The Friday Prophets are a Stockholm based punk rock band who ooze energy, positivity and good times. They’ve recently released their second album In The Key Of Sublimation via their own label Holy Howl Records. It’s exciting, upbeat punk rock with heart of gold that’ll appeal to punkrockers worldwide!
We spoke to Mattias Robertson to get a proper introduction to the band.
How would you sum up The Friday Prophets for someone who’s just discovering you?
I would say that we are a punk rock band from Stockholm that tries to unify the harmonic part of punk rock with the more gritty side of it. Then I would recommended some songs to check out! Which songs? I would say Reason, Where Are You?, La La La and With You. That oughta be enough for a start!
What inspired you most when writing your album, In The Key of Sublimation?
First of all, I would say music in general. I listen to a lot of music and it just inspires me and makes me want to pick up the guitar and start writing something on my own.
Regarding the sound, there have definitely been some albums that have been particularly influential and these are: Lifetime‘s self-titled album, Green Day’sDookie, Against Me!‘s Transgender Dysphoria Blues and The Bouncing Souls‘ self-titled album and How I Spent My Summer Vacation. To me these are exceptional records, the kind of records that you can rediscover again and again. Continue reading “Band Spotlight: The Friday Prophets [Interview]”
Almost twenty five years in the game and the ska-punkers with the square brackets, [spunge] are still going strong. Latest single Liar is a blend of catharsis and upbeat rhythms. We caught up with frontman Alex to talk about keeping things positive, playing the old songs and teabagging. Not that type of teabagging, relax.
Firstly, seeing as I was there, I have to say congrats on your headlining slot in Boomtown this past summer. What do you remember from that night?
Awesome – nice and muddy wasn’t it..? We had a blast. It was our first time at Boomtown and with so much going on we didn’t know what to expect but the place was stuffed full… and we had a blast, seriously enjoyed it and as we only played a few shows this year it was great to play live for sure. Definitely one we would like to revisit.
One of my memories is of teabags being thrown into the crowd..is this normal at your shows or do tea bags just become part of the life of a maturing band?
Incisions are a fresh, no-nonsense, blast of fury from Manchester, who’ve just announced that they’ll be releasing their self-titled debut album via DIY legends TNS Records in December.
Incisions’ QuitNow was one of our Top 5 Releases of 2017 and their new material promises even more exciting things. Seen live, their fast, take-no-prisoners approach captivates audiences. We spoke to vocalist/guitarist Jordan Lloyd to get the latest on their new album and their plans to conquer the scene.
Hey Jordan! How would you sum up Incisions for someone who’s just discovering you?
Hey! We are heavily influenced by all the hardcore bands and Slayer but like to try and bring a bit more melody into the songs. We try to play everything as fast as we can. We recently were told we are ‘the audio equivalent of a brick through a window’. I liked that.
Tell me a bit about how Incisions came to be – how did the band form?
I moved to Manchester a few years ago ’cause I wanted to start a band and there place where me and Steab (guitarist) grew up had no music scene at all. I found a really good drummer. We put an ad out for a bassist and met Mandog. We then met up at the first Manchester Punk Festival and obviously MPF is enough to make anyone want to start a band… we were both pretty overwhelmed by the whole weekend as is the case for everyone that goes, so we were much more serious about what we wanted to do after that.
Our drummer moved back to Spain before we really got going, but Tom joined straight away and then took it up a level. We’d written our first EP after a couple of weeks. Tom left just after we finished recording Quit Now. Stefan has been playing live with us since the second EP.
You’ve undergone some line-up changes since then, too. Give us an update – what’s the line-up looking like now?
Yeah, Archie (a.k.a. Betty Egg) from Clayface is playing bass for us now which is ace cos I love him and he’s pretty easy to influence when I want to go out and get drunk.
Andy is now playing drums for us he plays in Animal Byproducts as well, he’s from Barnsley so none of us can understand a word that he says but he seems friendly.
Stefan is still killing it on his snide Gibson and they all still have to put up with me!
