** Plus ** Angels & Airwaves Trivium Diet Cig Milk Teeth Cold Years Belmont Violent Soho Yours Truly + loads more
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W H AT T H E D E A D M E N S AY THE NEW ALBUM OUT NOW
F E AT U R I N G ‘ C ATA S T R O P H I S T ’, ‘ W H AT T H E D E A D M E N S AY ’ & ‘ B L E E D I N T O M E ’
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MAY 2020 Issue 54
HELLO.
Well, this is weird, isn’t it? At the time of writing, the UK is in full lockdown. We have to queue to get into the supermarket, and if you listen to some smarter-thanus-types, we may not even see a major gig this side of the new year. Quite how this all shakes up is beyond a simple music magazine, but the impact is huge. So much so that many of the records we were expecting to talk to you about over the next few months have started to move around the schedules. Take this month’s coverstars, PVRIS. Lynn and co’s third album was supposed to be arriving very soon indeed. Now, thanks to our good mate COVID-19, it’ll be with us a bit later - but we can confirm it is both massive and brilliant. You’ll find out more on page 30. As it stands, our plan is to keep bringing you magazines no matter what over the next few months. There’ll probably be all kinds of changes, but one thing we can be sure of - the need for decent music never stops. We’ll be back at the front of a packed show before we know it.
S tephen
Editor / @stephenackroyd
Upset Editor Stephen Ackroyd Deputy Editor Victoria Sinden Associate Editor Ali Shutler Scribblers Alexander Bradley, Dillon Eastoe, Dominic Allum, Jack Press, Jasleen Dhindsa, Linsey Teggert, Martyn Young, Paris Fawcett, Sam Taylor, Steven Loftin, Tyler Damara Kelly Snappers Charlie Jones, Derek Ridgers, Edd Taylor, Emily Dublin, Georgia Moloney, Lindsey Byrnes, Sarah Louise Bennett
RIOT 4. TRIVIUM 9. VIOLENT SOHO 10. ENTER SHIKARI 16. ANGELS AND AIRWAVES 20. YOURS TRULY 22. COLD YEARS ABOUT TO BREAK 26. BELMONT 28. REMINDERS FEATURES 30. PVRIS 40. DIET CIG 44. DANCE GAVIN DANCE 50. BOSTON MANOR REVIEWS
P U B L I S H E D F RO M
56. BOSTON MANOR 56. ASKING ALEXANDRIA 57. THE USED TEENAGE KICKS
W E LCO M E TOT H E B U N K E R.CO M
58. MILK TEETH
U N I T 10, 23 G RA N G E RO A D, H A S T I N G S, T N34 2R L
All material copyright (c). All rights reserved.
Riot_ EVERYTHING HAPPENING IN ROCK
Words: Steven Loftin.
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THIS MONTH IN ROCK
Enter Shikari’s new album, ‘Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible’ might just be their most accomplished record yet. p.10
Angels & Airwaves’ Tom Delonge is out to do some good with the band’s new single. p.16
Moderation has become the new norm for Trivium frontman Matt Heafy. Where it used to be all things all at once - and still is to some degree these days, knowing that there’s a balance, a yin and yang, is what keeps him grounded. In fact, even more so in the current climate, when early warning signs around the current pandemic crisis saw the group
swiftly cancel all trips and tours surrounding their new outing, ‘What The Dead Men Say’. “I know it might sound paranoid, I had this feeling that that’s what was going to happen, and luckily we didn’t fly out and get stuck,” he remembers. It’s this astute awareness which echoes through everything Matt, along with Corey Beaulieu (guitar), Paolo Gregoletto (bass), and Alex Bent (drums), have created on their ninth outing. Sure, some missteps have been taken, with recent albums feeling like a lost wandering into singular
Cold Year’s new album may have been delayed, but we’ve got the lowdown on what to expect when it finally arrives. p.22
depths, as opposed to the full meal, but now they’re back, and on ‘What The Dead Men Say’, it’s full steam ahead. Moderately, of course. “It’s interesting for me to be championing moderation. I’ve always found myself to be extremist in everything that I do,” he chuckles. “Everything I’ve gotten into I’ve gone in full; when I got into cooking, I had to make something that took three days for the first time. When I decided to do the martial arts, I feel like I picked the hardest one. But for an extreme person like myself to be
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Riot_ saying let’s find moderation, then it’s a real thing.” Matt’s extremes were indeed prevalent at the beginning of Trivium’s career. But over the years, the tide has pushed and pulled them all over the shop, from the immediate success of ‘Ascendancy’ and across the following six albums that have led them here today, so looking back is both a cause of reflection, and a setup for what comes next. “We’ve been playing ‘Ascendancy’ stuff our entire career, but it’s almost like I forgot we made that record,” Matt says. “I looked back at what an amazing time it was it, like with the UK, we were the press band. We were the band that was collecting all the awards, that was on all the magazine covers, that was hailed as the next best thing. “That was the only time in our entire career that that happened. It went by so quickly that it was essentially a blur. But we’re able to look back at it now and see what it was about that record, what it was about the formula we did then that made it so Trivium.” And what was that then? “It was that we didn’t have fans yet, so we just made the kind of music we wanted to make,” he shrugs. “Us being fans of metal, into melodic death metal, into extreme metal, metalcore, combining all these things on record and allowing everything to be and just happen naturally.” With Trivium’s growth, as with any band, time can certainly convolute things. Those albums that haven’t quite sat right with the expectation, while not offering Trivium the past glory, are all stepping stones to what ‘What The Dead Men Say’ can finally do offer a banger filled retribution. “I feel like part of the Trivium sound is allowing absolutely everything to be there, allowing everything on one record that should be on one record. Whereas the times of our career where we have focused in and stayed away from these other elements are the
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“WHEN OUR SON AND DAUGHTER WERE BORN, I ALWAYS WANTED TO MAKE SURE I PORTRAYED A GOOD EXAMPLE”
times that didn’t, as an album, express that Trivium mentality.” It’s not just the sound that Matt knows has taken the long road to get all ironed out. Admitting that aspects like band photography, music videos and staging only hitting their stride under the campaign for fifth album ‘In Waves’, when it came to this ninth chapter in Trivium’s ever-growing novel of strife and clenched fists against the crowd, “everything has been given the proper care and attention it deserves.” As a true master of moderation, Matt has become more than aware that care and attention has to start at home, and ultimately boils down to mental health; knowing the ins and outs, the balance required, those yins and yangs. “It’s always a push and pull. I approach things very level headed because I recognise what it takes to make me feel balanced,” he reasons. “A big thing I always advocate for is for people to recognise that mental health is a real thing, more important than bodily health. I know that people may not agree with me, but the brain controls everything. The way you feel mentally is the way that you’re going to feel physically.” Speaking candidly of steps forward the world needs to make, including “I would say the solution is everyone should see a therapist,” a thing he admits being “taboo” to say, but the knowing tone in his voice echoes wisdom and no ulterior motive. Matt just wants to help. “It still feels weird even for me to be encouraging it, because we’re brought up to feel if we have to do it [only if] there’s something wrong with us. That’s not true,” he says. “Everyone has something specific about themselves, and it’s very important to recognise that. I recognise that I need Jujitsu, and I need food, yoga, weightlifting, Twitch streaming and practice. It’s all these things on top of each other that is what makes me feel balanced.”
Like all musicians, his craft is also his outlet. That list may be Matt’s checks and balances on a personal level, but musically it’s all about “having songs that are able to go into the darker aspects of life, and confront these things.” “The reason why the music sounds dark, the reason why the lyrics are very grave most of the time, it’s so we can get these feelings out,” he explains. “So we can realise that everyone is feeling that, we can get that out, and then, in turn, be able to enjoy life a bit more. I’m being balanced and happy because I know what it takes to keep me there, and I make sure I have all those ingredients, pretty much at all times. I encourage people to find that.” Helping tendencies aside, Matt’s also been given him one of life’s natural perspectives, kids. Twins, actually - Mia and Akira. “It’s the most amazing thing in the world, but it’s also one of the most challenging things in the world. When our son and daughter were born, I always wanted to make sure I portrayed a good example because they really are sponges, they can absorb everything. “With my son, he already has a lot of my tendencies. He has my impatience, my irritability, and he’s very extreme. Everything he gets into he wants to go to the highest extreme, so that’s mindblowing - to be a parent and see that before you can even set a bad example. They’ve already inherited some of what I see as my more difficult aspects, so I apologise to him - I’m sorry Akira!” Recognising who it is the mirror, and knowing where the change needs to happen, be it personally, or even musically is the twenty-odd years of growing in a unique spotlight showing their maturation. “The four of us, we’re not perfect,” he says of himself and his bandmates. “I’m by no means a perfect human, but encouraging the correct things and discouraging the things that I find to be incorrect is good.
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The Pretty Reckless have inked a new record deal with Century Media Records, and are teasing a new album. ‘Death By Rock And Roll’ will be the band’s fourth fulllength, following on from 2016’s ‘Who You Selling For’.
Pete Wentz has teamed up with Cheap Cuts for their eccentric new single, ‘Check Your Phone’. A collaboration that confronts phone addiction, Pete explains: “It’s funny to have everything in the world in a device at the tip of my fingers and feel like it is swallowing me whole sometimes.”
arture: “I am incredibly grateful and proud of everything we have achieved. A Day To Remember have released a new teaser from their upcoming album ‘You’re Welcome’, which is set to arrive at some point this year. New single ‘Mindreader’ “was one of my personal favourites off the new album from the day it was written,” says frontman Jeremy McKinnon. 8 UPSETMAGAZINE.
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“It’s great that Trivium has always been a band about accepting all walks of life. An outsider looking in will be like, ‘well your music’s just shouting, and it’s angry all the time’, but that’s not the point of it. It’s to show what is wrong in the world, or to show a specific take on something so that someone else can see, ‘Oh I’ve been feeling that and it’s amazing that Trivium does too’, and they can find that solace in that company and then that community from there.” The heart of Trivium has always been sincere. They’ve racked up “tens of thousands of hours” on their craft, have become selfconfessed “religious obsessive practitioners of what we do”, and they’ve hit a brad new stride that echoes the sentiments heard all those years ago around the hype of ‘Ascendancy’. Trivium are indeed a band rooted back in where they belong. “It’s now been 21 years since I joined this band and I feel like we’re more invigorated, motivated and inspired than we’ve ever been, which is great. I think about when I was 13, and if asked where would I be in 21 years I’d still say Trivium, but I wouldn’t think that we’d be as fired up as we were back then.” That fire is what has kept Trivium pacing onwards, refusing to stop, taking no prisoners. Given
the growth that’s happened, 21 years of it, surely the darkness Matt and co are pulling from has changed also? “It’s developed more worldly, where we look at like society as a whole, the entire planet,” he ponders. “Or what we see as right or wrong, or the injustices of mankind. That’s the other aspects of metal to be able to call out what we find as wrong in the world, and I’ve always felt that the lyrics need to be as important as the music in any form of music. “There are a lot of musicians that don’t care about lyrics. I’ve read lyrics that seem like people don’t really care about what they’re saying. So it’s been really important to me that we always keep that as thought out and as planned and as important as the music.” Thoughtfulness and moderation may have had to come into play for various reasons, be it the growth of families, on a personal level or just straight-up survival, but the extreme will always remain in Trivium, and that’s their truth they refuse to hide. “That’s totally key,” Matt ends. “Key to where you need to be as a band to truly believe and have a good time. it’s about getting back to the roots of yourself, and why you started this in the first place.” P Trivium’s album ‘What The
Dead Men Say’ is out now.
Everything you need to know about...
