AGAINST THE CURRENT (01/03/16)

Few hours before their Parisian show at Le Trabendo, RockUrLife spoke with the 3 Against The Current’s members about their past and their new album “In Our Bones”.

How is going your European tour so far?

Chrissy Costanza (vocals): Good, thank you! It’s really amazing.

You started this one a few days ago with two French dates at Lille and Toulouse. How were these dates?

Chrissy: They were awesome! There were a lot a people and a lot of fun.

Will Ferri (drums): We played on a boat (laughs) ! We’ve been to places we’ve never been so it’s always fun.

Isn’t that strange to play in that kind of small venues after the arenas you used to play with All Time Low and Good Charlotte?

Dan Gow (guitar): Not that strange but it’s quite quick. We actually finished this tour, took a boat and arrived here. But we’re still very happy and proud to be there.

Before talking about your first album, we’re gonna talk about your past. How did this project start?

Chrissy: We started about 4 years ago. Dan and Will have been in bands together since they were 10 years old and then we kinda met up through mutual friends. So it kinda started from there. It’s as simple as it seems.

Will: At first, we just wanted to be just the best we could be, be a band. Keep writing songs, getting better and have fun. Everything is growing right now and we just now hope to keep going that way and have a career.

As everyone knows, you started with covers on YouTube and even now, as a proper band, you still release covers through this platform. Lately, you revealed a cover of the Justin Bieber’s hit “Sorry”.  Despite the fact that you’re now a signed band, is that difficult for you to deal with this image of cover band?

Chrissy: Not really. I think that everyone really takes his time to discover the band and in the end realizes that the covers are a platform. It’s more like an outlet, something that we share, music for our fans. Despite that, they can come the our shows, listen to our proper songs online. Our covers is not one big thing, it’s just part of the group.

But is that still relevent to do covers as a signed band?

Chrissy: Yes, of course. That’s not even a question for us. It’s a way for us to connect with every fan that we have across the globe in an instance. We can’t really replace that.

That’s right. Also, if not mistaken, Against The Current was at first a five-piece band.

Chrissy: Actually, we’ve been a three-piece band since before our first EP came out so really for the greater part of Against The Current. Even when we establish Against The Current, it was a three-piece band so.

Is that easier for you to blossom musically speaking as a three-piece band?

Will: Yes, and that’s pretty much why it happened definitely. It always just felt so easy and right with the three of us, pretty much like a no brainer. We take the band where we wanted to go and i think it was the right move to do.

Like three best friends making music together?

Chrissy: You say it, exactly.

In 2015, you announced that you finally get sign by Fueled By Ramen. What does this contract bring you, as a band? Not economically speaking for sure.

Chrissy: This contract afforded us the opportunity to work with amazing writers for our album. We all got to learn and develop relationships with such amazing people who had so much priceless experiences in the industry. We’re still kinda new, a fairly young band, but an amazing team is surrounding us now. We have emotional supports, they are there at the video shoots, at the shows. They’ve become part of our family as much as anyone else.

Before the album, were you in touch with some other writers?

Chrissy: Yes, we had a couple that worked with us on our EP “Gravity” but it was a very small tightened circle. After getting signed, we had the opportunity to collaborate with pretty much any writer we wanted to work with. Thanks to that, we get different opportunities.

So in the end, can we consider that, thanks to Fueled by Ramen, you’d finally get the chance to be the band you always wanted to be?

Will: Definitely. We used to have ideas about the sounds and directions we wanted to try but, at the time, we really didn’t know how to do that. So working with people with experience allowed us to experiment those directions. It turns out pretty awesome.

Chrissy: I think sooner or later we would have got into where we wanted to be. But the signing act helped us to get there sooner and quicker.

Let’s talk about your first album “In Our Bones”, set to be released on 20th May. How were the writing and recording sessions?

Chrissy: There were some of the most interesting experience we had as writers. I think we all feel that we’ve come out as much strongers. We have a better understanding of our music, of what we like and of what we wanna do on the next album even though that’s still far for us. (laughs) But now we constantly want to get better and that album really helps us to be able to do that.

Was it more difficult to work on the album than on your previous EPs?

Dan: In a way, yes. But we also got alot more time to do it. We did it in, like, 3 months or so, during the all summer, a little bit during Spring and also a little bit during the Fall.

