“Bambi” is as Anxious as something the band has ever achieved.
Rebecca Lader/Run For Cowl Data
conceal caption
toggle caption
Rebecca Lader/Run For Cowl Data
Your teenage years are for determining who you’re and perhaps for becoming a member of a band.
Grady Allen and Dante Melucci – together with three different buddies – fashioned the band “Anxious” in 2016, earlier than they may even drive.
Six years later, their first full-length album “Little Inexperienced Home” smashed the hardcore scene.
Now of their 20s, Allen and Melucci say you’ll be able to name their second album, “Bambi,” hardcore, melodic, punk… no matter you need.
However make no mistake, it is ALL Anxious.
There isn’t any time wasted on “Bambi.”
Lead singer Grady Allen’s voice can soothe and unsettle like an angsty lullaby one second, earlier than Dante Melucci’s thrashing guitar breaks the relative quiet the very subsequent.
YouTube
They open their new album with the observe “By no means Mentioned” — a darkish ode to the uncertainty of relationships after hitting it massive.
Grady Allen says: that is all a part of the plan.
“I prefer it sort of beginning with this sort-of chaotic sentiment,” he provides. “After which by the point it pulls round to the final track on the document, you realize the final track is sort of actual mild and candy.”
Guitarist Dante Melucci says the intro track is supposed to evoke the band’s earliest days, however he additionally snuck in a bit of foreshadowing of the place the blokes find yourself.
“It is perhaps one of many extra like ‘Anxious-y songs.’ However my largest inspiration on the time of us engaged on that was the primary Panic! At The Disco document, which is sort of a actually divisive document… in our sort of scene,” Melucci says.
“A bunch of, just like the chords in that track, I spotted, whereas we had been writing [it] are completely simply taken from the primary track on that document.”
Melucci calls that “controversial” as a result of Panic! At The Disco’s 2005 document “A Fever You Cannot Sweat Out” was instantly in style, and over time that sort of polished emo turned too mainstream.
Anxious is not daring the hardcore scene to activate them, however Grady Allen says “For me, in writing that track, I believe it was simply coming from a reasonably uncooked frustration that I believe I skilled in our little nook of music subculture.”
Nonetheless, Allen says he would not name their new album a “departure” from the style that made them in style, both.
“That is simply who Anxious is. And these are the songs that we write,” he says.
After years of touring following their shock success, Grady Allen hit a wall.
Too younger for even a quarter-life disaster on the time, he however agonized about whether or not to return to school and get a level or the studio to attempt to seize lightning putting twice.
“I wished to have the area to have some experiences and simply reside some life exterior of a[n] eight passenger transit van,” Allen says.
“It has been so cool residing on this very unconventional, punk nook of the world. However in quite a lot of methods, my life felt very homogenous. You realize, all people was in a band, or managing a band … and so to step again in an area the place individuals is likely to be pursuing, you realize, what are thought-about like way more typical issues or careers. I really feel like that is given my life quite a lot of range that I did not have prior.”
Now 24, Allen has realized that the advantage of rising up is with the ability to replicate.
And upon additional reflection, perhaps naming your band Anxious won’t ship the message you need it to.
“I want we had named the band Bambi. That might have been such a superb band identify. You realize, the draw back of naming a band while you’re 15 is, uh, I do not know. They don’t seem to be at all times winners,” Allen says.
So who’s Anxious now? Nicely the primary single off “Bambi,” would possibly offer you a clue.
YouTube
“Counting Sheep” combines the band’s hardcore roots and their melodic curiosity into one track. Pepper in some guitar riffs that sound straight from the Nineteen Nineties and also you get what Anxious has grow to be.
“Once we had the final sense of all of the songs, I believe that was probably the most ‘Bambi’ one we had. I believe we simply wished to be fairly shameless on that track,” says Melucci.
Melucci provides that there was a aware effort to squeeze as a lot into these 4 minutes as potential. Every thing that impressed them, what they realized on the highway and what they appeared ahead to.
However it feels wealthy, not over-stuffed.
It is the proper single as a result of it mirrors their very own younger lives — a lot expertise in so little time.
“I hope ‘Bambi’ affords us the flexibility to maintain doing what we love,” says Allen.
Melucci provides that he hopes the album “helps see us for who we’re. So I am excited as a result of it seems like we’re probably the most genuine we have been.”
