pelt’s album ‘Artisans & Merchants’ is out 17th March.

Upset 55

Black Honey

Fall Out Boy

SO MUCH (FOR) STARDUST ★★★★★ Released: 24th March.

→ They should have just called this ‘So Much Stardust’, as Fall Out Boy’s long-awaited return has more than just a sprinkle of magic throughout. Now, just because there are a few more guitars at play and the emo renaissance is in full swing, it was always naive to imagine Chicago’s best would be returning with

some sort of ‘Take This To Your Grave’ 2.0.

Instead, for their first album in over five years, Fall Out Boy have brought the drama and theatre back to rock music with this pop-infused masterpiece. Whether it’s these Brian May-style, Everest surmounting, guitar solos, the big band ensemble or Patrick Stump’s glistening pop-star vocals, ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is an album on the scale of a Broadway spectacle.

Landing somewhere between Danny Elfman and Lin-Manuel Miranda through the lens of 70s and 80s rock classics, accomplished with the feel of a live cast recording, you get a sense of the album Fall Out Boy have set out to create.

There is the ‘Footloose’-

esque ‘So Happy Right Now’ and the Earth, Wind and Fire reminiscent ‘What A Time To Be Alive’ bringing an infectious, feel-good, quality to them. Counter balance those tunes with the album’s opening number ‘Love From The Other Side’ and a monologue from the 90s rom-com ‘Reality Bites’, there is still one wary eye on the apocalypse.

Nevertheless, jazz hands are at the ready as they match towards their doom in style.

It’s a spectacular album.

In their 20 years, Fall Out Boy have been fiercely ambitious with every passing album but nothing could prepare for the outstanding magnitude of ‘So Much (For) Stardust’. Worth the wait?

Without a doubt. Alexander

Bradley

A FISTFUL OF PEACHES

★★★★

Released: 17rd March. → British alternative’s favourite scrappy underdogs, Black Honey are at it again as they shred insane guitars and belt phenomenal tracks that delve deep. Their third fulllength offering, ‘A Fistful of Peaches’ is intensely charged with Izzy Bee Phillips’ unabashed selfanalyses and explorations of mental health, while carrying the band’s longstanding charisma and innate coolness. Hitting every serotonin-releasing node of your brain, Black Honey display an abundance of character throughout - with nods to everything from radical rock band style to YouTube videos from 2007. Connor Fenton

Bury Tomorrow

THE SEVENTH SUN

★★★★

Released: 31st March. → Some bands let creative standards slip in the wake of losing members, but Bury Tomorrow’s first album without founding member and co-vocalist Jason Cameron passes quality control with flying colours. If 2019’s ‘Cannibal’ was metalcore’s equivalent of the Mighty Meaty, ‘The Seventh Sun’ takes a Saturday night standard and livens it up. Incoming guitarist Ed Hartwell and co-vocalist and keyboardist Tom Prendergast inject depth to their flavour profile; stuffing their crust with sweetened

56 Upset

RATED

synths (‘Abandon Us’), enriching their sauce with sumptuous string sections (‘Wrath’), and delivers a defining deep dish vocal base for chorus’ to keep in your mind forever that perfectly compliment Dani Winter-Bates’ distinctive roar (‘Majesty’, ‘Heretic’).

‘The Seventh Sun’ is a sensory experience; consider us pleasantly full.

Jack Press

City and Colour

THE LOVE STILL HELD ME NEAR

vast it’s hard to untangle all the knots. LIES – which features Mike and Nate – is another act to go into this family catalogue, alongside the likes of Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, Make Believe, Birthmark, Owls and Owen (to name a few). Having most recently collaborated in the later American Football releases, LIES feels like an off-shoot of this with the reigns cut loose, but while there may be an echo of other Kinsella acts in there – which is unavoidable given the personnel – it also represents something new and exciting for Mike and Nate too. Ultimately, LIES is a blank canvas for the duo, and in ‘Lies’ they’ve married experimentation and expression perfectly.

Rob Mair

★★★★

Released: 31st March. → In quick succession, Dallas Green lost close friends and family members and his marriage broke down too. With so much to unpack, City and Colour’s approach is to step back from their recent, more psychedelic and bluesy, experimentation and instead revert to their Americana-style roots.

Despite dealing with some enormous losses, ‘The Love Still Held Me Near’ shines with optimism thanks to tracks like ‘Things We Choose to Care About’ and the infectious and upbeat ‘Underground’.

Brooding numbers like ‘A Little Mercy’ balance the album and act as a snapshot to both sides of the coin of Dallas’s renewed relationship with mortality.

That perspective allows this album to become City and Colour’s most accomplished yet. Alexander Bradley

LIES

LIES

★★★★

Released: 31st March. → The shared history of brothers Mike and Tim and cousin Nate Kinsella is so

Manchester Orchestra THE VALLEY OF VISION EP

★★★★★

what came before, each organic, raspy synth-bed scratching a specific itch.

Few bands are brave enough to try something this ambitious, even fewer have the talent to pull it off. But then Manchester Orchestra were never one of the pack. If this is their vision, it’s one everyone needs to see. Stephen Ackroyd

Out now.

→ So often music can be a throwaway commodity.

Cut up into two and a bit minute chunks, primed for the algorithm, designed to capture the maximum number of streams. But that modern condition only serves as a stark contrast to when an act actually pushes beyond the capsule collection.