VIOLENT SOHO’S The title of the record actually arose from the album artwork concept. There is a house that
often flies its flag at half-mast near the home where Luke, our singer, grew up in Mansfield, Brisbane. The idea was to get a photo of this house as the album artwork and to call it ‘Pity Jar’, sort of as a social commentary on the darker ironies of our mundane society, but when we all saw the house it seemed too strange and gloomy for us to decorate it with such a bummer name, so the new title arose from the lyrics of the final album track ‘A-OK’. Of course, the idea is supposed to be ironic and allowed us to theme things a little more antithetically in line with how Australian’s perceive the ideal of middle-class life. Our previous records, in terms of their title and artwork, had covered a slightly darker view of a similar subject so this time around we wanted the title to look at this same suburban ideology a little more dialectically in pointing out the ridiculous irony of being comfortable within a banal environment.
The album was recorded in two separate two-week blocks mid last year at The Grove Studios,
If ever there was a time that a tongue-in-cheek ‘Everything Is A-OK’ was needed, it’s now. Violent Soho tell us about their new record, one that takes a swipe at complacency and dishonesty in the modern landscape.
new album 'Everything Is A-OK' which is an iconic residential recording studio in New South Wales’ Central Coast region. It
was built originally by the blokes from INXS, they sold it to the chaps at Hillsong who then flogged it off to our mate Scott Horscroft and his family, who make amazing records with some of the best bands in Australia on a weekly basis and run a really cool music production academy from there as well. Hats off to the Universe for making a beautiful thing happen in this case.
good to go, you can trust him and move on. I’ve never worked with anyone so consistently correct with their performance in a studio. He also cooked dinner for the Mexican embassy once. Mate, the list just goes on with this bloke.
The American bloke who mixed the record, Will Yip, is also someone we have wanted to work with for years now. His three
album collaborations with one of our favourite bands, Title Fight, very much informed a lot of stylistic choices we had made on our two previous records. Although this new album is probably not leaping from the exact same creative spaces We got to work with one of the as our previous two, being able best and most brilliant minds to work with a person we admire in the Aussie music world hugely on a stylistically progressive on this record. Greg Wales is batch of songs, rhythmically, responsible for production on all tonally and structurally was very live recordings that go through exciting and it felt like we were the largest youth-oriented music breaking new ground creatively broadcaster in Australia, JJJ. I don’t with him. He was stoked with all know of another person in music the songs too so it’s very pleasing to who is responsible for putting out have had such great feedback from such a consistently high output someone we admire so much. of live music and who has also successfully collaborated on such It took two years, raising 3 a wide range of genres. Basically, toddlers and going through one the man is a brilliant and kinddivorce to make this album. spirited bloke who knows more Bloody hell life does not wait for than anyone about how to nail a you, does it? P quality take in a studio without the use of lame autotune bullshit Violent Soho’s album ‘Everything or whatever. When he tells you it’s Is A-OK’ is out now.
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Enter Shikari have carved out a reputation as one of the most ambitious bands in rock. Their new album, ‘Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible’ might just be their most accomplished record yet. Words: Jack Press. Photos: Derek Ridgers.
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In an industry built on formulas and formats, forever focused on finding the next Number 1 and following the trends, you could almost forgive bands for playing it safe the deeper they get into their careers. There are artists who slip into the mainstream consciousness and remain there as the small fishes in a big pond, content with the stature they’ve sought for so long. Alongside them come the rebellious rulebreakers discontent with colouring between the lines, who opt to bend and break the boundaries at play between underground and mainstream sounds. Having broken through the mainstream barriers since their 2007 debut ‘Take To The Skies’, Enter Shikari have been bending genres to fit their politicised social commentary, constantly recreating themselves album-toalbum. As they prepare to release their sixth album – ‘Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible’ – frontman Rou Reynolds tells Upset why Enter Shikari are the only band on the planet who sound like them and why they’ve been allowed to do it for so long. “I’m not really sure why it is, but we’ve managed to carve out this niche area where we sort of get away with anything,” muses Rou, buoyed by his band’s ability to blur the lines between genres without consequence. “It’s like we’ve been given these reins and with a lot of bands, you have to do it immediately, like with the second album, you’ve got to make that departure otherwise you get locked in, and people expect you to make the same thing again.” “There are loads of bands I want to hear similar things from because I love it so much, but it doesn’t really allow for the reason why musicians and artists
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exist, which is to explore and experiment, at least that’s my definition. Music to me would have all of the intrigue and interest taken out of it if it was all the same.” Experimentation and exploration are terms Enter Shikari fans have come to expect from the St Albans foursome, and are ultimately the lynchpins holding together the bipolar blitz of pace
that runs through ‘Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible’. Opener ‘THE GREAT UNKNOWN’ is a pulsating industrial club banger blasting your eardrums whilst ‘Crossing The Rubicon’ is streamlined sunny-day synth-pop, meanwhile ‘Elegy For Extinction’ is a climate change-tackling symphonic masterpiece, seeing the band create a suite of classical music in collaboration with the
City of Prague Symphony Orchestra and composer George Fenton. ‘Elegy For Extinction’ is Enter Shikari at the peak of their creative powers, evidence of their ability to inject meaning and melody into absolutely anything. “We can’t do an album without at least one song about climate change. I think every album we’ve done we’ve had at least one, and even though it’s very widespread
and ubiquitous, we still have to keep pummelling it, it has to drench the whole of society and keep people fuelled and wanting to be in activism. “We had to sit and think how do we do it in a way that’s original and interesting. I never want to be a band where people say, ‘Oh, well, you made that song four years ago, and ten years ago, why did you do something so similar?’”
different place, and if anything I felt more free. I actually had a choice on what I wanted to write about because I wasn’t in a period of intense hardship in my life, so I had this elevated sense of freedom and possibility, like - what’s possible? What can we do? “So whereas ‘The Spark’ was about vulnerability and exploring vulnerability as an innate characteristic of our species, this
“WE’VE MANAGED TO CARVE OUT THIS NICHE AREA WHERE WE SORT OF GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING” With the fear of falling prey to retracing their lines as they repeat the socio-political narratives, they’ve been writing and exploring for more than a decade in the back of their mind, Enter Shikari took their music to the most extreme end of the spectrum. “I had this idea of using the type of classical music called programmed form where you try and convey a real-world thing just with instrumentation, like an event or an environment, and me being me went for the very grandiose, ridiculous concept of making this track about life on our planet.” Life on our little planet subconsciously became the building blocks for the basis of the entire album. Having dug into the deepest depths of his own mind and mental health issues on 2017’s ‘The Spark,’ Rou and co. decided it was important to open up the floor using the new-found freedom that came from finding the light in the dark following the hardest time of his life. “On this album, I was in a very
album became about possibility, not just musically and pushing ourselves forward in that respect, but addressing possibility as something in society. I think the last five to ten years have socially and politically shocked us with things we never thought would happen that have happened, so possibility has gone from being something we’ve looked forward to as positive prospects in to something that is now actually quite terrifying, and I wanted to address that.” If possibility is the pillar on which ‘Nothing Is True…’ leans on, then the balance between optimism and pessimism lies somewhere in between, something which Rou is very much concerned with maintaining. “One of the things I really don’t like is offering false hope, giving people an ‘everything is going to be fine’. I think a lot of music in our world can offer false positivity, which I think is dangerous, so realism is the most important thing to me.
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letlive. are celebrating ten years of their cult-fave album ‘Fake History’ by releasing some demos. The rough cuts are available as Pay What You Want on the 333 Wrecks Bandcamp, run by vocalist Jason Aalon Butler. “We had no idea where these demos would bring us,” he says.
Lonely The Brave are back with their new single, ‘Bound’. Their first studio material to feature new frontman Jack Bennett, the track arrives with the news that they’ve signed a new deal with Easy Life Records. Give it a listen at upsetmagazine.com.
arture: “I am incredibly grateful and proud of everything we have achieved. Mike Duce is back with his new project Headache, and debut single ‘Broke’. The Lower Than Atlantis frontman describes his new material as “a regurgitation, of an amalgamation of music I’ve been into all my life.” Keep an eye out for his debut EP, ‘Food For Thwart’, coming soon. 14 UPSETMAGAZINE.
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“POSSIBILITY HAS GONE FROM BEING SOMETHING WE’VE LOOKED FORWARD TO, TO SOMETHING THAT IS NOW ACTUALLY QUITE TERRIFYING” “There will always be a balance between optimism and pessimism in the music that we make. Likewise, we couldn’t be a doom metal band; positivity will always be central, that was clear from ‘The Spark’. I wrote that album in very much the worst year I’ve ever experienced, and so much of the music still came out positive, both in how it sounded with its upbeat nature but also a lot of the lyrics were full of fortitude. I’m not sure where that came from, I wasn’t trying to do that consciously, but there’s something innately within me that seems to always want to grasp at least one hand in hope even if we’re addressing issues that are actually quite terrifying.” Rou is careful not to send mixed messages; in fact, he makes a point of noting that ‘Nothing Is True’ is a social commentary open for interpretation more than anything else, to encourage and educate the masses. “All the usual things are there, like the music we’re trying to encourage, it’s diverse, which philosophically we’ve always been about unity, about bringing the diversity of humanity together and we all know how divisive and polarised the world has become, so that’s quite central. “There’s a degree of seriousness to it. All of the themes we’ve been
singing about for like 15 years, they’re getting our species more and more into deeper trouble. There’s an element of annoyance in this record, but it’s important to balance that. ‘Modern Living’ is literally a song taking the piss out of ourselves. I think for people, like me and the guys, and anyone sort of on the left - even though left and right have become somewhat defunct terms - you’re constantly expecting the end of the world. We’re always predicting the apocalypse every other week, and it’s taking the piss out of that a bit.” It appears that in the midst of the apocalypse, and at the time of writing, a real-world global pandemic, that Enter Shikari have embraced the symbolism of tongue-incheek humourism in their music. Humour, much like their music, is a means to an end in evoking the emotional responses required to explore and experiment with the activism the world needs. “Humour is a wonderful thing because it can often be thought of as a cheap and immature thing, but humour really is a defence mechanism. Even in the worst fascist regimes, if you have humour you still have a soul, they haven’t taken everything from you, so I think humour again is a very unifying thing. To laugh is very similar to music in the fact that it has a very immediate, instinctual, kneejerk reaction - sometimes you cannot help but laugh at something, you don’t make the decision to laugh, it’s instinctual, and that’s the same with music, it will make you feel something, and whether you like it or not it will have an emotional reaction within you, which is what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to sculpt output to make
you feel something, so they’re two unifying things.” In writing about the unification of the planet as a whole, Rou understands the importance of utilising the platform he has to promote positivism and possibility. It’s an opportunity, and a gift he’s not afraid of making the most out of and is very aware of the lack of caution fellow artists with platforms operate both online and off. “Anyone with a following should be thinking slightly more than usual when they’re putting something out into the world. Often you’ll find ‘rock stars’ feel the need
to just fucking speak, just utter gibberish. In Budhism they call it ‘Parshavajra’, one of my favourite words, which is just gibberish speak, like ‘oh, people are listening, I need to say something’, and they don’t think about the consequences of it. “We need a much more considered thinking, this whole doing instead of thinking is a real widespread philosophical faux par which we see from the very highest aspects in terms of people like Trump. When Trump starts a sentence, he starts about three sentences at the same time; he’s like ‘welcome, good to see you all… by the way…’, he just
goes off on little things. It’s mad, so much of it is unplanned. He’ll get to the end of a sentence purely through luck, and we see a lot of it on smaller scales on social media, it’s constant fucking nothingness. I’m lucky we have the time to think and put something out that reflects that we’ve had time to think, and that we’re serious about that.” Even with all the experimentation and exploration, all the positivity and possibility, and even all the time to put out perspective-based art using their platforms, Enter Shikari are at their bare bones four men familiar with the pressures of putting their personal beliefs out there for public consumption. The pressure of living up to the standards they themselves have set, both as musicians and as people, is always at the back of their minds. “If I stood here and said it didn’t affect me and didn’t seep into my thinking, I’d be lying. Even if it’s a subconscious thing. I try to ignore that side of it; I try to do the whole Oscar Wilde thing of taking no notice of public opinion – the public should be non-existent to an artist is how he put it. “I’m sure deep down within me I’m always thinking if our fanbase will like this and appreciate this, but we’ve come so far now. We’ve never had confidence before, all four of us, me especially, we’re not really like fucking rock stars, like cock-sure confident, assertive people, it’s just not in our nature.” “We’re always second-guessing things, it’s in our nature to worry, but over the years we’ve built it up and the fact we’re still growing and gaining new fans, even after time and all this experimentation, I think it would give even the most timid person a degree confidence to go forward and not think about being upstanding with a certain framework of what we should be and how we should act, and that’s what I wish everyone else would follow.” P Enter Shikari’s album
‘Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible’ is out now.