I was completely gripped by the Quit Now EP you released last year, in fact it was in our Top 5 EPs of 2017. How does the album differ to the EP musically?
Yeah, thanks for that. We were really proud of making that list!
I think we started to find our sound when writing the last EP but we had come to terms with it when we wrote the album, so this was a bit more focused in that sense. Someone said it sounds like Minor Threat had been dragged through every bar in Manchester. I think it’s a bit more direct lyrically than the EPs have been and there are more riffs. Continue reading “Incisions: The Sound Of Young, Working-Class Anger [Interview]”
Lincoln’s newest skate-punks Nieviem are definitely one to watch.
Fans of UK melodic hardcore should kee their eyes peeled for Nieviem. Having formed in Lincoln in 2016, they’re a reliatively new group that breathe life into 90’s-style melodic skatepunk with a does of heavier, nu metal influenced backline.
We spoked to guitarist Bart Stanczyk and vocalist Hope Bateman to learn more.
How would you sum up Nieviem for someone who’s just discovering you?
Hope: A Tony Hawk soundtrack, or as I think we’ve previously been described, think of Bad Religion with a lass on the mic.
Bart: Female-fronted mixture of Pennywise, BigWig, Millencolin and Bad Religion.
Tell me a bit about how Nieviem came to be – how did you meet?
Bart: I met our previous drummer Tomek at work. As far as I remember we started jamming together in 2010. Few years later our bassist Kuba joined us but we still used to play covers just for fun. Nieviem were officially established when previous vocalist Vicky joined us in on April 2016. One year later she had to leave the band due to health issues, but thanks god we found Hope and we carry on until now together. Continue reading “Band Spotlight: Nieviem [Interview]”
What’s your dream project? Each and every one of us has that fantasy in our heads: a vocation, a band or a goal that we hope we’ll one day be able to make real.
Well, Ed Hall’s dream is All Silk Mastering House and, through hard graft and dedication, he’s made it a reality. You may know Ed from Egos At The Door, but nowadays he’s probably better known for his talented ear and knack for exceptional audio production.
This year he’s finally been able to realise his dreams, by building a bespoke space for mixing and mastering, now offering quality and attention to detail at competitive rates. We spoke to Ed about his love for all things audio and all the hard work and emotional investment that’s gone into to this.
Firstly, give us a little overview of what you do at All Silk Mastering House – explain to us laymen what do you get up to?
For sure! A mastering house is an audio suite (which is more or less a control room, minus being attached to a live room) geared towards mastering as opposed to, say, mixing or recording. An engineer who specialises in mastering takes the final mixes which are often years in the making and analyses their objective traits. Every final mix will have strengths and weaknesses so the processes play to and accentuate or diminish these traits with the end goal of making a competitively loud and tonally pleasing track.
There is more or less a standard intrinsic loudness to most music, especially now, so that it can play amongst thousands of other tracks on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, CD players, iPods and not sound out of place, quieter, uncomfortably distorted/louder or at all noticeably off in comparison to the average.
It’s a mastering engineer’s job to deliver the best version they can of the audio they are provided while ticking these boxes. Of course in the real world it is much more subjective and subtle than this with sympathy to the art/the vision/taste…
What was your vision for All Silk when you first started out?
Listen to Sarah getting drunk with Spoilers, Rebuke and Captain Trips on this second Punk Rock Holiday special.
On today’s podcast, we will be whisking you back in time to the beautiful, sun-drenched beach at Punk Rock Holiday. Sarah grabbed Spoilers, Rebuke and Captain Trips for a chat at Slovenia’s premier punk festival. Grab a drink, put your feet up and listen to us getting progressively drunker as the day goes on.
Ben Davis and Dan Goatham from Kentish punks Spoilers have just released a sterling debut album in the form of Roundabouts. They’re a hilarious bunch so we jumped at the change to discuss the album, their summer holiday plans and
We speak to Petter Mossberg and Phil Nordling from skate-punks Rebuke. We share a pina colada, discuss their 15 years as a band, the current Swedish music scene and some of the bands they currently admire.
