Music interview '“ Against The Current: '˜Past Lives was a lot of fun to write'

Against The Current are a three-piece pop punk band based in the small New York state city of Poughkeepsie, and have been taking the world by storm since mid-2011.
Against The Current play at Leeds Stylus.Against The Current play at Leeds Stylus.
Against The Current play at Leeds Stylus.

They have had a lot of success after releasing a couple of EPs (Infinity and Gravity) and a full-length album, In Our Bones over the past few years, and are now embarking on a world tour to celebrate the forthcoming release of their new album, Past Lives, which is due out on September 28.

As part of their latest world tour, they are hitting the UK, with nine shows across the country including one at Stylus, Leeds. Neil Short spoke to lead singer Chrissy Constanza, to see how the band and her were doing on the build-up to the tour.

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First question was, as always, just asking how things were going since their last album launch in 2016. “We released In Our Bones in May 2016, so she is two years old now. We are about to head out on a world tour, and we have already put two songs out off of our new record (Past Lives) that is coming out sometime soon, so we will mainly be playing material from that.

“We are obviously going to be going through some songs from Gravity and In Our Bones, and we are going to play one of the tracks off of that album that we have only ever played live once, so that should be cool. It is going to be a completely different set for this tour, which we are really excited about because we have been playing a lot of the same songs for quite a while now.”

I was curious about the band (having played in Leeds a couple of times before, and at Leeds Festival) coming over on tour pre-album launch. “This tour is kind of the rollout for the new album, and like I said before, we will be playing a lot of new songs this time around, so this tour is primarily to kick off the new album cycle.

“We have approached this album in a really different way, I mean even the software we used was different. We wrote a lot of this album in Logic (Apple Software) and then moved it in to Pro Tools, whereas we used to just use ProTools. We also got a different producer in for this one as well, as we used the same producer for the first three releases, and even for a couple of the tracks off of Past Lives, but most of this album was produced by Andrew Goldstein.

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“Even with just having a new producer, it automatically kind of just changes everything anyway, because every producer has their own style so our whole process was different this time – where we started with songs, using different sounds, but it was a lot of fun to write.

“I think ultimately this album is still Against The Current, so I mean people won’t be going, ‘Whoa! This is a totally new band’, but it is more that we have grown up a little bit. We wrote Gravity when we were all 17, and I am 23 now; I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not a ton of time, but at this type of age, every year is a big developmental jump, so the record of course will be different – we are older, more intelligent, and we are just better songwriters now.”

Against The Current play at Stylus, Leeds on Saturday September 22. www.atcofficial.com

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