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Words: Steven Loftin.
ALL THAT’S LEFT IS LOVE
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In times of trouble such as, y’know, right now with the outbreak of COVID-19 - humans are actually quite good at helping each other, from key workers taking on roles that are beyond important, to those trying their best to keep morale afloat, supporting the wellbeing of others. One of these people is Angels and Airwaves’ Tom Delonge.
you. “It really moved me to think that with the mass consciousness in a group of people, and they all put their mind to something, can pretty much conquer anything,” he marvels. “So I wanted to do something, to put something out that made people feel a bit different. It’s not going to change the world, and it’s not going to get rid of the pandemic, but I feel if all artists contributed to try to lift people up, over time that could really change the state of anxiety and fear that’s going around right now, as difficult as it may be.” As for where that next Releasing a new single, ‘All chapter on the Angels & That’s Left Is Love’ to aid Airwaves journey is at, Feeding America, a charity “that will be done in the that “feeds millions every next couple of months”, week across the United with ‘All That’s Left Is Love’ States”, this isn’t his first appearing “but the record foray into helping them itself is still in progress… the out - he’s also “popped up to first actual radio single has schools, helped put food out not been released yet. to families on holidays, and “I’m really excited for that different things like that.” push, and for when that But knowing his musical happens. We didn’t put this craft is a platform for good, out to be a reflection of the Tom stuck his head in the record to come, we put it out studio and gave words to a because it was ready and all I feeling felt across the world had to do was sing on it, and on a track that musically I was really inspired to sing existed before everything something that matters right turned upside down. now, to me, and to people. Following on from two And that’s how we got here.” previous standalone singles, The future for Angels & ‘Rebel Girl’ and ‘Kiss & Tell’, Airwaves has always been the igniting moment for ‘All at the forefront for Tom, That’s Left Is Love’ was a even back to the basics of scene that’s been cropping leading the charge in the up more over the last couple band’s creation by utilising of months. “multimedia pieces to “I felt like people were be a part of everything I pushing each other into a do musically,” that’s all cyclical state of fear and continuing onward. anxiety,” Tom starts. “I’ve “We have some big plans, done a lot of reading on but I can’t talk about them consciousness and people’s at the moment,” he smirks. energy. The problem is that a “But my goal has always lot of people are feeling this been the same which is to one particular thing, [and] it be ambitious, to really put literally does affect the world yourself out there and be - the material world around
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authentic to who you are, how you feel, and to try to do something that inspires positivity somehow,” “Maybe there’s a few rated R rated and X rated jokes that make their way into the live shows,” he continues. “But that’s the old me, I can’t really get rid of that part of myself from the Blink world. I’ve always liked this kind of mix of positivity and rebellion, and humour can make the day go by a little bit easier.” Angels & Airwaves have hope entwined around their very existence. When Tom needed to understand just what it is he wanted to give the world, he set out on their debut single ‘The
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Adventure’. As the road continued, he built an empire filled with “hope like fire”. And through the years he’s established himself as being someone that just wants to help the world, through love and knowledge. “When we started Angels & Airwaves, I came out of the band blink-182 that I started when I was 16 years old, it was kind of like this young man’s crisis of identity and depression. Being so lucky and so fortunate to have a rock and roll band, that got to be one of the bigger bands in the world, and then all of a sudden you walk away from all of it, and you don’t know who you are anymore; no
one knows you, or cares about you, other than your attachment to that specific legacy.” Rediscovering who Tom is, isn’t too dissimilar to the current societal situation where the world over, people are rediscovering just what makes us… well, us. It’s breaking things down to their bare bones, and understanding what you’re left with. “That specific legacy was not a 100% pure picture of who I was, it was one part of me - a major part of me, but not all of me,” he reasons. “When I created Angels & Airwaves, I didn’t know what it was gonna be. I didn’t know how it was gonna sound. I wanted to
“WE HAVE SOME BIG PLANS, BUT I CAN’T TALK ABOUT THEM AT THE MOMENT”
is who we are’, you know? ‘This is who I am’. We’ve landed, and this is where we’re gonna build our empire. That’s why the next record was called ‘I, Empire’” Optimism has been a part of Tom’s career for as long as he can remember, so for him, this was just par for the course. “I’m a big believer in that you put your mind to, you can pretty much accomplish anything,” he smiles. “You hear these incredible stories where there’s a car crash and a mom can lift the entire car off of her child… and it’s all done with the power of the mind, for lack of a better description of it. It’s something that I’m passionate about. It’s something that I believe in. “I feel like art has the ability to do that to people. I mean we’ve seen this on YouTube when they’ll take an animated movie trailer, like Lion King, and they’ll put scary music to it, and just by changing the music that makes it create an art project that was documenting an autobiographical sound like a horror movie. “Music has the frequency, to journey of somebody who had really affect you,” he marvels. “So to rediscover who they were, this is my attempt to contribute who they wanted to be and how something that feels a little they’re gonna live their life, you know, and that ended up creating bit more uplifting, and that’s something that this band stands a song.” for. Something that the band has Talking of ‘The Adventure’, authentically, and genuinely, he says: “It kind of became the done over a decade - thirteen flagship song of what the band is about, and what we were hoping to years now we’ve been putting out achieve.” His voice rattles with the these kinds of messages to inspire people to think differently about same hyperactive positivity that themselves, and think differently launched his band over a decade about the world. This is right up ago. our alley, this is what we like to “I remember the moment that we that that song happened. I was do.” Charitable actions aside, Tom able to look around and say ‘this
is still going through the same experience the rest of us are. Camped out at his cabin in the mountains of his native Southern California, he knows he’s “pretty fortunate.” “We have pretty good weather, so I’m going on a couple of walks, that’s really the best medicine a guy like me can have - nature and clean air, and seeing a sunset or something,” he says. “I need nature, and trees, I need the ocean. It’s harder for people that are stuck inside cities like New York or London or whatever; they can’t really leave the flat.” Keeping his own hope aflame, while no easy feat, stems from the same place that ‘All That’s Left Is Love’ does. On a personal, granular level, he says creatively expressing himself is a major part of that, and he tends “to get depressed and down if I’m not able to create something.” Knowing not everyone has a creative outlet, Tom offers his own piece of wider advice that is simple enough in nature: “Being able to talk to people and help others,” is another way of stoking the hope. “I always tell people when you feel at your worst, when you feel as down as you possibly can, I dare you to start helping others somehow,” he challenges. “Because that will change your mood. It’s really hard to muster up the energy to go help others when you are yourself in need, but I promise you that will always take away some of the pain, if not all of it.” P Angels & Airwaves’ single
‘All That’s Left Is Love’ is out now.
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Riot_ It might feel a little like the world is ending at the moment, but plenty of bands are plugging on to bring us new music. One such optimistic bunch are Aussie new-ish-comers Yours Truly, who plan to drop their debut album later this year. Guitarist Teddie Winder-Haron tells us more. Photo: Georgia Moloney. Hi Teddie! Are you all at home social-distancing? What are you up to? Slam Dunk will take place in autumn, at Leeds Temple Newsam on 5th September, and Hatfield House the following day, instead of May due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. They explain: “We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive reaction, thus locking in a large percentage of the announced line-up for September.”
My Chemical Romance’s first UK comeback gig has been cancelled. They were due to play in Cornwall for Eden Sessions on 16th June, as part of a bill that also included Lionel Richie, Noel Gallagher, The Script, and Diana Ross.
arture: “I am incredibly grateful and proud of everything we have achieved. Creeper have rescheduled their April headline tour. “Due to the escalating Coronavirus Pandemic we have rescheduled the tour for August,” they explain. The run will now kick off on 19th August. All tickets will remain valid, though refunds are also available. 20 Upset
We are all staying at home doing what we can in terms of
social-distancing so we can get through this as quickly as possible. Each day has been pretty much the same for me. I start by taking my dog for a walk around the block, then get stuck into playing guitar, and then I’ve been cooking a whole bunch of new recipes for my family. Then, I finish up by binge-watching whatever I have up next on my watch list.
And how’s the album doing, is it all finished?
Thankfully we finished up the recording process just before going into lockdown. We’re now going through the final stages from home.
What was the recording process like, what challenges did you have to overcome? Recording is always super exciting and inspiring for me. Getting to see the demos we had been working on for
How did you approach curating the record’s tracklisting, what’s the balance like between older and newer songs?
I don’t want to give away anything too early. After hearing all the songs back, we thought this was definitely a step forward in the right direction from our last EP ‘Afterglow’, and we’ve spent some time playing around with the tracklisting, piecing it together almost like a puzzle, creating the perfect flow between each of the songs
We felt like releasing composure as the first single of our new era was just right because it has the perfect balance of we have in store.
What’s it like planning an album launch at the mo, it must be difficult?
It’s been challenging to plan anything at the moment with situations changing almost every day still, but we’re doing what we can and just staying flexible and adapting with everything as we go.
What do you think the next few months are going to look like for you guys?
Over the next few months, we’re going to be working as hard as we can to get everything together and start giving you more of the new era of Yours Truly. P
How did you choose which track to announce the album with, is ‘Composure’ a good representation Yours Truly’s debut album is due later this year. of what’s to come?
YOURS TRULY,
the past few years take shape and come to life. We did some long hours in the studio, and we pushed our musicianship to the next level, which was challenging at the time but worth it for how the songs turned out.
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Riot_
Much like festivals and Greggs sausage rolls, Cold Years’ cathartic new album ‘Paradise’ is something we’re going to have to wait just a bit longer for thanks to COVID-19. Ahead of its release this September, bassist Louis Craighead reflects on the frustrations that shaped it. 22 Upset
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Riot_ Hey Louis, how’s it going? Are you guys on lockdown at the mo?
Hey! Myself and the boys are doing great still in good health and working away like any other day. Rumours of Tanks and all sorts but no lockdown or us just yet... Guess we will have to wait and see.
Tell us about your new album, what’s it about? Did you have a mission statement going in?
Our new album ‘Paradise’ – a play on the false utopia of our hometown Aberdeen - covers a lot. When we first sat down to write this album Ross already had a lot he wanted to say musically and lyrically. As we wrote more and more and things in the UK unfolded the way they did an ongoing narrative formed, and we found a lot of the songs were in tune with how fucked everything is for our generation as a whole. It feels like this record takes all aspects of what growing up does to you, financially and emotionally. It’s a record that I hope speaks for our generation. It’s angry, punchy and it’s all about shit that really matters right now... don’t worry, there is some nice stuff thrown in there too.
Did you enjoy the process of putting it together?
Yeah, we sure did! We are pretty lucky that our local studio Captain Tom’s give us full use of his recording studio to write and demo. It’s a really cool way to approach writing records, you can flesh out ideas, hit the practice room and realise they are shit and go back and rewrite until your happy! It’s a nice environment to be in too, much more relaxed and we can all get our ideas across to each other without wanting to punch each other in the face over a chorus melody or a drum fill. When the album was written, we had the pleasure of going down to Southampton for two weeks to
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“IT’S A RECORD THAT I HOPE SPEAKS FOR OUR GENERATION”
stay with our good friend Neil Kennedy and the rest of the guys at The Ranch. We have spoken to Neil for a long time about making a record together it was great to finally get down there. I’ve always said if you are working with a producer who couldn’t give a fuck about your music, don’t waste your time making the record in the first place. Neil has always supported this band, it’s an ace feeling when you and your producer are
all in it together to make a record as good as it can possibly be. It’s pretty special. We hammered the hours though, we didn’t stop for two weeks straight we started to lose our minds a bit by the end, Neil would finish up after a tenhour day with us, and he would give us the keys to the studio, and we would carry on working on ideas through the night.
