PUNKZ Magazine

MY ChEMICAL

ROMANCE THE COMEBACK

PLUS

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BMTH º BLINK-182 º NECK DEEP

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My Chemical Romance’s comeback music

Neck Deep - STFU

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page 6-9

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page 14

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page 10-13

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How Bring Me The Horizon saved British rock

page 14

Blink-182’s comeback

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My Chemical Romance's comeback music is truly the antidote we need in post-lockdown world

My Chemical Reaction’s newly released The Foundations of Decay prima facie appears to be a return to their emo roots but is a sonically mature outing.

In #TheMusicThatMadeUs,

senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri chronicles the impact that musicians and their art have on our lives, how they mould the industry by rewriting its rules and how they shape us into the people we become: their greatest legacies My Chemical Romance’s delayed comeback is, in fact, a blessing in disguise. Returning to a post-lockdown world that is embroiled in multiple hues of personal transformations, MCR’s postponed reunion tour couldn’t have been timed better. After announcing their comeback gig in 2019, their plans—much likes ours—hadn’t factored a pandemic that forced people to stay home, lose jobs, homeschool their children and grapple with a spiralling sense of hopelessness.

In short, the perfect breed-

ing ground for the manifestation of a new generation of the emo experience.

While vocalist Gerard Way has doggedly denied the band’s emo shades, fans of MCR are united in their appreciation for the music that delves deeply into emotional expression. Way has been dismissive of emo as a rock music genre itself, preferring to highlight the rock operatic nature of their songwriting and compositions.

Harnessing elements of funk, pop, hard rock, goth and alternative rock, MCR has been unique in taking intimate, confessional lyrics and giving them a more theatrical vocalisation under Gerard Way’s command.

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My Chemical Romance

Gerard Way

Their immensely popu-

lar Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge was a turning point in the way the band was perceived.

Starting out with the rawness emo-meets-post punk mould, MCR attained worldwide acclaim with Three Cheers, an album that exuded everything that the emo movement stood for. Heartfelt emotional lyrics that combined introspection and admission, held together by the robust guitaring of punk seeing an interplay of hard and soft elem ents of the genre forms a distinct nature of emo.

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Yet with prog rock’s pre-

disposition for unorthodox song structures and extreme shifts in sonic style, emo was literally a band and its instrument wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

The brooding sense of existence is projected in the moody, emotionally tense songwriting and the vocal screaming only heightens the fundamentals of the genre. With their third album, The Black Parade, the band showcases a world where emo, alternative rock, post-hardcore and punk rock of the 2000s find their roots in influences from 1970s classic rock, glam rock, pop, and gothic rock.

This ran parallel with the resurgence of the next generation of emo fans who started to sport the flat, black straight hair look with black kohl-lined eyes, skinny pants and tight tees.

Naturally, such fandom follows the cyclical nature of being an outlier in society;

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where the idea of not fitting in inspires music that fans relate to, only to have the fans stand out for being off mainstream even in an uber niche genre like alternative rock.

My Chemical Romance aren’t alone in finding such devoted fans for the honesty of emotion that their music portrays. Bands like Fall Out Boy, AFI, The Used and even Panic! At The Disco too saw their fans unite in the relatability that these emo bands provided.

This underground emo culture stemmed from social isolation, angst, and even misanthropy. With rising cases of suicide, depression, and self-harm, bands like MCR started to distance themselves from the “emo” word and openly denounced any association with it.

That may have worked tactically for the band but the sense of community that fanhood offers cannot be rebranded on the whim of an artist. Particularly one that is immensely influenced by the likes of Queen, The Cure, Joy Division and even the appropriately titled, Misfits. Queen’s energy and love for grandeur emanates through the band’s third album The Black Parade.

Concept albums aren’t new in rock and roll, with every decade throwing up some monumental, path-breaking pieces of work,

My Chemical Romance

think Sgt Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band (The Beatles), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (David Bowie), The Wall (Pink Floyd), Tommy (The Who) …you get the point. One time a rock staple of the 1970s, the concept album or rock opera in this case made a resounding resurgence in the 2000s with The Black Parade, introducing newer, angstier audiences to it.

