Interview with Matt McCloskey from Rev Theory at Welcome To Rockville

My first interview at Welcome To Rockville was with Matt McCloskey from Rev Theory. Enjoy! 

Can you give me any details on the new album? What can expect from it?

MM - We tried to go a little outside the box on this. We came off the road and weren't really sure what we were doing. There were a lot of things going on and there was a lot of tension so we kind of infused that into our writing. Julian and I are the main leaders in writing and we told everyone to fuck off and we just wrote all the music we wanted. I got into production and we had the tools to do things on our own. So, this whole record is about DIY and going in and making music we want without some label guy telling us "Oh, this song should be this way and this song should be this way. It's where we've always wanted to be as a band and we hit a chord with this new evolution of our sound. We are infusing some electronic elements and just brutally heavy guitars like drop tuning super low and B-tuning. We just got some new bear atone guitars and we geeked out on those. We wrote whatever we were feeling. It's pretty gnarly. That's been the word of this recording: gnarly. Everything is super 'gnar'. We even had the guitar settings on super high. That's what it's been all about. It's been fun. We can do whatever we want. There's no restrictions.

How will the new album differ from Justice? I know you said it's DIY and gnarly, but elaborate.

MM - Justice was, well, we were still on Interscope Records and we had an A&R guy. We always felt that there were too many people putting their hands on, okay, maybe not that, um, too many chefs in the kitchen. We'll put it that way. Everyone has their two cents. They're like "Oh well I like this song" or "You should do this." And the managers are like "You should do this thing." We were writing with different people and we felt like it got convoluted. We went and worked with Terry Date who is a huge producer. We spent a shit ton of money to record it at Henson studios and we just got in a room and jammed and made what we thought we wanted. We made a really raw, natural record. It came out great but for some reason we felt like the reaction wasn't what it should have been. This time we went a little more modern and infused a little more electronic type influences like Nine Inch Nails and got super heavy because we like Deftones. It's just ballsy and fun. We played three new songs off the record today. One was called Blow It Up. I had friends in the crowd and they told me that once we kicked in that song, they felt a wall of people just smack into them. It's just hard hitting, bouncing, and really heavy guitars.

I loved that song. It was my favorite.

MM - We wanted to limit ourselves on lyrics and take them out and just play the song. The chorus is a little repetitive but it gets stuck in your head and it's so hooky. That was a theme when we started recording this.

Anything else you want to add?

MM - Other than my voice is shot from playing the pre-party last night, nope!