J ULY 2 018 D ISRU P T THE NOISE
GOOD CHARLOTTE YOU ME AT SIX PANIC! AT THE DISCO CULTURE ABUSE UPSETMAGAZINE.COM
THE FAIM PETAL
S T A T E
C H A M P S
“IT’S STILL THE SAME BAND. IT’S JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE US”
EVERYTHING HAPPENING IN ROCK.
YOU ME AT VI
“WE WERE LOSING OUR IDENTITY” YOU ME AT SIX ARE ALL-GUNS-BLAZING FOR SIXTH ALBUM ‘VI’, WITH GRAND PLANS TO REASSERT EXACTLY WHO THEY ARE. “WE LOST OUR WAY A LITTLE BIT,” SAYS JOSH FRANCESCHI. WORDS: STEVEN LOFTIN
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OU ME AT SIX ARE BACK AND READY TO FIGHT: THEY’RE OLDER, THEY’VE LEARNED SOME VALUABLE LESSONS, AND NOW THEY’RE PUTTING THEM ALL TO THE TEST ON THEIR SIXTH OUTING, ‘VI’. “I felt very much like [2017’s] ‘Night People’ was a halfway house to going nowhere,” frontman Josh Franceschi starts. “We didn’t really execute any of our ambitions or visions that we had for the band, be it creatively or just in general, to be honest. A lot of darkness and negativity around making that record was...” He pauses. “It’s been quite integral to this record coming together.” “When I listen back to the new record, and how it’s sounding and feeling, it sounds like a band who knew exactly what they wanted to achieve. They had the confidence to go for it. They cut out all of the distractions and bullshit that can come with being an artist, and it was great to make a record again in England.” Returning to their home shores to carry out ‘VI’ gave You Me At Six a chance to re-kindle their faded passion. Instead of letting life get in the way - be it clock watching due to commuting between drummer Dan Flint’s house in Surrey to London, or simple dinner plans - it all went out of the window in favour of a far more centred method. Focusing on finding themselves again, they set up shop in a residential studio. Cracking out fifteen-hour days, only stopping for sleep - and the pub, of course - what it’s led to, is a genuine movement forward for themselves. They’re progressing, they’ve re-found the fire, and it sounds better than ever. Dropping not one, but two new tracks in the form of ‘Fast Forward’ and ‘3 AM’, you can immediately hear the development they’ve undergone. There’s aggression littered across Josh’s vocals, and the instrumentation is fierce. “’Fast Forward’ is very much a selfassessment song lyrically, and I’ll be honest with you, my personal life, and also my life within the band during the whole ‘Night People’ era, was just sort of coasting. Whether it be coasting through bad stuff or good stuff, it was just coasting. There was no flag in the ground moment. “Sometimes you have to lose something to know what it meant to you in the first place. With You Me At Six, we felt like we’d lost our way a little bit on the last record, and therefore it made us so hungry.” Josh attributes the discourse around the time of ‘Night People’ to the breakout success of 2014’s ‘Cavalier Youth’. “We came off the back of it with a number one album, O2 Arena, main stages at Isle of Wight and Reading, T in The Park. In terms of everything we wanted to achieve as a band, if it was a video game, we’d completed it,” he says matter of factly.
“SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING TO KNOW WHAT IT MEANT TO YOU” JOSH FRANCESCHI “Everything we’ve wanted to do, we’ve done. When you come out of that, and you’re surrounded by people that tell you that’s what you’ve done, and encourage you to just coast…” he tentatively trails off. “Anybody that works in the industry knows that it’s full of complete cunts, but there are also some truly pure and wonderful people in there. It’s about surrounding yourself as often and as much as you can with your eyes wide open as to who those wonderful people are, and keeping those that are going to cause nothing but aggravation at a distance.” He’s not going to name and shame those who failed to help them capitalise; instead, he’s staying firm with the belief that beyond having achieved what they felt they needed to, all that matters now is keeping that fire alive. “It won’t achieve anything... Actually, it does. It’s moulded us into becoming as wise as we are now.” It didn’t just lie with various people who, intentionally or not, didn’t have the band’s best interests at heart. “I felt like we were, and had been, losing our identity,” Josh freely admits. “Because it was like, ‘OK, you’ve done stage one of turning into a band’, now it’s about having that Kings of Leon ‘Sex on Fire’, or fucking ‘Mr Brightside’ moment.” A bold claim, but what do you expect from someone who’s re-found the love for something that’s given him more opportunity than anyone else could imagine? ‘VI’ is the culmination of all of these ideas and a future that feels brighter for You Me At Six. There’s no grand statement album coming out. It’s not a piece of art that sits on a station way above anything else around it. Instead, it’s something purer - that missing identity. “I generally feel that the music will say everything we need to say, and sometimes, giving the album a title you’re almost encouraging some sort of identity to come alongside that,” he nods to the simplicity of the title.