How did you approach curating the tracklisting?
whether you own a venue or you play down the local boozer on a Friday night in a cover band, it’s all going to change for a little while. It’s pretty damn scary, to be honest. Right now we honestly don’t know if it will affect anything this year for us. All we know is for the meantime we are working hard behind the scenes to use social media to our advantage, and hopefully, we will be able to reveal some exciting content for our fans to enjoy soon! Everyone needs to work together through these tough times, and we want people to know will always support them in any way we can.
Is there anything on the album that feels more pertinent now than when you wrote it?
Like most things with this band, we all put our ideas in, we argued, and then we finally came up with a solution. We all had it in our heads the tracklisting would be a certain way, our label actually suggested a completely different track listing, and for me, it changed the record completely. It made it fresh and exciting after listening to it one way for the guts of a year at least. It’s funny listening back now I would never have it the original way.
What was the biggest challenge you faced during the record’s creation? It certainly wasn’t writing the music, surprisingly. The hardest part was probably feeling that
the final product we had worked for was enough for people. People are so critical of bands these days it can be pretty daunting putting your heart and soul into something and never know if it’s going to be enough. Ross has always said this album for him feels like the one from his collection he never had. I think that’s pretty cool, it feels like we achieved something pretty great and overcame the hardships that go with making a record.
Is the virus outbreak going to impact the record’s touring, do you think? What are your plans?
We are faced with very capricious times just now. This virus is going to impact everyone in the creative industries;
When we wrote ‘62’, Ross came into the studio to demo down his vocals and immediately the lyrics hit us hard. My favourite part of the whole songwriting process is hearing what Ross has come up with after he has taken it away. That song out of any other songs on the record sums up the main leitmotif of the record. After seeing and hearing people’s reactions to it amidst the Brexit chaos that song, in particular, has meant more than it ever did right now. We also took a really old song called ‘The Waits’ which was off of the first-ever Cold Years release and revisited it with the mindset of taking away any punk elements it may have had. It was super fun to take our music in a bit of a different direction, and it’s now becoming one of our favourites to play live!
Is there anything else we should know? We have already started on the next record. There’s so much we want to tell people, but right now we have to keep our lips sealed! P
Cold Years’ album ‘Paradise’ is out 4th September. Upset 25
THE BEST NEW BANDS. THE HOTTEST NEW MUSIC.
JOE & THE SHITBOYS You can’t spend 5 mins at Upset HQ at the mo without hearing someone shout “Shitboys in the house!” They’re fun, on point, and completely addictive.
WANT A NEW BAND CRUSH? CHECK OUT THIS LOT! >>>
BELMONT Chicago fivesome Belmont are proof that there’s plenty of life left in poppunk. Taking the heart-on-sleeve genre to new and more experimental places, the band have just followed up their self-titled debut album with anthemic new EP, ‘Reflections’ - and every song sounds like an instant classic. Sam Patt and Brian Lada catch us up. Words: Sam Taylor.
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Hey guys, who are you all, where did you meet, and whose idea was it to start the band?
Brian: The band formed around the end of 2014 while we were all 16-17 and in high school. We were all scattered around the Chicagoland area. Taz had got together with our old bassist and
guitarists through the internet, and I went to the same high school as our old bassist who got me to link up and jam with the band. It was all brought to life in my parents’ basement, and that would be the spot we would practice/ work from there on out. We all clicked, and really became friends first before the band,
SUGAR HORSE The Bristol band’s new EP ‘Drugs’ is a sprawling, vital release that showcases Sugar Horse’s rage, pop sensibilities and wit.
but we kicked it into high gear and very soon after got Sam into the band through playing shows in our local scene. A couple of line-up changes later, adding Jason and Alex, and we are now at our full form!
“YOU GET KNOCKED DOWN A LOT IN THIS WORLD”
CLT DRP Brighton’s CLT DRP are sending a great big ‘fuck you’ to anyone spreading hate. It’s a great message, delivered via brutal electro-punk.
what we want. There are a lot of new elements brought to the table and experimentation. It holds no barriers and was something that we did for us. We didn’t care what people would say about it, we just wanted a release that we would Can you remember love and be something is our current state, and the first song you wrote we’ve really only started that we’ve always wanted together? Is it still to hear. The music was to form our mould. It will kicking about? made to stand out and keep evolving as we go. Brian: A lot of the first be completely fresh songs never made it onto while keeping the same You dropped your debut How did you come to any type of recording, Belmont energy that’s album a couple of years work with Pure Noise but the first real song we been here since the back, how did you find it? Records? Sam: After we dropped made was called ‘Absent beginning. The theme is Sam: Our debut was a our debut album in 2018 Mind’ which we did end a general continuation long process, but it was it completed our record up recording, but is now from our past releases. extremely rewarding. It hidden on the internet. We all came together over the deal with our label at It is a struggle with the time, Mutant League definitely don’t have them course of about a year, self-identity, opening up Records. Mutant League kicking about currently, vulnerabilities, learning and we ended up finding signed us when we were but who knows if it will to value the life one leads, our permanent fifth reappear or not! and finding a positive member of the band (other in high school and took care of us better than we shine through hardship guitarist Jason) through How has your writing ever could have hoped with what life throws the process. What we did developed since then? for from 2016-2018. We at us in general. It is a with the full-length was Brian: The writing has collection of songs that something people needed had always looked up to constantly been evolving artists on Pure Noise when we recorded in different to kind of digest for a and maturing since the we were younger, and places over an extended minute, but it’s launched beginning. The idea has period of time. Every song us farther than I think we it just so happened that always been to make a our manager had a great that was recorded for the ever would have hoped continuation and better relationship with them. EP made it onto the EP, so and we’re just ready to version of Belmont with They’ve got savvy A&R we actually didn’t have to keep moving forward. every release. The most reps and came to us with decide on songs to keep substantial development a great pitch that made us and scrap. Everything was What’s the biggest in writing from the challenge you guys have feel like they understood ready to go. beginning of the band, come up against so far? what our vision for the Is it a precursor to however, is transitioning future was. Sam: The biggest another album? from a mindset of challenge so far has just Brian: It is definitely a wanting to sound like our been sticking with it. You What’s your new EP about? precursor to our second favourite bands to being get knocked down a lot Brian: Our new EP album which we will be our favourite band. The in this world and a lot of ‘Reflections’ is a statement going into the studio to music is exactly what times bands have a hard in our catalogue of music. record very soon! P is wanted now with no time sticking together It’s the first Belmont barriers or boundaries. through all the trials and Belmont’s EP release that is truly not Making a signature sound tribulations that come ‘Reflections’ is out now. afraid of doing exactly completely true to itself from rising out of a local scene through DIY touring and then slowly beginning the support tour grind. It can be mentally exhausting, we’re lucky to have extremely supportive fans, a really solid team of management and agents/label behind us, and above all else, we’re great friends with each other.
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REMINDERS Isle of Wight newcomers Reminders have 90s pop-punk coursing through their veins. Burger Records signees, the trio - Leo Dyke (vox/guitar), Theo Afsarian (bass), and Harry Spencer (drums) - have a knack for channelling teen angst into super-fun tunes that actually, make all the uncertainty and adventure of growing up sound like the best days of your life. Words: Sam Taylor. Photo: Charlie Jones.
Hi Leo, how are you guys doing? Are you stuck at home for the foreseeable?
practically since the day he was born, as our mums worked together. Somehow we ended Hey! All good here thanks, up hating each other, meeting again when yep, stuck inside for the we were like 14 to form foreseeable. I initially a band (in the fallout of thought I would last ages Theo teaching me guitar), in social isolation, but hating each other again, I’ve quickly realised I’m and then when I decided going to be terrible. I’ve to try and become a eaten copious amounts (relatively) competent of Hobnobs and written musician we started a song about being in this band. Huge mistake quarantine and, to be honest, I’m already out of asking this guy to join, but he’s the best I’ve got. bullets.
How did you three meet then, did you grow up together?
I met Theo when I was about 7 or 8. He was my brother’s best friend, and I hated him for a good 5 years, until I introduced him to Green Day, and he softened up and stopped bullying me. He was always into music and dressed like Slash (sweatbands and all), until he was about 10. He eventually returned the Green Day favour by (apprehensively) teaching me guitar. He was the ‘jock’ in high school, and I ruined his credibility by asking him to play bass in my band, and he never recovered. Who’s laughing now, he’s getting a mention in Upset! I actually knew Harry
“I HAVE A HUGE OBSESSION WITH BACK TO THE FUTURE, SO SPEND A LOT OF TIME SEARCHING FOR MARTY MCFLY ON PINTEREST” You’ve said before that you’re not into political music, but a lot of the bands you’ve been inspired by (Green Day etc.) are pretty outspoken?
Are there many A lot of the bands opportunities for upand-coming bands on the and albums I like are politically motivated, but, Isle of Wight? The Island is a cool place, and there is loads of opportunity to cut your teeth when starting a band. There is literally a limited number of people who can see you, so it’s a great litmus test to see if you’re worth your salt. People really want to help out too, Ventnor Fringe Festival is this super cool fringe they have there, and they offer an application where basically everyone gets to play, and that was our first show. Islanders are mostly pretty supportive and accommodating, but don’t quote me on that, it’s a weird place.
it’s not for me to write about or comment on. I think right now, with social media, everybody thinks they know everything, and people just post and share loads of completely baseless nonsense. Also, politics is in your face 100 per cent of the time, and I hate that too. Everyone’s writing political music, and it’s all so vanilla and opinion-less when you really listen to it; succumbing to the more escapist side of music is far more rebellious.
Do you have more songs on the way soon?
Yeah! We’ve been in the studio a lot lately, and I’m
always writing. We’ve got some big stuff planned in the next 12 months, involving new music and hopefully a tape out on Burger... But we are really proud of [latest single] ‘Carousel’ so want to give it its time - it’s certainly a strong indicator of where we are going and want to be, sonically.
Music aside, what do you do for fun?
As much as I just denied my interest and knowledge of politics, I love watching documentaries and conspiracies. I [also] have a huge obsession with Back to the Future, so spend a lot of time searching for Marty McFly on Pinterest, and asking my girlfriend if it’s socially acceptable for me to wear an orange gilet over a denim jacket considering it’s not 1985. She said no, but I’m definitely willing to contest. P
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With a new label and a fresh outlook, PVRIS are back with a third album and this time, Lynn Gunn is taking the lead more than ever before. Words: Ali Shutler. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.