On their latest project, ‘The Valley of Vision’, Manchester Orchestra prove they’re a much deeper concern than any of that. Backed with an accompanying virtual reality film, it’s an immersive world that pushes through in the music just as much as the material that surrounds it. Opener ‘Capital Karma’ rolls in like the morning fog, textured and tangible, setting an atmosphere that only builds. Switching up on the expected, the band cast aside their usual instruments and guitardriven past to produce a work that ascends beyond

‘Say It (To My Face)’ bristles with assured confidence and sharp bite, while ‘Kool’ echoes across its own wavy brilliance. ‘Try’ rattles in with a bravado that screams iconic, and ‘Thx 4 Nothing’ tubthumps itself into a frenzy. As much-anticipated debuts go, ‘PAST//PRESENT// FUTURE’ firmly hits the mark. Stephen Ackroyd

have perfected their own brand of wonderfully scuzzy shoegaze. Kelsey

McClure

The Van Pelt

ARTISANS & MERCHANTS

★★★★

Released: 17th March.

Meet Me @ Softcult The Altar SEE YOU IN THE PAST//PRESENT// FUTURE

★★★★★ Out now.

→ Past, present, future.

While most bands manage to point in one, maybe two directions, Meet Me @ The Altar are transcendent. A loving appreciation for golden eras past, an understanding that the here and now needs both evolution and revolution, and a spark to throw things forward in a way that breaks down barriers; there’s a reason they’re so regularly referred to as pop-punk’s salvation.

Like their peers before them, they instinctively embrace the iconic.

DARK EP

★★★★

Released: 24th February. → With its title drawing inspiration from Nietzsche (“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”) ‘See you in the dark’ is achingly intimate, twinkling like a star at sea. Opening track ‘Drain’ laments on life on a dying planet.

Mercedes Ann-Horn’s voice floats through the airways, offering warmth in an otherwise effortlessly cool EP, pairing gorgeous harmonies with lyrically dark content. Expertly mixing dreamy synths with grungy bass lines, Softcult

→ In a just and fair world, the Van Pelt would be as popular as Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, Karate or any other act that inhibited the late 90s not-quite-indienot-quite-emo sound.

But, instead, by calling it quits before emo hit the mainstream, they’ve remained a somewhat hidden gem. Despite being released some 25 years after their initial split ‘Artisans & Merchants’ is a perfect reinterpretation of the band for today’s audience, containing just as much lyrical obtuseness and weirdness as ever, but not at the expense of some kick-ass indie-rock.

Resurrecting long-gone acts is never easy, but this should serve as the blueprint for all acts planning on doing the same. Rob Mair

Upset 57

Buzzcocks

Ever Fallen In Love With Someone

I had this battered old CD called ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ when I was a teenager that I stole from my mum’s car. It had some absolute belters on there, all mainly late-70s and early-80s UK punk. This song changed my life. The harmonies, the melody, that guitar line... I would belt it on the road walking to school or on the bus, because I just couldn’t not.

System of a Down Prison Song

No band had the rage and pure eccentricity that System did.

It was just totally different to anything I’d heard before, which was massive because by 14, I thought I knew everything.

Man, are we always wrong. Serj Tankian’s voice, lyrics and power are still kinda unrivalled.

Green Day

Sassafras Roots

‘Dookie’ blew my mind. My older sisters were listening to Green Day when I was like 11, and I used

BAR STOOL PREACHERS

to hear this album pumping out from under the door. I discovered Green Day a bit later than some, so the next album I had was ‘American Idiot’ (I was 13 when that came out); after that, they made up a huge part of everything I listened to.

Arctic Monkeys Mardy Bum

A late-teen banger and a song that sits a bit outside the rest. By the time I got into indie and the Arctic Monkeys, I was also into jungle, garage and drum and bass, smoking weed and riding in mates’ clapped out Ford Fiestas. Even the kids that were nothing like us liked this song. It was a proper indie night classic when we were sneaking into pubs at 16.

The Clash

Complete Control

The Clash were a band I was

EVERYONE HAS THOSE FORMATIVE BANDS AND TRACKS THAT FIRST GOT THEM INTO MUSIC AND HELPED SHAPE THEIR VERY BEING. THIS MONTH, TOM MCFAULL OF BAR STOOL PREACHERS TAKES US THROUGH SOME OF THE SONGS THAT MEANT THE MOST TO HIM DURING HIS TEENAGE YEARS.

introduced to early. I started out loving songs like ‘Janie Jones’ and ‘Wrong ’Em Boyo’, but as a teenager, I was listening to their first album on repeat. It was angry, it was raw, just what I was after.

The Members

Sound of the Suburbs Another tune from the UK punk archives and discovered at around the same time for

me as most of the late 70s bands; this is easily the best Members song in my eyes.

The scratchy, twangy guitar sound and the immediacy of the lyrics and delivery had me hooked from the first listen.

The Offspring

Bad Habit Offspring’s albums were constantly playing. We used to pack the car with sleeping bags, a tent, all the family, and drive to France. ‘Bad Habit’ sticks out as the song that brought us the most joy; Mum would try and turn down the middle bit (“You stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker!”), but half the time would get it wrong, which meant we got to shout swear words at the top of our lungs. Mint.

Blink 182

Every Time I Look For You Pop-punk perfection.

Every band I was in during secondary school covered this song. The perfect blend of stupid, fun lyrics, catchy hooks and top harmonies, ‘Every Time I Look For You’ gets overlooked a lot in a great back catalogue, but it is definitely one of my favourites.

Bar Stool Preachers’ album ‘Above The Static’ is out 31st March.

58 Upset

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