“Whether it be branding or marketing, and with ‘Night People’ it was very clear when I look back on that whole period that we were trying to make something of our title, and that being our identity, whereas our identity is ‘six’. You Me At Six, it’s a part of our name! It’s what we’ve done the whole time, and why we’re dropping new music on the sixth of the sixth because that shit’s just meant to happen. There’s something quite poetic about that, and we’re just trying to keep it real simple.” Feeling as if they’re in a better place than ever, the road ahead looks prosperous. The fight is a lesson they’ll never forget, and the industry can try it all it can to taint them, but You Me At Six have made it this far. “Bands like us never do that,” he quickly admits. “They say [that it’s] the difficult second or third album, but our difficult album was our fifth album,” Josh finishes laughing. “And it’s like we had to get some shit out of our system to be able to make this record.” P
YOU ME AT SIX’S ALBUM ‘VI’ IS OUT 5TH OCTOBER.
BLACK PEAKS’ ALBUM IS INCOMING
Black Peaks’ new album ‘All That Divides’ is out on 5th October via Rise Records/BMG, preceded by the single ‘Home’. “The album definitely holds some surprises,” they told us earlier this year. Exciting stuff, huh? The band are also hitting the road the same month.
BLACK HONEY ARE HITTING THE ROAD
Black Honey have announced an autumn tour, which will see them head out from 13th October, with a finale at London’s Electric Ballroom. They’ll also play the Omeara this month, on 12th June. The group have not long released their new single ‘Bad Friends’, with their debut album also coming imminently. Can’t wait! DISRUPT THE NOISE 5
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GENERATION TERRORISTS
“LIFE IS PAINFUL, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE”
IT’S TIME FOR A NEW GOOD CHARLOTTE RECORD, AND ‘GENERATION RX’ SEES BENJI AND JOEL MADDEN GOING BACK TO THEIR ROOTS. WORDS: ALI SHUTLER.
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THE BEST NEW BANDS. THE HOTTEST NEW MUSIC.
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WANT A NEW BAND CRUSH? CHECK OUT THIS LOT! >>>
BODEGA
Following their top set on Upset’s stage at The Great Escape last month (which you can read more about later), New York City’s Bodega are about to drop their debut album ‘Endless Scroll’ - and it’s bloody good.
GRAYSCALE
This lot recently supported As It Is on tour - frontman Patty features on their debut album, ‘Adornment’, you know - and went down crazy well at Slam Dunk. Get their summery, pop-punk vibes in your ears.
HOMESAFE
The latest project from Knuckle Puck’s Ryan Rumchaks - plus Tyler Albertson, Emanuel Duran, and Joe Colesby Homesafe are newly signed to Pure Noise Records, and have a debut album due imminently. Exciting stuff.
