are synonymous and at this point we’ll ride this train till the end. We’ve been approached by other labels but our loyalties lie with React!. At this point I’m personally pretty heavily involved in a lot of the behind the scenes stuff with the label as well. Wayne: As a band you have always had a political and sometimes activist role in the hardcore scene, what specific messages will the upcoming LP be focused on? and what do you think hardcore really needs to touch upon or enforce now more than ever? Ev: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there’s a shortage of bands who are addressing real, significant social and political issues but I don’t think these bands are getting much attention from the masses for whatever reason. I’m not in a position to dictate what people should and shouldn’t talk about, because not everyone views the world through the same lens. I think what is most important for the hardcore scene, a community as much based on message as music, is that people be honest with themselves. The lyrics for the Leave No Doubt (the name of the LP) are definitely the most honest and sincere I have ever written, and there are certain songs I wouldn’t have been comfortable writing when I was younger. The lyrics were written over the course of the last four years,
which have been marked by incredibly pivotal moments for myself and for the United States. If there is a general theme, it deals with me struggling to make sense of myself while our country attempts to make sense of itself. I’m not saying this is a concept album or anything, but our generation is facing a potentially bleak future and I don’t think many people know what to make of it. We’ve all inherited the weight of the mistakes of our parents, and the load seems to get heavier and heavier everyday. I graduated from college with a degree in Architecture as the bottom dropped out of the construction and housing market, facing oppressive student loans and a rapidly shrinking opportunity. Granted, I’ve found myself in a better position than many, but that’s my story in one sentence. Shortly after, the presidential election of 2008 ushered in a wave of hope that has failed to produce tangible results, leaving many of us feeling defeated and hopeless. The first line of the record is “Is this the world that we saw in our dreams when we were young?” This is a question for myself, my generation, and my country. Am I the person at 26 that I thought I would be at 16? Does the world we live in meet the idealized expectations we had as children? Has our country fulfilled the goals it initially set out to achieve? Another lyric is “I know the world’s a mess because I live
here too...” I wrote this as a reaction to people assuming “positive” bands (which we are often categorized as) are inherently escapist, but found myself realizing that most bands I encountered were either oblivious or in denial about the state of the world. The whole system is fucked. Anyone who has worked to support themselves knows that we are literally buying into a system that yields increasingly less and less results. Its a terrible fucking investment. No one is willing to accept any responsibility, not just politically but individually, and everyone is waiting for someone else to patch the holes while the ship sinks. Sometimes it seems like people have just given up and accepted their fate. Anyway, that’s just part of the problem. The bigger issue is that no one is comfortable confronting it, especially in our generation. We’re all just marching single file into the fucking fire. If anything, this is the tone of the record. Again, this isn’t some kind of concept record but these are the things that keep me up at night. If anything, this record is more introspective than previous records, but not exclusively. Other songs discuss the dangers of fundamentalism, confronting an uncertain future, fighting complacency, thoughts on vegetarianism, and Mindset’s first ever song about straight edge (believe it or not!)