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“Sometimes... I feel like our career is a big cosmic joke amongst the gods or something,” tweeted Lynn Gunn as the news broke that PVRIS’ third album ‘Use Me’ was being pushed back due to the “unforeseen circumstances” of a global pandemic. And it’s easy to see why she thinks someone is having a laugh. PVRIS’ debut album, the lush, brooding and atmospheric ‘White Noise’ was an all-out fairytale success story. From a standing start, the band were suddenly touring the world, playing support shows in arenas and being championed as the next big thing in rock. They played Reading & Leeds for the first time in 2015, a midafternoon slot in The Pit, and we weren’t the only ones to believe we were looking at future Main Stage headliners. “We couldn’t have written a more ideal story,” offered guitarist Alex Babinski at the time. But things quickly took a turn. In amongst all the touring and the hype, Lynn readily admitted there was a lot of pressure and expectation: “It feels like our bones are growing faster than our skin.” And that didn’t go away as the band set to work with album two. At first glance, ‘All We Know Of Heaven, All We Need Of Hell’ sees PVRIS try to expand the world they’d created with ‘White Noise’, but they were trying to focus on this larger than life picture, while obsessing over the minute details. “I dug myself into a ditch. I became self-critical and put so pressure on myself.” Anytime anything went off-script during writing or recording, it would throw Lynn into a little black hole. “I just really, really became my own worst enemy.” Onstage as well, Lynn was forcing herself into uncomfortable situations. “Coming up in a heavier scene, and touring with a lot
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“I DIDN’T WANT TO BE SEEN AS BOSSY. I DIDN’T WANT TO BE SEEN AS SOMETHING FROM THE ENDLESS LIST OF THINGS THAT WOMEN ARE CALLED IF THEY’RE TAKING CHARGE OR RUNNING SOMETHING” of bands where the frontman is screaming at the crowd and being in everyone’s face, I had this preconceived pressure that I had to do the same to be a frontwoman as equal and as powerful as them. That’s really not me. I’m a lot more calm and softly spoken.” And while there was hope to their second album, it also saw Lynn get really vulnerable. There was less poetry and more harsh truths, but due to the speedy nature of the business, it didn’t leave her enough time to process it. As singles were released, Lynn starting feeling scared. “There are things I’m still dealing with that I’m not ready to share or discuss yet,” she told us just before the release of album two. “There’s something in me that feels that once the record is out, it’ll be a really big part of being able to process everything and heal.” But those prankster deities had other cruel ideas. As soon as ‘All We Need Of Heaven’ was released, Lynn started to struggle with her voice. With an album to promote, PVRIS continued to tour, but Lynn’s health just got worse. They were playing to bigger rooms, performing these very personal songs, but she couldn’t connect. There was talk of cancelling their biggest ever headline run, including a show at London’s
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“IT’S NOT COCKINESS OR BOASTING; IT’S PUTTING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE. IT’S ABOUT BEING REAL” Brixton Academy, but they soldiered on as dreams became waking nightmares. “I had to find a new way to feel comfortable onstage. It’s not like the end of the world dramatic, but not having a working voice for an entire touring cycle really will teach you a lot.” As the tour approached its end and with PVRIS unsure about what happens next, Lynn found herself trying to be as present as possible and soaking in each moment. Going to get coffee in a foreign city, waking up in Milan, writing in a journal in Paris or just being on the road, “I felt like it was all going to go away if my voice didn’t come back.” After a gruelling year that saw Lynn relearn how to sing while touring heavily, the band headed home at the end of summer 2018 with Lynn feeling “disappointed in myself.” She’d always envisioned grand plans, and now, she wasn’t where she wanted to be. In between then and now, Lynn has been diagnosed with autoimmune disease ankylosing spondylitis (which causes inflammation anywhere in
the body) and Crohn’s disease, which explains why touring felt like such a struggle. There’s no cure, and while the symptoms can be managed, it’s an ongoing concern. They also changed labels, producers and a big chunk of their team. It’s enough to make anyone question their career choices going forward, but PVRIS aren’t giving in. That’s what ‘Use Me’ is here to say. “Everything went the way it had to,” starts Lynn. Their ‘All We Need Of Heaven’ era “was a time for growth,” she stresses. “A time to reevaluate and a chance to get reality checked by the universe. It definitely had me revaluate what we get to do. It made me extra, extra, extra grateful for what we get to do.” It’s why Lynn hasn’t stopped working. Earlier this year, the band set out on a run of intimateby-their-standards headline shows across Europe and the UK. For most bands doing an underplay tour, it’s an excuse to drum up some excitement, but PVRIS had something to prove. After returning to the Main Stage of Reading & Leeds in August (earning redemption
for their 2017 appearance that saw the start of Lynn’s health issues and onstage struggles), this was a chance to reconnect to fans and see if they had a future as a touring band. At London’s Electric Brixton, they’ve never looked as strong or in control. “It felt redeeming and refreshing, especially having a working voice,” Lynn explains. “Being able to go up on stage and not feeling completely terrified felt great. Reading & Leeds 2019 was my first time really being back onstage. I was trying to figure out if it was going to work or not. I was still getting my bearings then but this last tour, I felt fully healthy again. It felt like we were back to where we should be. Just knowing it was working felt great.” Being herself, rather than trying to emulate the rock moves of other bands, has meant “being onstage feels a lot calmer and a lot less stressful,” for Lynn. “There’s less trying to prove yourself,” which is an energy that flows through ‘Use Me’. “These people are here to enjoy a show and as long as you’re being present and that’s real to how you’re feeling, that vulnerability can transfer to people.” The band aren’t settling for more of the same on ‘Use Me’. Taking a lead from their ‘Hallucinations’ EP, the record sees the group undertake new adventures while letting go of what’s come before. The opening ‘Gimme A Minute’ is a snarling slice of industrial electro-pop that demands space. “I thought it was over, maybe it isn’t,” sings Lynn finding a neon light in the darkness while the sparkling ‘Good To Be Alive’ has a skip in its step before Lynn launches a lyrical ambush, asking “is this body even mine? Feels good to be alive, but I hate my life.” The heartbeat vulnerability of the title track is the most gorgeous the band have dared to tread before the closing ‘Wish You Well’ oozes sass and beaming smiles as the band bare venomous teeth.
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“I WISH I COULD EVEN BEGIN TO EXPLAIN THE AMOUNT OF CRAZY STUFF THAT’S HAPPENED TO US” Unburdened and celebrating their power, it’s an album of grit, defiance and want. ‘Use Me’ also sees Lynn step into the spotlight and take ownership of her role as the creative force behind PVRIS. “I allowed myself to support a narrative I thought I had to support of PVRIS being a band,” she explained as the album was announced. “Coming from a ‘band culture’, it’s about how the group is always greater than the sum of its parts, and you’re not supposed to take credit, even if you do everything. There’s no template or role model for really owning it as a woman. I wanted to make everyone else happy and uphold an image I thought we had to. Growing up, I learned I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m finally allowing myself to take credit. I’ve got the full support and encouragement of my bandmates. PVRIS is a unit and very much a team, but the heart and soul of the vision and music always has sourced from me. I’m just saying it now. I fulfilled my own vision of what a role model should be.” “I felt pressured to shrink myself,” she reveals now, “and I didn’t realise how much that messed with me in a lot of other areas in my life or how it affected me in general. It’s still a little crazy for me to be talking about it now,” Lynn tells us. “I need to get more comfortable with it, and
I’m aware of that. In PVRIS, I’ve done all the writing, all of the creative directing and a majority of our merch designs but I always felt pressured to not talk about it because I didn’t want to be seen as too much. I didn’t want to be seen as bossy. I didn’t want to be seen as something from the endless list of things that women are called if they’re taking charge or running something.” It didn’t help that Lynn struggled to find role models taking similar ownership. “I didn’t have anyone to look to when I was starting out in music. I really wish I had had someone to say, ‘It’s ok, you can do this, you can talk about it, and you can have support’.” Because the message is that you can’t. Hayley Williams has spent her whole career reassuring people that Paramore is a band and it falling on deaf ears, while Billie Eilish has been called an industry plant from the moment she released ‘Ocean Eyes’. There are similar stories with Halsey, Taylor Swift and Florence and the Machine. You don’t get the same doubt aimed at Billie Joe Armstrong or Yungblud. In short, people don’t believe women. “I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus or be cryptic about it, but there have been a lot of situations where I think, especially being a woman, your decisions are doubted and not necessarily trusted, especially creatively.” Lynn had had enough. “I finally noticed a lot of that with particular people that are no longer in our team. I realised, ‘Wow, this is really messed up’. I was definitely upset by it, and it made me very aware of what was happening, but it made me totally want to stick to my guns, trust my gut and not listen to the group of however many men were in the office telling me that it should actually be this way.” Her bandmates Alex and Brian “were really sweet and supportive,” she says. “They encouraged me to talk about it and be open about it.” Despite
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the uncertainty, Lynn couldn’t hide anymore. “I needed to do it so I could move forward towards the future in a healthy, confident manner. Being honest about what you’re doing, it’s not cockiness or boasting. It’s putting credit where credit is due. It’s about being real. Art should be authentic and the way your art is made, that story should be authentic as well. I didn’t feel like that was happening, and that’s incredibly important.” Lynn’s turbulent five-year journey from wide-eyed dreamer to bruised and bloodied leader can be felt across ‘Use Me’. “I wish I could even begin to explain the amount of crazy stuff that’s happened to us in the last few years,” starts Lynn. The band have had to rebuild and reassess everything. “There’s been a lot of shedding old skin and reflecting on relationships that might not have had our best interests at heart. During the process of making this album, I was fried and dealing with health issues, and I never really felt like my well-being was made a priority. To make it as dramatic as possible, I felt like a product being pushed around,” which is where the title comes from. It’s more a warning than an invitation though. There’s hard-fought victory and fury that she’s had to endure across ‘Use Me’, but there’s also space for self-reflection and a flickering torch leading the way to self-love. “There’s a lot of selfworth and self-respect, but there’s also the other side of that, the times where I wasn’t honouring that. There is a lot of resentment and exhaustion, but that story is told through a healthier and more hopeful perspective.” It holds itself tall with a proud, feminine energy, righting wrongs with lyrics like ‘Dead Weight’s “Do you
even notice how easy you got this, Taking wings off a goddess.” “I hope it makes whoever identifies with that feel powerful, but especially our female fans. There’s definitely a lot of leaning into more feminine qualities. There’s a lot of honouring that busy, intuitive nature and it’s emotive, present and aware. It feels good.” ‘Use Me’ also sees Lynn with the confidence to take PVRIS in the direction she’s always wanted. It started with their ‘Hallucinations’ EP, a coursecorrecting beast of a record that “was definitely a way to reframe things for us and for our audience.” The likes of ‘Death of Me’ and the title-track show off the band’s desire for bigger and brighter while the bleeding love
a pressure to fit into a more rock, alternative scene.” Now, Lynn’s done with living up to other peoples expectations. Making ‘Use Me’, “felt great and very fulfilling. I wanted to be making this all along.” Embracing it all, “feels right. It’s evolved, obviously but we always want to do that. It’s very much still got the teeth and the heart behind it.” But this record isn’t just for Lynn. Her decision to ask for the respect she’d earned was 50% for her, 50% so other young creative don’t find themselves in a similar position. “Making this album and saying what I say on this album, it is really important for me as a young woman in music and as someone existing on planet earth right now. I want everyone to be able to connect to it, but I hope that it can connect to other young women. I want it to help.” ‘Use Me’ is Lynn’s story, but she’s not alone in the journey she’s been on. “The biggest thing has been to really trust my gut rather than making fear-based decisions.” The album is there for whatever people need from it, “but I know what I’ve taken from it is a lot of self-love, self-worth and just trying to honour that more. It’s about self-respect and staying strong. Vulnerability, nurturing people and caring for people can be a superpower, but you need to learn to set your boundaries and look out for yourself as well.” A few minutes after the announcement that ‘Use Me’ was being delayed and Lynn felt like screaming at the sky, she followed it up with the promise that, “We’re underdogs and underdogs don’t quit and we don’t lose hope!!” Whatever happens next, it’ll be PVRIS that have the last laugh. P PVRIS’ album ‘Use Me’
“THE BIGGEST THING HAS BEEN TO REALLY TRUST MY GUT”
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of ‘Old Wounds’ exposes them stripped to their very core. ‘Use Me’ takes that freedom and runs with it. “Really, that’s always the direction I’ve wanted our music to go. JT [Daly, who produced the EP and the album] really understood what I’ve wanted PVRIS to sound like for a long time and was able to translate that. It was about finding the right way to articulate it and finding the confidence to fully go through with it.” Both ‘White Noise’ and ‘All We Know Of Heaven’ flirt with pop production and arena gaze but, Lynn explains, “using the word poppy-ness as the most general term, we were afraid to let the poppy-ness shine through. A lot of it got masked with more atmospheric rock production.” On both those albums, “there was
is out 10th July.‘
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LITTLE
Words: Linsey Teggert. Photos: Emily Dublin.
WON -DER “Oh my gosh, how did we get here? Why are people listening? Did we trick them?” Diet Cig vocalist and guitarist Alex Luciano is musing over the sense of imposter syndrome the self-proclaimed ‘slop-pop’ duo have been trying to shake since their debut record.