SNAIL MAIL L SNAIL MAIL’S LO-FI INDIE ROCK TUNES COME STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART, AND ARE QUICKLY GAINING THE MARYLAND ARTIST AN ARMY OF FANS ALL OVER THE WORLD. WORDS: LILY BECKETT. INDSEY JORDAN, BETTER KNOWN AS SNAIL MAIL, HAS BEEN VERY, VERY BUSY. SPEAKING TO THE TEENAGE STAR AT MATADOR RECORDS AFTER A SOLD-OUT GIG AT LONDON’S OSLO, SHE’S STILL BUZZING, FULL OF ENERGY FROM THE NIGHT BEFORE. “It was a great night. It was so sick,” she enthuses. Touring isn’t a new concept for Lindsey, who’s been and done this all before, despite the fact she’s only just about to turn nineteen. The last time she was in London, she was here for another sold-out show. This time, gigging in the city has become a little more intense, with the addition of back to back dates all over the USA, UK and Europe over the course of two months. “Rapid-fire is an entirely new experience,” she laughs. “You have to change your attitude, learn to live differently. Touring before was like going on vacation and getting to go home afterwards. Now, we have to learn to live on the road.” Despite barely having a moment to rest and recuperate, Lindsey admits that having to play a new crowd night after night isn’t the worst thing in the world. “I’ve grown up and learned what works for me. It’s a skill, it’s tricky, but I like it. I love travelling, and I’m so excited to be doing this tour right now.” Snail Mail released her first EP, ‘Habits’, in 2016. Since then, she’s been writing, touring and setting herself up for the release of her new album, ‘Lush’. To the Maryland-based singer, the term ‘lush’ isn’t simply a positive affirmation used predominantly by the Welsh amongst us. In her mind, the name draws on the ‘sensory immersive’ direction she’s taken the album, which promises deep storylines and all-encompassing sounds. According to Lindsey, the record will tell a
“A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT BEING A WOMAN ISN’T A GENRE” LINDSEY JORDAN
story of personal growth. “It starts off wistful and positive; then there’s a ‘fuck you’ song on there, ‘Full Control’. It levels out at the end of the record, with this self-actualisation song, ‘Anytime’, which is kind of an ode to the realisation that the most healthy thing you can do is separate yourself from relationships that aren’t conducive to self-growth.” Lindsey confesses to being a perfectionist-slash-super-control-freak with very strong ideas of what she wants to create. In terms of the role she assumes as an artist, she sees herself primarily as a songwriter who plays shows, and when it came to creating the ‘Heatwave’ music video, the performative process didn’t come naturally, despite the polished final result. “Outside of playing shows and writing music, I feel like a fish out of water and unskilled. It becomes so not my field that I get so flustered, and I don’t even want to do it anymore. I get really weird about the things that get aligned with Snail Mail; I don’t like it when people get their hands on my brand.” Also, Lindsey would appreciate if people would make an effort to delve a little further into her music before automatically lumping her in with other women who also happen to play guitar
and sing. “We’re all making music which is different from one another, and when we’re thrown in together like that, it takes away from what we’re doing as individual artists. A lot of people don’t understand that being a woman isn’t a genre. “You get those people who are like, ‘I love women!’, and I think they took the exciting fact that there are many women in music right now and ran with it in a way that devalues everyone’s individuality.” Her straight-talking attitude goes hand in hand with a refined mix of musical heroes who have inspired her to love music since early childhood. She explains that Fiona Apples is her “biggest musical, performance and personal inspiration.” “I saw her play with my mom when I was young, it was incredible. She’s not scared of being straightforward and giving herself to the audience. I’ve always been in awe of her; she’s just so bold.” Other artists cited as influential in Lindsey’s formative years include Electrolene, Grizzly Bear and Paramore. Asked about her current tastes and her most-played on Spotify, Lindsey whips out her phone and reels off dozens of names, adhering to no specific genre. “Velvet Underground, greatest classic band of all time. Casey Musgrave, any of her stuff. I like The Big Thief and Alvvays; those guys are doing some great work right now. Also, Crying, from New York.” She hastens to add that she finds minimal-techno music pretty cool, too. It’s suddenly very easy to see how Snail Mail came to find herself in the middle of a sold-out international tour. Lindsey possesses the confidence to point out what’s right and what’s not in the world, an infectious enthusiasm for music, and, perhaps most critically, the palpable desire to create something that’s totally her own. P SNAIL MAIL’S DEBUT ALBUM ‘LUSH’ IS OUT NOW.