Combining the pain of Nirvana with the madness of The Sex Pistols, the drive of an Iron Maiden with the depth of Queen, MCR pushed themselves further into the mainstream acceptance of alternative rock but never truly lost the emo core.

Their newly released The Foundations of Decay prima facie appears to be a return to their emo roots but is a sonically mature outing.

With the band finally completing its short set of

concerts, MCR’s reunion is a very optimistic sign in this post-pandemic world. We’ve emerged on the other side with our emotions fraught and a new sense of existentialism. Against this backdrop, an evolved My Chemical Romance with new music is truly the antidote we need.

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How Bring Me The Horizon

saved British rock

Bring me the horizon

From the start, Bring Me The Horizon’s

It didn’t take long for the teens of Myspace to decide that this scrappy band were infamous scene kids. At one point, Bring Me The Horizon was the most played artist on the platform, ahead of musicians like Coldplay, Lily Allen and Adele. “It was very much: the scene decides,” says bass player Matt Kean. “It wasn’t about press liking it, or if your dad’s in a band or what budget you’ve got, or any of the other things that contribute to making an artist big.”

story was a reactionary one of love and hate, death and rebirth. They formed in Sheffield in 2004. Nicholls, who was from Rotherham met Oli Sykes at alternative nights for underage kids in the city centre.

Sykes was an unpopular child who repeatedly got beaten up at school. Though highly creative, his ADHD diagnosis at the age of six set him up for unsatisfying experiences in the classroom. Heavy music was an outlet. Nicholls knew guitarists Lee Malia and Curtis Ward who played in a Metallica cover band and suggested to Sykes that they create their own group.

“None of us knew what we were doing.

We just wanted to make heavy music that people could mosh to,” remembers Malia.

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Male-dominated rock

media was hostile to them, a reaction that seemed to come from resenting the democratisation of their success, the generic deathcore of their early music and what they perceived as Sykes’ good looks and poor attitude. “We felt the hatred, especially with the press,” says Kean. “It’s probably because we were so young but everyone in the rock press seemed so old and didn’t like the fact they had to put us in their magazines but had to because they knew we sold.” For a sector of rock fans who reflected the press, the band were not metal enough.

Bring me the horizon symbol

The result, with keyboardist-meets-producer Jordan Fish newly onboard, was 2013’s Sempiternal. Across their following albums, each with broader appeal, listeners who had wanted them out of metal were annoyed that they were branching out into other genres. Their fanbase grew with each album, especially the anthemic pop-rock of That’s The Spirit (2015). What happened, again, was another reactionary pivot. The next album, amo, had to be different.

“We’re too creative to be a straight-up arena rock band”

reflects Fish. “Oli’s got too much creativity to be in that band.

So amo felt like a bit of a reset to break that trajectory.”

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Their sixth record, amo, was a product of just under two years’ work, and was released in 2019. It gave them a taste of what they craved: a No. 1 album and Grammy nominations. But ironically, despite these accolades, it was their most divisive record among their fanbase and received lukewarm reviews. The idea of a four-part EP series was born from this experience: immense time and resources for the album format equals bigger stressors.

For Sykes, the negativity around amo stayed at the forefront of his mind. “I’m still so proud of that record, but it’s a mental toll on you when you put so much work into it and it feels like so much is riding on it, that one bad comment about it ruins your life. Your selfworth becomes how many records you sell or if you get a No. 1.” Losing out on Grammys for amo was a disappointment, too. “You’re looking around at all these other artists doing so much better than you and bigger than you: it pollutes your mind,” he says.