Listening to their self-assured second record ‘Do You Wonder About Me?’ and hearing Alex confidently coo “I’m thriving thanks for asking” on cathartic opener ‘Thriving’, it’s difficult to imagine the pair feeling like they don’t belong, but it’s this vulnerability that makes the already charming Diet Cig all the more endearing. Like their unabashedly honest debut ‘Swear I’m Good At
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This’, their new record is just as human, and just as impossible not to fall in love with. “Though that imposter feeling never fully goes away, I feel that with the last record we carved out a space for ourselves to be here and be heard by our fans,” says Alex. “There’s something about having your music resonate with people that makes you feel so much less alone, and it’s genuinely because of that that we feel a little more confident.” Having spent most of their life as a band on tour, the New York natives decided to take their foot off the gas in 2019 to approach their next record in a more measured way. “We moved to Richmond, Virginia to hide out and make music,” explains drummer Noah Bowman. “It’s a nice change of pace being down in Richmond versus being in New York – it was crazier being at home than it was being on tour, so coming down here gave us a chance to slow down and figure out what we wanted to do for this next
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record.” The concept of the difficult second album still abounds in the music world, but Diet Cig managed to avoid the pitfalls of pressure by giving themselves plenty of breathing space. Compared to the chaotic recording of their debut which was bashed out in stolen moments between tours, making ‘Do You Wonder About Me?’ was pretty damn chilled. “With the first record we’d come up with ideas on the road, come home from tour, sit in the studio for a week straight and bang out songs, then we’d be back on the road again. We were exhausted, but we had to make our limited off-time count,” says Alex. “We wrote half of ‘Swear I’m Good At This’ in the studio,” adds Noah. “We didn’t even have most of the songs fleshed out, we just put our heads together and finished them while recording which was a crazy way to do it, but it was a fun challenge.” Given that ‘Do You Wonder About Me?’ is largely about growing up and reflecting on who you are, allowing themselves time to breathe and sit with their feelings was an invaluable experience for Diet Cig, and it really shows. Though their debut was an irresistible whirlwind of scrappy indierock, it felt a little hyperactive at times, whereas the new record feels much more considered and intentional. “With the last record it was about how big we could make everything sound: big guitars, big drums, every song super in your face, though there were a few calmer moments like ‘Bath Bomb’ and ‘Apricots’. Going into this record we wanted to be much more mindful,” says Noah. “The last record was like ‘Okay we’ve got these songs, we’re playing them live, let’s hit it, let’s go, we’ve got this!’ laughs Alex. “This time we almost let the songs marinate, we had the time to really evaluate them and play with more moods.” Speaking of moods, a big part of what makes Diet Cig so relatable are Alex’s intimate and acerbic lyrics. The prevailing message of ‘Do You Wonder?’ is that it’s okay to be who you are, particularly on the soporifically sweet ‘Night Terrors’ which sees Alex explore her bizarre sleep activity and ‘Broken Body’ which is musically defiant despite Alex’s struggles with self-loathing during a long recovery period after surgery. “It’s about reflecting on the people you have been and who you are now, reckoning with those embarrassing or uncool past versions of yourself. There are crappy parts inside of everybody, but it’s about celebrating all the parts of yourself, even the ones that are not so attractive.”
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“GOING INTO THIS RECORD WE WANTED TO BE MUCH MORE MINDFUL”
By her own admission, Alex has perhaps been a little too honest in the past. She giggles uncontrollably as she recalls ‘Sixteen’, the opener from their first album which sees her sing about dating a boy with the same name and how weird it was to moan her own name during sex. “I feel like I was more vague about who and what these songs are about, because when we released ‘Sixteen’ I had no idea how many people would listen to that song and now everyone I grew up with is like, ‘Oh! That’s who this person is!’ I’ve had to find the balance between sharing honest pieces of myself but at the same time protecting myself emotionally.” As a tight-knit duo, it’s almost inevitable that Diet Cig’s second record is a much more self-assured piece of work, given that they’ve been playing together for almost six years now. Alex had never played in a band before meeting Noah, so the pair have forged their own bond and now work together in an intuitive way. “We’re on the same wavelength in a way we weren’t when we first started,” says Alex. “I don’t know music theory, so I really struggled with finding ways to communicate when writing music, but I feel like we have the language now. We have a lot of patience with each other, there’s a lot of trust we’ve built together.” Looking back at how they’ve grown as musicians together, it’s impossible not to take a stroll down memory lane back to the day they met and the fabled lighter story that seems to dominate most earlier articles about the band. “Oh my God, I regret that story!” screams Alex between laughter. “People always ask how we met, and it’s boring really, so we thought we’d tell it like a fun little story, how it was a special coincidence that I didn’t know Noah, but we had this small interaction that led to us becoming friends. It was such a benign thing, it was in-between songs at a tiny basement show that Noah’s old band were playing, they were tuning up, and I asked him if he had a lighter; he said no but passed me a jug of wine, and then we chatted after the show. “People held onto it and blasted it into this huge thing of Alex stopping the show and interrupting the set just to ask me for a lighter,” sighs Noah. “I wish we’d made up some other ridiculous story, like we met fishing in Antarctica…” P Diet Cig’s
album ‘Do You Wonder About Me?’ is out 1st May.
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Dance Gavin Dance are something of a phenomenon pretty much everywhere but the behind-the-times UK - but with their new album ‘Afterburner’, that’s all about the change. Words: Steven Loftin. Photos: Lindsey Byrnes.
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Since day dot, Dance Gavin Dance have been a rapturous amalgamation of sounds rooted deep into every facet of rock, from hardcore, to melodic metal and even a bit of funk. It’s all just being themselves; a statement that’s probably been written and read about just about every band, but Dance Gavin Dance are those words through and through. They’ve curated their own festival, Swanfest, racked up millions of views and streams, consistently sell out merch and are one of the most forward-thinking, fun and exasperating bands currently active. But given they’ve had more members than hot dinners, getting to album nine, ‘Afterburner’, was indeed no small feat. “When I joined, I think it was 2012? I honestly didn’t look past a couple of years,” ‘clean’ vocalist Tilian Pearson admits. “I was like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do this, we’ll see what happens, maybe it’ll work out, maybe it won’t’.” Fortunately, it did start to work. Sure, it took some stalling moments but the jumpstart of ‘Instant Gratification’ in 2015, gave the most recent - and consistent - iteration of Dance Gavin Dance their first taste of success in their homeland of the US. “It’s hard to explain why it has gone the way that it’s gone, and why we hit this kind of, I guess it’d be a fourth wave?” he ponders. “Because the band had the first singer [Jonny Craig], the second singer [Kurt Travis], the first singer again, and then me, it was kind of like we were starting from that first tour that I did with them.” Now completed by founding members, guitarist Will Swan, drummer Matt Mingus, along with bassist Tim Feerick and ‘unclean’ vocalist Jon Mess,
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“THE ONLY THING THAT WE HAVE TO CONCENTRATE ON IS KEEPING IT FRESH” the five of them have been trucking along since 2012. “The rooms were… not packed, not doing great.” He says with a trademark chuckle that crops up throughout our chat. “I mean, I guess I’d be the same way if I was a fan of the band and they go through a line-up change, I’m not gonna pay attention until they do something I like. So, the first one didn’t hit [‘Acceptance To Speech’], and the second one [‘Instant Gratification’] did, and we’ve been riding that since. It still surprises me the lasting power and support we get… it’s unbelievable.” From those days when Tilian was unsure of where things could go (“when I first joined I was still saving up to tour”) to those quiet rooms, and messy past of the role he’s inherited meant he “had high hopes but a short term fallback vision for it. Either way, I was gonna put as much energy into it as possible, to at least try it.” Which is the true backbone of Dance Gavin Dance, putting all their energy into everything they do. Now they’ve hit a consistent stride, the future is wide open, and they aren’t going to let it get away from them. “Every time we make the process more efficient, you can do it with lower stress and have it just be more play than work,” he says. “We get asked the question of how do we remain
so prolific, and I don’t think we’re trying necessarily to be prolific. “Will loves writing riffs and song structures, and everybody else loves putting their taste and influence on it, so it kind of just happens. We never really have to say ‘Okay guys let’s hunker down and do the album now’, like, the album’s usually just come in between touring cycles naturally which is nice.” These days, being spread across the country means the work tends to happen over email, but there’s a group chat to keep things ticking along, and Dance Gavin Dance’s energy truly alive and kicking. However, the double-edged sword of being a carousel of characters means that, yes, there are indeed fresh ears and input, but also when you find that stable footing, it can potentially feel stale. But as is the Dance Gavin Dance way, you can’t look back when the path behind is burned and ashen, which Tilian explains. “I kind of look at it as a kind of snapshot of the time. Definitely not something that I ever thought of when making this album, that we have to be like ‘this is the ninth chapter’, or we have to be true to all the past albums. “We have to concentrate on making it fresh because it’s been the same five members now for the last like seven years, maybe eight? It’s gonna
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sound similar no matter what we do.” He chuckles again. “So the only thing that we have to concentrate on is keeping it fresh, and then we will naturally kind of pay homage to the past.” Tilian comes across as someone who has indeed kept his heart in the band, and his mind in the realism of the situation. There’s very much a deeper understanding of the intricate nature that belongs to creating in any aspect, especially in a world so intent of burning through everything and anything. “We can’t put any attention on trying to redo things that we’ve already done,” he shrugs.
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“I think it’s just a waste. It works the same way in any media when something’s been done then it’s done. If you try to recreate it probably won’t be as good as the first time.” A surprising aspect of the Dance Gavin Dance journey over the last five years of increasing success is they’ve still never really struck the solid ground on these fair British shores. “We’ve grown in Australia, faster than the UK, even,” Tilian says baffled. “But I also think that we haven’t gotten a chance, recently, to show what we can do in the UK, and that’s part of it. We haven’t been there in a bit.
The last time we went, it felt like the same kind of turning point that I felt in the US in about 2015 right before we kind of quoteunquote blew up in the US.” Given the current global crisis, it might be a while before Tilian and co. can venture this way to prove what Dance Gavin Dance have evolved too, but total domination will always be on the cards for the five-piece even though their moves have had to be measured. “For the whole time I’ve been in the band, you go to the UK, and you lose money,” Tilian says. “So there’s that aspect of it has to be worth it, but hopefully the things we have in the works
“FOR THE WHOLE TIME I’VE BEEN IN THE BAND, YOU GO TO THE UK, AND YOU LOSE MONEY”
will line up, and it’ll allow us to reach a point in the UK where we’re going back at least every year.” It’s also a similar story for the band over in mainland Europe, though he thinks that could be due to a translation error in just how Dance Gavin Dance are. “I think that aspect is we have a sort of irony, and sarcasm in the band,” he smirks. “I see that foreign-language countries, to us, don’t necessarily catch that aspect as well, it just doesn’t resonate there as it does in the US, and even the UK.” Personality is the keyword that screams through Dance Gavin Dance. Their music
videos are always a narrative affair that toy with satirical comedy, a rooting in just being a band and having fun with it, and unclean vocalist Jon Mess often portraying the opposite character to his focused screams. Tilian remembers a time before the carefree nature of Dance Gavin Dance. “I’ve been in bands in the past where they take it really seriously, it’s like almost life and death. Like, ‘We’ve got to do this!’ Everything’s very heavy, the stakes are really high. “In this band, we’ve always taken a more laid back approach. And I think that Jon obviously takes it a step further and into parody and an irony territory, that’s kind of the gist I think that comes out in our personalities.” The amalgamation of the band comes from each members’ tastes, all drawn from different experiences. The personality
that Tilian brings to the blender stems from a combination of growing up listening to “obscene hip hop… and also emotional music. Party music, and bands that didn’t take themselves seriously and bands that did. We have elements of all of those things.” “There are definitely moments where we’re more earnest in certain songs and certain sections of songs,” Tilian mentions of the key balance Dance Gavin Dance retains. “Then there are moments when you just want to make people dance. I don’t think we’ve ever really intentionally been like, ‘Hey let’s do something edgy’, we’re just products of the sum of listening to all different kinds of genres, and all different kinds of media - being influenced by different people.” Even ‘Afterburner’ is a layered title that began with the striking artwork of “the depiction of hell,” he explains. “It’s the devil literally burning the sinner,” Tilian says with another gentle chuckle. But most prominently, the notion of ‘Afterburner’ resides deep in the definition of the term. They’re a band rooted in the emotional angst, with the melodies to shimmy and shake too, lyrics that you can pin to a wall or scribble on a notebook, something Tilian notes warmly as, “you kind of have to do it with our band, and our genre, just because that’s kind of the entire schtick.” There’s no one quite like Dance Gavin Dance, least of all who have been around as long. No one pushes boundaries while making you crack a smile, all the while they’ve been dealt complex hands, and for Tilian, this is it, things are finally paying off. And failing that? “If there’s anything, we can at least say we’re unique,” he ends. P Dance Gavin Dance’s album
‘Afterburner’ is out 24th April.