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LIVING COVER STORY
PROOF
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BY THIS POINT STATE CHAMPS ARE EFFECTIVELY POP PUNK ROYALTY. WITH NEW ALBUM ‘LIVING PROOF’, THEY’RE SET TO CLAIM THEIR THRONE. WORDS: JACK PRESS PHOTOS: SARAH LOUISE BENNETT
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F
IVE YEARS AGO, ALBANY’S STATE CHAMPS WERE PUTTING OUT THEIR FIRST RECORD ‘THE FINER THINGS’, WHICH FOR THE MOST PART WAS THE CULMINATION OF SEVERAL YEARS OF PLAYING HOMETOWN SHOWS AND SKIPPING OUT SCHOOL. FAST FORWARD TO NOW AND THEY’RE ON ALBUM NUMBER THREE, AND MUCH LIKE ITS TITLE, THEY’RE LIVING PROOF THAT BUSTING YOUR ASS DAY IN AND DAY OUT PAYS OFF. “’The Finer Things’ was our fun thing, it was us introducing ourselves,” muses frontman Derek DiScanio. “Then ‘Around The World & Back’ comes along, and it’s like, woah, how many bands even get a chance to do a second album? And out of those bands, how many of them actually outdo their first album, and take it to a whole new level? Not many, but we did.” Derek’s currently flitting between dressing rooms, bathrooms, and corridors at Zurich’s Dynamo club, moments away from headlining State Champ’s first ‘Living Proof’-era show. The band’s spirited brand of pop-punk has taken them from their state-capital hometown of New York’s Albany to sharing arenas with the likes of Fall Out Boy and 5 Seconds Of Summer, to gearing up for their first trip to South America - and they’ve paid their dues to make it to album number three. “Now we get to do a third record, and that’s more pressure because we have to outdo both of those albums,” Derek continues. “To do that we had to step back and realise what we wanted to do and whether it’s worth it with where we are in our lives personally, and as a band, because we exhausted ourselves from that whole cycle.” Touring 2015’s ‘Around The World & Back’ for just over two and half years saw the band use up every single inch of their souls, leaving their power banks empty and their motivations questionable. Jet-lagged and jaded, the Champs had a new record to write while the world was still upside down. “All of a sudden we found ourselves in all these cool spots, working with all these producers, and we’re partying and meeting all these new people, and we’ve all got relationships going on. Then we come home, and it’s like, what the hell is going on? It was a lot to take in all at once, and we had to stop and reflect. “At the end of the last cycle, I had a relationship that ended. It was a longterm and a long-distance relationship, and it was the first time where something like that really got to me, and
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“WE’RE NEVER GOING TO DO ANYTHING THAT WE DON’T WANT TO DO” it was the first time I felt a kind of way about it and had something to say. “The idea of ‘living proof’ is that we made it out alive. That’s why I think it’ll connect with the fans, because everyone has ups and down, everybody goes through bad times and rough parts, but it’s up to yourself to realise how you can get through that and find the light. Everyone faces adversity in life, but you’ve got to find your own path, and you have to stand back and embrace your independence, to be the living proof in your own way.” ‘Living Proof’, thematically, is State Champ’s most personal record, a cutdeep tell-all that documents the struggle between the personal and professional realms of being a global superstar. Much of the album questions whether the band are really where they’re at, and why. On revolutionary songs like the softer ‘Future Hearts’-era All Time Low-vibes of ‘Our Time To Go’, the realisation of being where you’re meant to be is something co-founder Tyler Szalkowski echoes. “It’s the reminder that we’re where we’re supposed to be,” he says. “We all need that. Whether you’re in a band or not, we can all agree it’s fucking hard to be alive sometimes, so songs like that help me realise we worked our asses off to get here, and yeah, we’re here by some lucky chance, but we’re truly here for a reason.”
