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!
