What does it feel like to finally come to India?
I’m stoked as hell. We’ve been to a lot of dope places in the
past few years and it’s unbelievable to me that we have fans
in places across the world that like our music enough to
want to come see us live. I think these shows are gonna be lit.
Can you talk to us about your third studio album,
NLND? What's the story behind it?
Well with our most recent EP The Most Hated, we tried
doing more of a hip hop/rap beat type of thing and mixed
that style with our own, and ended up keeping a lot of the
sampled drums and 808 bass lines and things like that, so
with New Levels New Devils we wanted to transpose all
of those aspects to real instruments. TMH was kind of our
test run, and once we made our single G.O.A.T. we just
rolled with it because it was pretty badass, and now I think
we’ve really figured out how to transpose sounds to our
instruments, so now the possibilities for future records
is endless.
The Most Hated has had a pretty huge impact on your
fanbase. How did you decide to come up with it?
We were really getting into rap beats and hip hop stuff and
a lot of our friends are producers, so when we went to work
with them they would make all this crazy dope shit, and we
were kinda just like, alright I guess we’re doing this! Haha.
Our style at first was more of whatever genre you’d call our
song “LIT”, but we knew that sounded kinda cheesy and at
that time we had no idea what we were doing when it came
to making beats, so when we went to work with Y2K for the
first time he made all our cheesy shit sound dope, and now
we have a much better idea of what sounds good these
days haha.
There have been some massive leaps in sound and
feel from the old-school, quintessential Polyphia to
Renaissance and now NLND. Can you tell us about
the journey?
We started out as a death metal band with our first EP
Resurrect, and then jumped on the djent trend for our
second EP Inspire, and once we got to our first full length
studio album “Muse” we wanted to try all sorts of different
stuff. We didn’t want to make another djent album because
that shit got super oversaturated and we didn’t really
like it that much anymore, so we focused more on poppy
sounding music. It was also our first time working with
Nick Sampson in the studio and he had a lot of sick ideas
that we were down to try, so that definitely helped us make
the album what it is, and kind of made us realize that we
should start working with more producers and artists. With
Renaissance we wanted to do our own thing in the studio
with nick again since that worked so well with Muse, and
The Most Hated is when we started branching out to hip hop/
trap and rap producers and started doing the real crazy shit.
And like I mentioned before, NLND was our version of all
that stuff in full band mode played with all real instruments
on top of the beats. So we really like experimenting with stuff
and making new styles of music. I don’t think we’ll ever end
up making the same album twice. The next one could be a
country album.
Riffs! How do you come up with them? They're
arguably the band's most defining quality and
everyone would love to know the writing process
behind them.
Our main goal with riffs is to make them catchy. We try
to structure our songs our so there’s a good melody in
the chorus, cool riffs in the verses and maybe a bridge or
something to tie the last chorus in to the rest of the song.
So it’s more focused on melody and catchiness and how
everything fits in with the rest of the song.
What was the experience of featuring so many
incredible talents on the latest album? Any key
moments that stood out during the writing and
tracking process?
We didn’t do any features on Renaissance because we
wanted to have an album that was just us, so for this next
one we figured let’s just have a bunch of our friends on the
record and make it as collaborative and sick as we can. We
did our first song with vocals with Cuco too so that was fun
to write to.
What was the inspiration behind the electronic and
trap influences in your newer music?
Tim and I listen to a lot of hard ass trap music and it pumps
us up, so we incorporate it into our music so people can
jam out to our stuff like we do to other music we like. We
work with producers like Y2K, judge and lophiile and
they’re crazy good at working with our style.
Tell us the story behind your relationship with CHON.
How did you end up crossing paths?
They were on tour years back and played at a local place
we always used to play at called Tomcats in Ft. Worth, so
we went to the show and hung out with them and we’ve
been homies ever since!
How did you end up signing with Equal Vision
Records? How has the shift from independent music
to a signed band impacted your music?
One of our biggest concerns with labels is that they don’t
try to control our style or our music. Equal Vision really
understood what we were trying to do and knew the
importance of us having our freedom and how that’s what
makes us who we are, so I wouldn’t really say it’s affected
us in any other way than just having a team of people help
us do the shit we do and more.
What can we look forward to in the new year? Any
tours or EP plans?
We have our Look But Don’t Touch headliner coming up in
April through May, which will be sick, and our Polyphia
Crazy Ultra Mega Macho Summer Camp for the Musically
Gifted and Extremely Talented in June which is also going
to be sick. As far as music goes, we’re always writing new
stuff so when we get a chance to go hard on it and get in the
studio you’ll know.
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