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Boston Manor are firm favourites ‘round our way. Their second album ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’ was a huge step up for the group and one of 2018’s stand-outs - it even saw them grace the cover of this very magazine. And their third record, ‘GLUE’? Well, we wouldn’t have expected anything less. Words: Alex Bradley. Photos: Edd Taylor.
When the New Year came, there was even more optimism than usual. New decade. New Year. New me. But on top of that was an underlying feeling of, well it can’t get any worse, can it?!? Well, it can, and it has. Taking stock of our lives with all its politics, class wars, the growing generational chasm, climate change, mental health decline, racism, terrorism, viral pandemics and Brexit are Boston Manor. Their new album is all about those topics which divide some and unite others, but ultimately issues we are all stuck with. Fittingly, it’s titled ‘GLUE’. “I see this as a time and place record; a 2020 record,” singer Henry Cox explains. “It all circles back and even the stuff that is personal is endemic of the bigger world and what we are talking about every day on every social media platform.” The result is an unforgiving social commentary filled with rage, confusion and also apathy set to their heaviest music to date. Henry describes the album’s sound as “post-genre” as it flicks from the driven, Nine Inch Nails inspired, lead single ‘Everything Is Ordinary’ to the lo-fi and distorted ‘High On A Ledge’, and the upbeat bop of ‘Brand New Kids’ without falter. The “glue” which holds the album together as it changes musically is the head-on and candid approach. “It took a bit of courage on my part because sometimes I have a bit of trouble saying things how they are in lyrics. You can walk a fine line with it being a little bit corny and you tend to lose a bit of the poetry and magic out of it sometimes.”
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“ALL THESE ISSUES BOIL DOWN TO IGNORANCE, AND THIS ISN’T CHANGING” “I think the message is the message, and it deserves to be spoken bluntly because, quite frankly, the subject matter is something that is not going to wait around, so we have to say it how it is now.” Inspired by Matthew Healy and The 1975’s way of being “plain spoken and poetic” and wrapping a serious message inside a well-crafted tune, Henry tackles head-on the Christchurch terrorist attack in ‘Playing God’, toxic masculinity and suicide in ‘On A High Ledge’ (with its haunting backing vocals of “Man up, man”) and the post-Brexit divide between generations in ‘1’s & 0’s’. But, there is also room for that frustration to spill over which Boston Manor have always been prepared to do. Throwing back to older numbers like ‘Broken Glass’ and ‘Funeral Party’, album closer ‘Monolith’ is unwavering in its chorus line of, “Hey you / fuck you too / I do what I want when I want to.” “Did I overstep the line there?” he asks, but quickly justifies: “I feel like when we are angry, we don’t tend to be that eloquent. You’re very monosyllabic and quite clear, so the message is quite simple.” And that’s it. He is angry, just
like a lot of people right now. “I’m at a point where it’s gone past being a joke now. We are at a point where all these issues boil down to one named problem, which is ignorance. And this isn’t changing. “I feel like I’ve had this same reoccurring moment which happens two-three times where something abysmal happens that is insensitive and thoughtless and every intelligent person on the planet - even every nonintelligent person on the planet - know it’s a stupid idea. It’s like we are walking off a cliff and we know we are walking off a cliff, but we’ve agreed to walk off a cliff so... let’s walk off a cliff. “It’s been happening since 2016, and it’s not fun anymore. I’m like, when is this over and why are we ignoring that this is a bad idea? But we go along with it anyway. I’m so tired of having that conversation.” That viewpoint isn’t radically different but, rather than merely point out the problems, the singer wants to encourage the conversation on how we solve the issues too. “I think people need to start doing things themselves and thinking, ‘How can I better this? How can I get out there and make my voice heard?’ At the same
time, it’s also our responsibility to listen to other people and not immediately dismiss everyone else’s opinion because it’s not “my opinion”. “It’s a time to shout very loud but also to listen very clearly as well, and I think we have been doing one and not the other and that’s the problem.” As well as tackling some of the biggest challenges facing humanity, Henry also held up a mirror to his own life and mental wellbeing in ‘Glue’. It’s a chance to ground the album in more personal issues and connect how they can be amplified into universal problems. “I’m not particularly special or interesting,” he starts, modestly. “There are a lot more interesting things to talk about than myself, and I find it a bit easier to talk about that stuff more than me. So then ‘Terrible Love’ is actually a really hard song to write. “I was looking after my parents’ cottage for a few days while they were away. It’s super remote. I was in a really low point, and I made a big list of all the things I really hate about myself and took a line each and put it into a song. It was really a cathartic, self-deprecating, bit of therapy actually.” He continues: “I’ve never been amazing at sharing my feelings, and I think a lot of young men who were raised in the period of time that we were, that’s a whole problem for them. We need to be more open, but it’s hard when you’re more vulnerable and putting yourself out there.” The scope on this record is huge, and Henry is well aware that it doesn’t get bigger without becoming “transient and vapid”, but with ‘GLUE’ being released at the start of a new decade, thematically, it was the perfect opportunity to take a snapshot of life in 2020; regardless of how bleak a picture that might be. Matching their ambition to bottle that wide lens perspective into 13 tracks and one album
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is how Henry - along with Ash Wilson, Mike Cunniffe, Dan Cunniffe and Jordan Pugh - were equally committed to pushing the limits of Boston Manor musically. Reuniting with Mike Sapone at The Barber Shop Studios in New Jersey, like with their previous effort ‘Welcome To The Neighbourhood’, they set their aspirations with this album even higher. “We spent a lot of time making crazy fucking noises,” he declares. The album continues to experiment with more synths balancing out the guitars (and array of pedals), but this is unmistakably Boston Manor’s heaviest album to date. Fuelled by playing a lot of shows low down on the bill on metal tours and festivals in the last couple of years, the band were assured that laying heavy foundations for ‘Glue’ was the way forward. “All our fans love to dance around and have a good time, and we feel very comfortable in that scenario and its always been very much part of our formula, and I don’t want to lose that,” he reasons. “We are always going to write energetic songs because it’s more fun. We wrote the heavy shit first and went from there. It was really fun to do some of the really riffy stuff; it’s my favourite thing sometimes.” From the outside, ‘GLUE’ is full of very bold statements. Its message is deafening, and the music is unashamedly confrontational too. But it wasn’t always this way. The leap Boston Manor took from their debut ‘Be Nothing’ to ‘Welcome To The Neighbourhood’ was massive (and in Henry’s words “the biggest jump they will ever make”). The dread-filled poprock stylings of their second album subsequently opened them up to a wider audience, and the tours that followed took them from Blackpool to all around the
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“IT’S LIKE WE ARE WALKING OFF A CLIFF AND WE KNOW WE ARE WALKING OFF A CLIFF, BUT WE’VE AGREED TO WALK OFF A CLIFF SO... LET’S WALK OFF A CLIFF” world. The additional festival here, the extra support tour there, resulted in the band finding themselves away from home for months on end “living the dream”. But “the dream”, in reality, left Boston Manor in a rut and the prospect of doing it all again wasn’t something that sounded too appealing. “We toured too much, to be honest. I wouldn’t take anything back, not for the world, but we
got back to point at the end of the cycle where we were just proper burnt out. There were moments where I should have been absolutely on top of the world and I was just sort of bummed out and exhausted.” The lethargy from touring and that the new songs “just wasn’t happening” got the band questioning whether they had they could give a new album 100% and whether mentally they had the stamina to go again. Eventually, four or five very different songs started to come together but making it fit into an album was the next challenge the band faced. At that point they knew the project was going to be “diverse”, but they headed to the studio where ‘GLUE’ started to form. “We would usually go into the studio have the whole record almost 95% done in preproduction. But we took in so many fucking songs, and some of them were only half-finished, and we would pull it all apart and put it back together again, and
it really started to take shape then. Truth be told, two weeks before we went into the studio, I was kind of shitting my pants, ‘Have we made a mistake? Are these songs, right? I think they’re great, but are other people going to like them?’.” Having shown the album to a select few family and friends, the reaction to ‘GLUE’ is that this is another change in direction for the band, but Henry’s opinion is “I actually think this one sits between the two in a lot of ways.” He adds: “I definitely see it as an evolution. I’m very wary that we’ve done three different albums, but I don’t want people to think we are just doing it as a gimmick. It’s not like we have to change our sound now on the next record. To me, these songs are just the next step and some of them every could have fitted on ‘Welcome To The Neighbourhood’ in a way.” Working to bridge the gap between the two albums is the inclusion of ‘Liquid’ on ‘GLUE’. Featuring Trophy Eyes’ John
Floreani, the single was first included on the ‘England’s Dreaming’ EP which was released last year as a reworking of tracks from ‘Welcome To The Neighbourhood’. ‘Liquid’ was initially recorded along with the track ‘Brand New Kids’ with the design that they would be standalone singles but both now serve as transitions between albums. It’s the emphasis on the value of an album, and how the single ‘Drowned In Gold’ got “lost” in Henry’s opinion, they made sure that song made it onto ‘GLUE’. It was unknowingly the first taste of ‘GLUE’, but when it came to deciding on the first single for their album, there was only one winner. “There are a few tracks that are left field for us here. ‘Everything is Ordinary’ is a weird song, and we knew that’s going to be the first single.” With its brash and pulverising chaos, ‘Everything Is Ordinary’ was always going to be polarising, but that was the point. “Maybe it’s a little arrogant, but that was the aim in a sense. When we started in this world, we were so different and there is no point in us catering to the people that only want us to be the band we used to be. If you want a band that sounds like we did in 2016, then there are a lot of bands right now who do it better than we did it.” That what it all boils down is the creative ambition that keeps propelling Boston Manor forward. The pop-punk band that crawled out from Blackpool is almost unrecognisable but the foundations they lay, the extra reverb and sinister tone in ‘Kill Your Conscience’ or the flash of violence in ‘Broken Glass’, were all part of the journey that have shaped ‘GLUE’. “I’ve started to think of us as a creative entity, and that’s how I want us to be,” Henry suggests. Selling himself somewhat
short, he refers to himself as a “sub-par musician, but I bring a lot to the aesthetic”. Having already worked on poster design, merch and now dabbling in photography too, Henry is pushing the visual side of who Boston Manor are. “I want to start, moving forward on the next record, using videos as the visual half to us as a visual enterprise. I think we have been very safe with our videos in the past, but I don’t like a lot of our music videos at all. I think we are still sticking to this weird ‘music promo’ format, but why can’t every video be like a movie?” Not wanting to get too far off track, he also emphasises how films have already influenced their records. “All the records we’ve made we’ve had films on while we’ve been recording and sometimes those movies would subconsciously creep into the sound. We watched loads of The Matrix and 90s movies when making ‘Welcome To The Neighbourhood’ and this one we were watching a weird fucking art house film!” It’s easy to see why they needed 100% commitment before making ‘GLUE’ because their ambition requires a lot of effort, but Boston Manor are continually conquering all that is set before them. They’re taking huge global issues, deep personal troubles, more expansive musical influences and pushing themselves as a creative outlet all at the same time. The message is the most important with this album but, along with the music, they seem prepared for it to be divisive. “I do think having songs about the issues that are so aggressive allows people to express themselves and talk to each other, but we will see when the record comes out. People might hate it, but we love, and that’s all that matters.” P Boston Manor’s
album ‘GLUE’ is out 1st May.