Finally, we spoke to Rich Mayor of Portsmouth skate-punks Captain Trips. We were officially 10+ cocktails deep at the time of recording, so it’s nice to have a recorded reminder of a conversation we’d no doubt have forgotten. We cover important topics like showering, cress, sweat, flip-flops, Dean Gaffney and solo projects.
I highly recommend sticking around to the end, as Sarah’s sobriety goes rapidly downhill in quite an amusing way. As Petter quite accurately puts it, “You meet too many cocktails.”
We play the following songs:
Spoilers – Roundabouts (from album Roundabouts is out now on Little Rocket Records, SBAM Records and Boss Tunage)
Rebuke – Take To The Seas (from their album Wouldworks, out on Disconnect Disconnect Records)
Captain Trips – Bottom Of The River (from their EP Stand By now on Umlaut Records)
If you enjoyed this, check out our first PRH Cocktail Special with Ducking Punches, The Murderburgers and Dead Neck.
La Armada bring a passion and ferocity to the stage that’s rarely seen, even in the hardcore punk scene. Starting life in the Dominican Republic, they’re heavily influenced by latin and Caribbean rhythms, but they’ve since relocated to Chicago via Florida, where a love for thrash, hardcore and grind has galvanized their fiery sound.
To relocate from Latin America to the USA for a shared musical project shows overwhelming dedication but they’re not stopping there: lyrically they’re aiming to be a voice for those who don’t have one, in Donald Trump’s America. Musically they’re seeking to defy genres and leave their own mark on the world.
We spoke to guitarist Paul and bassist Mani to learn more about this unique band.
I was lucky enough to catch you guys live at Punk Rock Holiday last year – I was floored by your live show. What did you most enjoy about your time in Europe?
Paul: A lot of things! I think the biggest one is the passion people have for music. I remember walking around precisely at Punk Rock Holiday and seeing groups of people marching around between bands and just singing songs from their favorite bands from the weekend out loud, just excited to be there and to see live music. You really don’t see that level of excitement as much on the side of the world we live in. So, definitely the appreciation people have for live music is the top thing we enjoyed seeing.
Aside from that, the experience of traveling country to country and being submerged into different cultures, languages without having to stop at a crosspoint for borders was great. We are planning to be back in Europe in the summer of 2019 with the help of Epidemic Records from Italy, who helped distribute our new record out there.
You released Anti-Colonial Vol. 1 earlier this year – it’s a melting pot of aggressive, latin-influenced hardcore. It’s quite a unique sound. What’s inspired that combination?
Mani: Music is a quintessential part of latin culture and identity. Before we even heard of punk and metal, we where listening to Caribbean merengue, salsa and bachata, and these rhythms had a big impact on our early musical development. By the time we went over every sub-genre of punk and metal (from grind to thrash) it was almost like we where fluent in two languages.
I think our current sound is also a direct result of the process of migrating and relocating to the US, being detached from our friends and families for so long pushed us to find a way to musically reconnect with our culture. Continue reading “La Armada: “Furious Is Our Nature” [Interview]”
![Band Spotlight: The Friday Prophets [Interview]](https://shoutlouderpunk.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/the-friday-prophets-shout-louder-interview.jpg?w=960)
![[spunge]: 25 Years And Still Going Strong [Interview]](https://shoutlouderpunk.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/JOE_SINGH_SNAPRCOKANDPOP_SPUNGE027small.jpg?w=1024)
![Incisions: The Sound Of Young, Working-Class Anger [Interview]](https://shoutlouderpunk.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/incisions-cold-front-photography.jpg?w=960)
![Band Spotlight: Nieviem [Interview]](https://shoutlouderpunk.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/nieviem.jpg?w=960)
![Ed Hall: Grafting To Make Your Dreams A Reality [Interview]](https://shoutlouderpunk.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dsc04392.jpg?w=1200)
![La Armada: “Furious Is Our Nature” [Interview]](https://shoutlouderpunk.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/la-armada-2018-web1.jpg?w=1200)