The rest of the band are more forthcom-

ing about amo’s limitations. Nicholls admits that it was the first album where the band tried to “tick boxes” to ensure its mainstream success. Messing with the unique Bring Me The Horizon formula backfired. “amo was missing something and people knew it and we realised it,” he says. “We came to America and it didn’t really resonate with anyone. We had a really hard time. We thought, ‘We’re in decline now.’” They were wrong, though, as amo proved to be another opportunity to propel Bring Me The Horizon forward and elsewhere. Sam Coare, MD of Alternative Press and previous editor of Kerrang!, believes that Sykes’ need to reinvent himself and the band is what makes them both fascinating to follow and polarising to the dominant heavy music fan who likes artists to fit in neatly defined boxes. “AC/DC have made a career of writing the same song for 45 years,

but it doesn’t feel like now you can stay in the same lane for 45 days without being old hat. Sykes more than anyone understands how kids work in a world of decreasing attention spans. You’d back a band that was starting today that had Oli Sykes as the figurehead, more than you would Dave Grohl,” Coare says.

Reliable, respected Grohl is an interesting counterpoint for a regenerative rock artist like Sykes, particularly emerging from a decade when the genre felt uninventive and reliant on legacy acts. When asked about goals for the band, Malia mentions him too: “If you say Foo Fighters, everyone in the world knows that band. We’re not that yet.” By capturing the zeitgeist on their last record, Bring Me The Horizon went some way to forging their own legacy: one of bringing British rock out of its ten-year mainstream stagnation, a singular feat.

Bring me the horizon

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Sykes has frequently

been vocal about modern rock music being stale but feels differently now. He is inspired by a scene of young alternative artists and has become something of a screamo Travis Barker, collaborating with and promoting many of them to celebrate and integrate himself with youth culture.

“So many of this new scene grew up on Bring Me The Horizon, it makes me feel like a proud Dad,” he says.

Fish is similarly feeling more settled in the genre, after the triumph of the heavier, guitar-focussed Survival Horror. “We’re more comfortable with being a rock band for a minute,” he says. “We realised we don’t have to be obtuse and awkward.”

Oli Sykes

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Blink-182 is coming back?!

Tom DeLonge recently talked about the

possibility of reuniting with blink-182 in an interview on The Late Late Show With James Corden.

After DeLonge and blink-182 parted ways in 2015, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker recruited Alkaline Trio‘s Matt Skiba in his place, releasing the albums California (2016) and Nine (2019). Rumours that the original blink will reform gained new steam this summer after Hoppus declared he was cancer-free.Corden wanted to know if that meant a blink-182 comeback with Mark, Tom, and Travis was close. DeLonge responded, “It’s so funny. Blink, it’s like we’re there and then we’re gone, and then we’re there, and then we’re gone. I feel like I’m always talking about some kind of reunion. I mean, we always talk about playing together again. And I think that that’s definitely something we’re all interested in.”He added, “Finding the time to do it, where it lines up with everybody’s priorities, is really all that’s needed. And getting Mark healthy again, getting him strong again. But yeah, no, I’m down. I think those guys are down. I think just finding the time to do it, and when, is really what we’ve got to figure out.”

Neck Deep

Neck Deep’s new song “STFU” Simply put, the headlines everywhere just

seem to be getting worse. The world has a wealth of problems, but rather than crawl up into a ball in the fetal position, the members of Neck Deep have done what they do best - address the suck with a sardonic take and furiously fresh pit-starting riffs on the new song “STFU.” The track serves as their first new music in two years, following the 2020 All Distortions Are Intentional album. While a new album hasn’t been announced quite yet, this does serve as the group’s first self-released music since their original demos ... and there’s a bit of that energy from that period too. The band reunited with Andrew Wade to work on the song, with the group calling “STFU” a “return to our roots, and a return to what we do best.” Singer Ben Barlow further elaborated on the track, stating, “As the world was falling apart at the time, and only seems to have worsened recently, it felt right to satirize the decline of society in typical punk fashion. Looking at the world through a screen and being lured into the impending sense of doom that’s overcome us all.” Keeping their finger on the pulse of modern times, the track includes references to former President Trump, NFTs, livestreams and social media outrage.

Blink-182

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