We caught up with vocalist Joe Cabrera on their recently released album and their upcoming tour with Mouth Culture.
Your album is officially out, ‘From Now On’. How are you feeling?
Yeah, I’m feeling relief, to be honest with you. We’ve had it so long. It’s been so long in the making, and it’s gone through so many different iterations and versions that it’s just felt like a real journey to kind of get the album out. It’s like ‘Happiness’, the first record, we kind of just had the songs. We were in the studio for 12 days. That was it was done and then it went off for mixing and mastering, and I just thought that’s how albums went. But then this album was like, well, at first we didn’t even know it was going to be an album, it was going to be like a four track EP. We went in and started demoing that in the studio, and then we were like, let’s do seven tracks. So then we did seven tracks and it became a ten track album.
It’s just been this like process of creating this album and then even so it was last December. We handed in the record to the label and it was ten tracks long and we were like, “this is the album.” But our management have access to a folder of ours which is called ‘demos’. They’re like, no, there’s more. So we handed the album in and they were like, “we like this”. But, Ben Ray, he’s the director of Slam Dunk, he just called me in his office one day, and he was like, “I was in the gym this morning and I was listening through your demo folder whilst I was running on the treadmill.” He was like, “why are you saving some of these songs for album three? You need to get back in the studio and record another four.
So then we ended up having to go back in and doing more. A very long winded answer, but essentially, I feel like we’ve been climbing a mountain to get this album out. I didn’t realise the sense of relief I’d feel once it was out there. But now I have a new feeling of being nervous about how it’s going to be received, whether people are going to dig it or not.
Your last album came out in 2022, you’ve released singles throughout then. Did you go in with a mindset of ‘this is going to be these are the songs’.
I think aswell, when we signed a record deal the first time we signed on a one album deal, we were essentially out of contract when we started writing the second album, there had to be no pen to paper, and we hadn’t been reapproached at that point. So there was a grey area of, “how are we even going to get to do a second album?”. So there was never that locked in moment at the beginning where it was, “this is what we’re going to create.” I think that’s why it went through so many stages and processes. We didn’t actually re-sign for album two until maybe a year after that.
Could you talk us through the writing process of this album? It sounds quite chaotic!
I think for the most part the songs just came out. Me and Dan are the lyric writers, Dan, one of the guitarists, and I think it was just kind of a reflection of our lives at those points. Some of the writing, like ‘Reaper’, for example, that song was written in 2022 when we were on tour with The Wonder Years, right after Happiness came out. So that was an old song. I wrote the lyrics to that one in the van. The lyric writing wasn’t planned that we wanted to go darker or write about more dark themes. I think like if you kind of dig deep on the album Happiness, even though it’s called Happiness, that’s kind of the point of the title, the songs are not happy or they’re just framed in that happy sound. And that is still a lot of that on From Now On’. There’s also ones that are just straight up sad songs. Dan, sadly lost two grandparents whilst we were going through the writing process, and he had a lot of residual emotion that I think he wanted to get out whilst we were writing the record. Me and Dan have grown up together, and we’ve had really similar upbringings. We have this sort of bond that I’ve never had with someone else who we write with, sometimes he will have an emotion that he wants to write about, but I’ll end up writing the song and vice versa. So like, like ‘Seeds For The Roses’, which is after the intro. It’s the first big track on the record, that’s about the passing of his grandparents – but I wrote the song. It was cathartic in a way, because we’ve got to share each other’s experience whilst we were writing. Sometimes, you can feel a certain way about something but struggle to put it into words. So having a second person who can be like, “I’ve wrote this part about this thing that you were feeling, what do you think?”. I think that was really cool.
There was no kind of rhyme or reason to the writing process. It was just what was going on and what we were feeling at the times when we wrote them and I think Happiness was an album that we’d been writing for so long because there was elements of songs that we’d used from years ago and from previous bands, and it was just a piece of work that came out, whereas this one, we started writing in 2022 and finished writing in 2024 for those two years. The world’s not exactly the best version of itself at the moment, and we’re post-Covid and everything. It was a raw reflection of what we were feeling at any given time when we were writing songs.
Musically though, we wrote this one very differently to the last one because we wrote a lot of it in the pandemic, and we the only time that we could really do it would to be in the room together in the rehearsal room. This time we would sort of write parts, send them to each other, and then we would bring ideas to the room and flesh them out a little bit, then take a skeleton away and go and demo it with Grant at his house. Then we would build them bit by bit. I think that’s allowed the songs to be kind of more layered and intricate.
You released four singles prior to this as well?
Well technically we released seven, but we released four singles in the album cycle. ‘Gloom’, ‘Reaper’ and ‘Cowboy Milk’ were already out, we put those out last year because they were supposed to be the singles for the ten track album that we submitted. Then we were told to go and write another four, so that was ‘When I’m Feeling Down’, ‘Lately’ and ‘Day of Iva’ with three of those four. They all ended up being singles, so it was definitely the right thing to do. And then ‘Okinawa’ was the fourth that we added on to the album.
What was the decision making process in releasing the singles that you did for the album release?
I think there was actually a lot of internal disagreeing between the band members about which ones we should release. I think the key point that was coming from the label and coming from JD and Ben, who who manage us, they really wanted us to put our best foot forward, the stereotypical standard singles, and we were happy to do that. Some of us really wanted to do that, but some of us wanted to get like maybe one or two of the emo deep cuts out there as well. But in the end, the process just kind of came down to what songs are most likely to be well-received and be played on the radio and things like that. It was a strategic decision to do those songs, ‘Old Rotten Teeth’ was the compromise, thematically and lyrically it’s probably a little bit heavy for radio play and stuff like that, even though we did get some, the first line in the chorus is, “I wish I was stoned in the other room”. But melodically, it’s got that sort of like ear worm, catchy, hooky thing to it. Me and Jordan, especially Jordan, we both really wanted to release the track ‘From Now On’ as an actual single but it’s not very radio friendly. It’s not the vocal, it’s not the lyrics, it’s more that the song is more of a emo tune and it doesn’t follow the verse chorus verse chorus structure and stuff like that.