Chrissy: We definitely had a long time to do it but it was definitely harder in a sense that it took so much longer so we were so tired by the end of it. But we woke up every day and we wrote songs. We were not running out of ideas, we always worked on something new. And if someone haven’t told us: “OK stop, you’re done, we’ve had enough songs.”, we still could have been in the studio right now.

Talking about this album, what’s the meaning behind the title?

Chrissy: It’s something poetic, not philosophical. “In Our Bones”, it’s us, it’s what we are doing right now. It’s what we were born to do, what we felt we were meant to do. It’s not what we felt was an active choice, the path our life was supposed to take.

So the title could have been “In Our Heads”, “In Our Hearts”, “In Our Blood”.

(laughs)

Chrissy: Yes, but i feel “In Our Bones” was right for us.

Dan: “In Our Bones” is also a title of one of our new songs so. (laughs)

Against all the odds, there ain’t any featurings on “In Our Bones”. Is that a way for you to say that this album is kinda 100% an Against The Current thing?

Chrissy: That is not something that we actively decided, to not have a feature. When the talk of features happened, we were like we wrote that song without thinking about a feature. Then we thought about a duet [with Taka from One Ok Rock on the title “Dreaming Alone”]. With the album, we didn’t figure out songs that could have features on it.

“In Our Bones” is what we can call a pop album, much more ambitious than anything you’ve done before. The production is effective and most of the songs are like hits. But now guitars are hidden behind keyboard and electronic stuff. Did “In Our Bones” help you to find yourself musically speaking?

Will: It was really cool to have access to analog synth sounds etc. The ideas of most of our songs started with a Juno. But it’s actually cool to be able to bring all those different sounds, all these ambiant/spacy sounds. It was fun to try things.

It seems that you’re not interested in distorded guitars anymore.

Dan: No, we still love guitars! That’s the challenge we had : to mix guitars and synths together. And I think we did it pretty well.

Chrissy: What gets lost in a lot of musicians is that ultimately, no matter what serve one song best and no matter what song it is, they think that the guitars have to be heavy, loud because that’s what bands do. But maybe that doesn’t serve that song, maybe that song isn’t a guitar driven zone.  We made what we think serve the best our songs, make them the best that they possibly can be. There might be some awesome and loud distorded guitars and there might not be, it just depends on what each song means.

Dan: Talking about distorded guitars, I think our live performances are more rock than our album. We have 2 live members, one at the guitar and one at the bass.

Will: In reality, we always wanted to have big catchy choruses but, sometimes, this thing gets lost in translation live. Some pop artists sound live exactly like the CD, that’s why we’re trying to act different on stage, with a different sound. It’s kinda like we’re covering our own songs. (laughs)

Chrissy: You should have a different experience when you go see a band live. If a band sounds exactly the same on stage, what’s the point to go see it? It needs to be bigger, theatrical on a way it’s larger than what it is and that’s what we are trying to do and hopefully succeed it. We want to give to our fans an experiment.

On “In Our Bones”, there are optimismic and uptempo songs like “Outsiders” or “Runaway” in the same way as doubtful songs like “Chasing Ghosts”. Do you think using pop melodies to talk about difficult subjects is hard to do?

Chrissy: Not really. We just kinda write about what’s going on in the world around us and what happen to us. But I also think pop melodies are always really easy for people to digest, easy to get stuck in your head. And even with a heavier and darker concept, it’s still pop music and can get stuck in your head. You don’t want people listening to our music and cry or feel upset. Even if the song is sad, we wanted to have some sort of redemption to it.

“Against The Current”, “Outsiders”. These terms suggest that you may have trouble finding yourself in the actual society. What prevents you from being good here?

Chrissy: The main point of “Outsiders” is to say it’s okay to feel, fitting in isn’t always a good thing. What we do is inconventional: being in a band at 20 years old and not being at school is inconventional. But we’re doing exactly what we love, what feels natural to us and that makes us different than the average 20 years old. But that’s OK. This is not about “oh it sucks I don’t fit in”, it’s about I’m doing something different.

Are you working on new things? An acoustic version of your album like you did with your previous 2 EP?

Dan: I’m sure we’re gonna do some acoustic things in the near future. But for now, we’re going to do shows for a bit and make music videos.

To conclude, we’re “RockUrLife” so what rocks your life?

All: The “Running With The Wild Things” tour!

Website: atcofficial.com