H
aving navigated an avalanche of obstacles in their personal lives and the perils of selfdoubt, the band sat down with a myriad of household names in pop-punk and alt-rock to put the pieces of the ‘Living Proof’ puzzle together. Not only is the album a much deeper
line of work lyrically, but it is a far more dynamic record sonically than they’ve ever done before, exploring the extremes of pop-punk, pushing its traditions to its limits in a remarkable modernisation that’ll split opinions more than a Donald Trump speech. One of the key players in this polarising shift in sound is co-writer and producer John Feldmann, renowned for helming make-or-break records for the likes of All Time Low, Blink-182, and 5 Seconds Of Summer. “We were curious to see how it was going to go, because a lot of our friends had worked with him, and we heard he could be good or bad,” admits Tyler, expressing a sense of insecurity towards sharing a room with a man who pushes bands to think outside of their boxes. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Derek continues. “Like, for all we knew, this guy was going to come in and make us write pop songs. “There are certain things you hear, like - he can not necessarily ruin bands, but you never know what’s going to happen. Even now, as the singles are coming out, we’re getting comments like, ‘You’ve been Feldmannised’. What does that even mean?” “He’s good at getting honest feelings out of you,” Tyler adds. “He wants to talk to you about your life and what’s going on in it, and he wants to take your feelings and turn it into art.” Working with old friend Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low, and ‘Around The World & Back’’s masterminds, Mike Green and Kyle Black, the band allowed themselves to evolve their straight-up pop-punk into a maturer sound. They were uncompromising in what they wrote and how they wrote it, ensuring
THE ONLY VERDICT YOU NEED.
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WICKED GAMES
P
anic! At The Disco didn’t Golden cathedrals and Eden paradise, it so much as burst onto the celebrates trust in yourself. scene with their debut Rather than try to outrun his history, album, as create it. It’s Panic! At The Disco use it to give this always been a big ask for present more weight. ‘High Hopes’ hits Brendon to fully escape harder knowing Brendon has always the shadow of 2005’s ‘A Fever You Can’t been a dreamer. Even now, glittering and Sweat Out’, but over the past few years, doused in starshine, he promises “they he’s started to craft a new wave. haven’t seen the best of me.” There’s a 2013s ‘Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to contagious hope living on the bright Die!’ saw him return home larger than side. The stranger crusaders done good, life and add a neon tint to those lived in escape has never felt more inviting. fantasies. 2016’s ‘Death Of A Bachelor’ ‘One Of The Drunks’ and ‘Old Fashioned’ found him the last man standing, keep the spirits high, numbing any something pain by keeping to prove and the glass half something to full and the party say, he embraced neverending. It’s the his history and sort of excess we’ve headed towards come to expect. a future. ‘Pray Across ‘Pray For The For The Wicked’ Wicked’, each song sees him dancing is fully realised, in the moment. coloured in and “To the old, and celebrated. to the new. We ‘The Overpass’ goes dedicate this song uptown with its to you,” starts the funk, while ‘King hyper-positive Of The Clouds’ skip of ‘(Fuck A) embraces the crisp Silver Lining’. lines of the nineties Unapologetic, before someone boisterous and speeds up the disc. PRAY FOR THE relentlessly Under the silver WICKED energetic, it’s lining though, FUELED BY RAMEN/DCD2 the perfect Brendon once again RECORDS introduction to an chews over the fact e e ee album that refuses he doesn’t trust IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL to slow down. anyone else. “I don’t LIKE... GLEE Panic! At The Disco feel anything at all,” certainly haven’t. he cries. His time on ‘Dying In LA’ fast Broadway has galvanised the performer forwards Brendon to an unknown future. within. Live, Brendon has always been Surrounded by dreams that came true the spotlight, but now the songs have and the proof that nobody can put limits that same showmanship. ‘Roaring 20s’ on what you can do, the closing track high kicks and heads for the big finish, flickers between optimism and defeat. undercutting the party throwdown with ‘Pray For The Wicked’ is a record of an emotional edge, while ‘Dancing’s Not belief. It’s about making wildest dreams A Crime’ is full of pomp, promise and feel a reality; there’s sadness in the victory, good fanfare. Elsewhere, ‘Hey Look Ma, but resilience to what comes next. ALI SHUTLER I Made It’ is full of untouchable pride.
PANIC! AT THE DISCO
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