Upset 55
Rated_ THE OFFICIAL VERDICT ON EVERYTHING
BOSTON MANOR GLUE
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I
f the last year of our lives have been a Black Mirror episode then Boston Manor have provided the soundtrack to it with ‘GLUE’.
It’s a Clockwork Orange style sensory overload with the assault of opening tracks ‘Everything Is Ordinary Now’ followed by the industrial, artillery style, drumming, of ‘1’s & 0’s’ which feels directly influenced by ‘The Downward Spiral’ era Nine Inch Nails. And if the sound wasn’t enough of a slap in the face then the subject matter is with those tracks taking on our numbness to the plight of the world around us and the growing chasm between generations in a postBrexit world respectively. Yeah, Boston Manor aren’t pulling any punches in this one. It’s not always so
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confrontational in its method as ‘High On A Ledge’ is the drugged, floaty, backdrop to an important take on toxic masculinity and ‘Terrible Love’ delivers singer Henry Cox at his most vulnerable as he wallows in his self depreciation. The point of the album is to tackle all that unites us in 2020 even if our opinions fall on different sides of the fence. It’s ambitious but unwavering in its determination to hold a mirror up to the world on politics, mental health, terrorism and the mass media. “Has the world gone mad today?” Henry asks on ‘Only 1’, somehow managing to not come across like he is preaching but genuinely trying to hold open people’s eyelids to make them see the world warts and all. In order to capture that frustration and anger upon which the album is built, ‘GLUE’ is a more subtle departure from the moody alt-rock of ‘Welcome To The Neighbourhood’ but not as big a leap than the one they made from their pop-punk roots. Ultimately, ‘GLUE’ is heavy; for its subject matter and its sound but it pits Boston Manor against the world and they come out the other side of it all unscathed. P Alexander Bradey
ASKING ALEXANDRIA LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE
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‘Like A House On Fire’ is a manifesto for a band that have spent the best part of over a decade working through their fair share of struggles. From the gargantuan bridge in ‘Down to Hell’ to the swagger that pours out of the guitar riff in ‘Take Some Time’, Asking Alexandria are pulling out their anthemic stadium-grade of shredding. By keeping the live show in mind during the writing process, it’s blindingly clear that the band have adopted an all-or-nothing attitude and are amplifying every aspect of themselves as musicians. P Tyler
Damara Kelly
CAR SEAT HEADREST
MAKING A DOOR LESS OPEN
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Driven by the genius mind of Will Toledo, ‘Making A Door Less Open’ sees an unusual form of self-collab, with the band joining forces with Toledo’s and drummer Andrew Katz’s electronic side-project, 1 Trait Danger. As a result, the album is a departure from the guitar-dominated records of CSH past, more space instead being given to synths and drum machines backing Toledo’s witty lyricism. If trying something different results in this good of an outcome, we can only look forward to seeing what Car Seat Headrest explore next. P
Dominic Allum
DANCE GAVIN DANCE AFTERBURNER
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Once you get nine albums in like Dance Gavin Dance, you have a fair idea of what to do. On ‘Afterburner’,
threads. Switch the outside world off and lose yourself in the chaos. P
Dillon Eastoe
THE USED HEARTWORK
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the band are a well-oiled machine delivering typically intense and hypermelodic slices of frantic rock. There’s a lot going on here, and the album keeps you guessing at every turn. On cuts like the dizzying supernova of ‘One In A Million’ the rush is palpable while ‘Born To Fail’ crushes everything in its wake. It’s an example of the change in dynamics and mood that characterises Dance Gavin Dance’s work, and it’s in full effect on this record. The band have lost none of their power or capability to experiment and switch things up, but the record is accessible enough to encourage new listeners even this deep into their discography. P Martyn Young
DIET CIG
DO YOU WONDER ABOUT ME?
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“I’m thriving, thanks for asking” belts Alex Luciano in the opening chorus of Diet Cig’s new album ‘Do You Wonder About Me’. Where their critically-acclaimed debut gained them cult status as trailblazers on the indie circuit, its follow-up sees them shedding the imposter syndrome and feeling more at one with themselves, and the world around them. Contemplating the extent of existence and the natural turbulence that you may experience along the way, Diet Cig wrap up all of this up from the perspective of love, and what everything looks like to an
outside influence. ‘Priority Mail’ strikes a chord in prioritising someone else’s happiness, even if it means putting your own terrifying occurrences to one side, but never once portraying that this might be a burden – instead, showcasing that selflessness is the key to feeling good about life. Whilst the album strikes a little thinly at just 25-minutes long, the songs themselves more than satisfy the listener’s interest, but of course they still leave you wanting more. P Tyler Damara Kelly
ENTER SHIKARI
NOTHING IS TRUE & EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE
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If ‘The Spark’ was Enter Shikari at their most introverted and restrained, the follow-up is a band releasing a deluge of ideas, lurching across genres at such breakneck speed you’d be forgiven for ending the album with an amount of motion sickness. ‘Everything is Possible’. Musically, that means glitching prog bouncing off euphoric stadium rock via an actual symphony. Lyrically, mastermind Rou Reynolds is on an odyssey of all the awful things you can imagine, with most of them coming true. This is a dizzying listen, and it’s testament to their prowess that Shikari can weave a coherent piece from such wildly diverse
The Used frontman Bert McCracken explains that ‘Heartwork’, his band’s eighth studio album, sits somewhere between the vulnerability and sincerity of ‘In Love and Death’, and the flair of ‘Lies For The Liars’ - and he couldn’t be more right. It’s quintessential The Used, and a true statement that they’ve returned back to familiar ground (with open arms) following their previous, more experimental LP, 2017’s ‘The Canyon’. At sixteen tracks long, ‘Heartwork’ is a strange record where the golden age of emo is at the core, yet it somehow manages to keep you guessing with flickers of the future amongst the retrospective narrative. It might not be groundbreaking, but at least it’s not boring. P Jasleen Dhindsa
TRIVIUM
WHAT THE DEAD MEN SAY
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Three years after their excellent ‘The Sin and the Sentence’, Trivium are on one heck of a form right now. ‘What the Dead Men Say’ sees the band open up the potential to begin a run of albums as good as any band in metal. There’s no fat on here: it’s all glorious choruses, titan heavy screams and metal worship heaviness. The band are combining a love of thrash attitude, classic metal catchiness and prog technicality to write an album that sounds uniquely them and exactly what’s needed in the metal mainstream. It’s not the first time that Trivium have written songs this good, but it feels like the band are entering a golden period of a career. P Paris Fawcett
Upset 57
EVERYONE HAS THOSE FORMATIVE BANDS AND TRACKS THAT FIRST GOT THEM INTO MUSIC AND HELPED SHAPE THEIR VERY BEING. THIS MONTH, MILK TEETH TAKE US THROUGH SOME THE SONGS THAT MEANT THE MOST TO THEM DURING THEIR TEENAGE YEARS. WITH... MILK TEETH PROPAGANDHI Back To The Motor League
Em: I borrowed ‘Today’s Empires Tomorrow’s Ashes’ on CD from a friend, and it changed my life. This song still gets heavy rotation and is more relevant than ever.
ALKALINE TRIO Private Eye
Em: This was the song that hooked me on Trio. They’ve had some musical ups and downs since but this was a perfect angsty anthem.
LEFTOVER CRACK Burn Them Prisons
Em: Speaks for itself really! When ‘Fuck World Trade’ came out, it was the most evil thing I had ever heard but what great fun.
SLIPKNOT Eyeless
Jack: I bought Slipknot’s ST album from CD Warehouse in Watford when I was a kid. Took it home and listened to it on repeat for months. The slow down riff still makes me want to roundhouse kick people whenever hear it!
SUM 41 Rhythms
Jack: First band I ever saw live. I used to spend hours playing along to ‘All Killer, No Filler’ when I started playing drums and this song was loads of fun.
NIRVANA You Know You’re Right
Becky: I borrowed this off my local library and burned a copy to CD as I had no money and instantly fell in love. I was already into Nirvana before but didn’t own any I could listen to (this is when dial-up internet was still a thing, streaming didn’t exist, and we had
58 Upset
no money as I lived in a singleparent household) I would blast this whilst I was in the bath as an angsty teen. Kurt’s lyrics in my eyes have always been unrivalled, and an artist I connect with more than most.
fell for it. This song still gives me the feeling of wanting to punch a wall or throw myself into a pit. That surge of adrenaline through my arms. We were lucky enough to tour Europe with them a few years back.
AC/DC Highway to Hell
DEFTONES Be Quiet And Drive Far Away
TITLE FIGHT Symmetry
Becky: I found out about Deftones from a mix Billie Joe (Green Day) has compiled of his favourite songs growing up. I’ve always had really bad depression since I was a teenager and this song is another I would blare out and managed to sound how I felt on the inside. P
Jack: The band that reminds me of being a kid! My dad is a huge AC/ DC fan, and this album was always spinning in our house when I was young, and they remain one of my favourite bands of all time!
Becky: I found this band through Tumblr as someone I followed posted the video, and I instantly
Milk Teeth’s self-titled album is out now.
HOMESCHOOL 8 - 10 MAY 2020
IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER...
AJIMAL · ALEC BENJAMIN · ALFIE TEMPLEMAN A N N A B E L A L L U M · A P R E · B A D S O U N D S · B A D // D R E E M S BEACH RIOT · BETSIE GOLD · BILK · BLOXX BORN RUFFIANS · BRYDE · BUZZARD BUZZARD BUZZARD CAV E TOW N · C H A PT E R A N D V E R S E · C H E E R B L E E D E R Z C OAC H PA RT Y · DA N A GAVA N S K I DELAIRE THE LIAR · DEVON · DIZZY DRUG STORE ROMEOS · ELLIS · EMMA STEINBAKKEN FAR CASPIAN · FEET · FLAWES · GAFFA TAPE SANDY GRACE LIGHTMAN · GROUPLOVE · GUEST SINGER G U R U · H A N N A H JA N E L E W I S · H A N YA · H E I G H T S HOME COUNTIES · HONEY HARPER · HONEY LUNG HONEY MOON · IDER · JAMIE LENMAN · JAZZ MORLEY JENS KUROSS · JOE & THE SHITBOYS JOHNNY KILLS · JONES · JORDAN MACKAMPA KENNYHOOPLA · LADY BIRD · LANDE HEKT · LARKINS LAURAN HIBBERD · LID O PIMIENTA · LISS LIZZY FARRALL · LOOR · LOVE FAME TRAGEDY LY N KS A F R I K K A · M A I S I E P E T E R S · M A X L E O N E N AT U R E T V · N I M M O · N OVAC U B · O R C H A R D S PARA FICTION · PEACH PIT · PHIL MADELEY P H O E B E G R E E N · P I Z Z AG I R L · P O L LY M O N E Y RACHEL CHINOURIRI · RHODES · SAD BOYS CLUB SFVEN · SKIA · SNOW COATS · SO CIAL ANIMALS S PAC E Y JA N E · TAY LO R JA N Z E N · T H E B OT S THE PALE WHITE · THE SHERLOCKS · THE XCERTS THYLA · TIM BURGESS · TOM GRENNAN · TTRRUUCES TUSKS · T WO TRIBES · UPSAHL · VC PINES · VISTAS WALLFLOWER · WARGIRL · WEIRD MILK W E S L E Y G O N Z A L E Z · YA K I M A · Z A N D · Z U Z U + MORE TBA
A N O N L I N E M U S I C F E S T I VA L W AT C H AT H O M E S C H O O L F E S T. C O M