We’re very small band compared to a lot, the point of it is to try and grow our reach and gain fans, which we have done, you know – all of my decisions are the wrong decisions!
If no one had heard of you before, what song would you give them from this album to introduce you?
That’s a good question. I think that there’s two answers depending on what type of person it is. If I was to give a version of me the record because I prefer those kind of songs where you pick apart the lyrics, I’m a proper album person as well. I like listening to an album front to back and hearing that. I think for someone like me, I would say the song ‘From Now On’, because the whole album kind of crescendos to that point, that’s the big thing, and I also just really love the chorus melody. I think it’s got really folky, melody in the chorus. But I think for someone who is generically into the type of music that we create. I think probably ‘When I’m Feeling Down’, it’s the most accessible tune that we’ve ever written. It’s still got our lyrical style, but it’s written around a melody that is kind of almost annoyingly catchy – Dan wrote that one. I don’t know where that melody came from. He literally just said he was just laid in bed one night and it was in his head and he had to get up and go and voice note it.
You’ve toured quite a lot. You played Slamdunk last year, and you had an As It Is collaboration at the beginning of this year.
I sang on, ‘Drowning Deep in Doubt’, which was cool. We did it live at Slamdunk this year as well.
It’s been a little while since you’ve played any of your sets, and you’re going on tour this month with Mouth Culture. Have you sorted out your set list already? Have you thought about how the new album is going to land?
We’ve been doing a lot of work as we’ve not toured for a while. This year’s been very quiet for us because we’ve just been concentrating on finishing the record and getting it out. But we’ve done a lot of work on the live stuff. It’s not that we’re going to change the way that we play live, per se, because we’re unique in that there’s six of us in the band, we’ve always had a way that we play live. We bought ourselves in an in ear rig and we’ve changed the way that we can hear the set on stage. We’re really excited to get out and try that, because for us, this Mouth Culture tour is going to be the first time that we’re not just using live monitors and that we can actually hear ourselves properly and everything. It’s going to be a new thing, but it has been a blessing for me because as soon as I got in ear monitors, I realised how much I was overworking my voice because I was singing so loud to make sure I could hear myself back out of the stage monitors, whereas I didn’t need to be giving it as much as I was. But in terms of the set for the record, I’ve got no idea how it’s going to be received. We’ve been playing songs from Happiness since 2021, so we’re just excited to play to play some of these new songs. It’ll be the first time that any of them, the only one of the new singles that we’ve played live, was when we did a one off show with Starting Line in the summer, and we did ‘When I’m Feeling Down’. But other than that, we’ve never played any of the new stuff live.
The set is pretty heavily weighted towards the new album. There’s a couple of the Happiness tunes on there, it’s almost like an experiment for us because we want to know how these songs are going to be received live so that we can kind of use that to understand what to put in the set when it’s time to do our headline tour.
Do you have a song that you’re most looking forward to playing live?
Yes. To be honest, I’m looking forward to playing all of the new songs live because we we’ve never done it. But I think if I had to pick one that I would really want to play live, it’s ‘From Now On’. But the end of that song, I literally had to go into the studio on two separate days to track the end of that song because it was so hard to sing. I blew my voice out on the first day of doing it. Before we put that one in the set I need to make sure that we’ve had a good few weeks working on it live, because just to figure out how how to do it live and where the breathing goes and everything. I’m just so ready to start playing them now.
What kind of music do you listen to and what inspires you? What kind of bands do you listen to on the daily?
A lot of what I listen to is older emo music one of my favourite albums of all time is ‘Home’ by The Hotelier. That record was huge for me, and I’m one of those people that is guilty of, I get in the in the neck from the band and JD, our manager, all the time because he always sends me new shit to listen to, but I always just cycle around the same albums over and over again. I can’t ever stop listening to Pine Grove, I just have a Pine Grove on repeat. I listen to The Hotelier on repeat, and then I’ve got playlists that I’ve made up of tunes from when I was really young that just play through like, Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, all the classics, those sort ones like the early, the early days. So they’re kind of my go to comfort music.
My favourite band of all time is Deftones. I’ve been a fan of Deftones since I was stupidly young, like primary school, you know?
How did you get into them at primary school?
I had a friend in my class who had an older brother who was a teenager when we were ten years old. He was a skater kid, and we all wanted to be him. He put us on to Deftones, then we thought we were really cool because we listened to Deftones. But it turns out we were in the end because Deftones are super cool now again. The band is called Beauty School because ‘Beauty School’ is a Deftones song. So Deftones is where I get my fill of music that I could never create because it’s just not in my range, the way that he writes his melodies and the way that the band write the guitars and music, it’s just not on my radar. I wouldn’t even know how they do it.
But I guess one of the things that I find myself listening to a lot at the moment is Bon Iver, one of the things that whenever I’m writing songs and I’m writing vocal melodies. It’s sort of the stereotypical kind of punk, emo, melodies. They’re not the ones that I’ll draw the most inspiration from and like that, kind of folky melody, like Pine Grove and like Bon Iver, like, they’re the things that inspire me melodically and almost every time, if you write sort of like a folky melody, they always work over punk and emo music, they always work so well.
Basically everything that I’ve written on the album is stooped in folk inspirations. Kind of a broad thing, but that’s that’s what I listen to!
I need to start listening to newer bands. I tend to discover my bands by being on tour with them, like Arms Length are like one of my favourite bands at the moment and that’s because we toured with them. Mouth Culture will be next!