Belgium’s THE HOMELESS (est. 2009) have recently launched a full stream of their first full length titled “In Loving Memory Of What Could Have Been” (Flood Hardcore). Recorded with Neil Kennedy at The Ranch Production House (LANDSCAPES, DEPARTURES), the collection of 9 songs presents the band’s blend of melodic hardcore / screamo / post hardcore with some poppy-emo influences.
After forming this pack, they jammed for more than a year without a singer. At the beginning of 2011 they’ve finally found him, the vocalist who could spit the words sincerely and honestly. They have hit the studio in May 2011 to record a 4 track EP called “Enjoy Poverty“, followed by the promo single “Hard Walk” last year.
Keep your eyes and ears open and meet THE HOMELESS!
Hey, buddies! How are you? Thanks for taking some time for IDIOTEQ. Cheers for that!
Hi Karol,
We’re fine man, how are you?
Thanks for the interest in our band, it means the world to us :)
Great, I’m fine! I guess your debut full length deserves some attention, so here we are :)Tell me more about “In Loving Memory Of What Could Have Been”. What’s the status of this project?
Well, the album title speaks a bit for itself, as we all grow older we tend to lose more than we’d love to and being such nostalgic fools makes us wonder what if? from time to time. In one way or the other every lyric handles this problem we all struggle with sometimes. Regarding the practical side of the release, most of the preparations are done. We already have the physical copies of the vinyls, which we are very happy with, the artwork turned out perfect. But we still need to print the inlays, record the tapes, print the CD’s and off course release it :) We’ve been working on this since ‘Enjoy Poverty’ came out so there’s no need to say that we are pretty siked about releasing it.
How are you releasing it? Who’s helping you out?
It will be available on a 12″ vinyl (2 colors) and a very limited amount of CD’s (50 copies).
Flood Records is releasing all of this. It’s a small label owned by Kristof, without a doubt the most passionate dude I have ever met.
He puts all his free time in to his label, even at work he’s constantly e-mailing.
His distro is getting bigger every day, he organizes a show at least once a month (Flood Floor Shows), he’s promoting his bands every day, he’s going to several shows a week … this list is endless.
It’s obvious that we are very lucky, he supports us in all ways. He books our shows, even drives along to them … and if it wasn’t for him, there would have been no record at all ’cause we are broke :D
Nice! But I’m afraid you’ve just made him busted because of the “at work” mention ;)How was the time spent at The Ranch Production House?
Haha damn, I’m sorry Kristof :DWe had a fantastic time at The Ranch, we’ve met some amazing musicians who seemed to be even greater people.Neil Kennedy recorded, produced, mixed and mastered the entire album. He recorded amazing bands such as LANDSCAPES and DEPARTURES, so we were all a bit impressed by the whole experience, but he managed to make us feel really comfortable and that’s what you need when recording a record in nine days. I think the fact that British people say ‘mate’ after almost every sentence made us feel so comfortable too, haha :)Neil brought our songs to a higher level without changing a lot, I guess he knew like the right buttons to turn the songs more ‘on’, he managed to bring more feeling to them. And that was the most important reason to go overseas, we’ve checked out many studios but couldn’t find one in our price range and with this much experience in ‘hardcore’ music.
Do you think it will be hard to recreate this new powerful sound live on stage?
As soon as we got back from the studio we started ‘learning’ our own songs again and I think that we’ve managed to bring a good reflection of our LP.
But honestly, I don’t think that we can bring that exact same sound live, the many overdubs and additional instruments made it sound pretty massive.
Our live shows are more energetic and our Lp has more detail, that’s the biggest difference. I don’t think our live shows are better or worse than the Lp it’s just slightly different.
Many bands talk about how they want to bring that live feeling into their record, but we’ve chosen not to. We had the feeling that our songs asked for little bit more when recording them, so we used many additional stuff like a piano, a glockenspiel, an Ebow, acoustic guitars, some more western sounding guitar on the title track, … Don’t get me wrong, I love those more rough sounding albums and when our future songs ask for a more straight forward recording than a straight forward recording they’ll get :)
OK. So how long was the trip?
The trip was about 5 hours, I think. We left at 2 AM and when we arrived, somewhere around 9 AM, Maarten had to start tracking drums immediately. He was one of the drivers to so that was pretty heavy for him but he did an amazing job while we were enjoying our first day in the UK :D
How long did you stay in the UK? How do you like the country?
We’ve been there for nine beautiful but rainy days :)
We all got influenced by lots of UK bands, think from the older punk, new wave, rock, … to the more modern sounding bands.
The UK must be some lab that constantly produces amazing bands and musicians :D, because it’s insane how many UK bands became milestones in their genre.
I could start a list of those bands but it would be endless … It’s pretty obvious that we adore the UK in a musical way!
I haven’t been overseas that many (I’ve been to London once and I think Canterbury on some silly schooltrip), but what I’ve seen looked pretty cool and the people were always very nice. We didn’t have that many time to check out Southampton, but again, what we’ve seen looked pretty cool.
Allow me to summarize the UK: the people are beautiful, the music is beautiful, the cities are beautiful, the history is very intriguing and the weather sucks donkey balls! :p
Haha! Dude, I’m allergic, I love English weather :D
Do, what’s the timetable for the new release?
haha :D I’ve never heard love and English weather in one sentence :D
Well, there’s a full album stream on bandcamp right now and it will be online until our release show, which is the 14th of july.
You can also pre-order the LP and some package deals on floodhardcore.bigcartel.com. After our release show we planned a little tour to promote our album.
We’ll start in Belgium on Vlamrock and then we’ll be heading to Fluff Fest and try to play the open stage again, we’ve been there last year and had such an amazing time that we promised ourselves to go back this year, then we’ll go through Germany for a week. So that’s what will be going on the upcoming months.
Amazing. The Fluff Fest kills it. I’m currently in the middle of desperate search for a flat or a room anywhere acutally.
What are the rules of this new outside stage at Fluff?
They don’t have many rules, you just have to find someone of the organisation and ask them to play and they’ll tell you when there’s an open spot. They’ve provided a little army tent and two monitors, throw in your gear and play, that’s about it. I found it very unique to play in front of so many foreign people, most of them don’t even know which band is playing they’re just enjoying some new music they’ve heard while walking from their tent to the festival. The whole festival represents the purity of music and live music in particularly, giving everyone the possibility to play only speaks for them.
How cool is that, right?
Ok, back to the release, I love the blue and white swirls and transparent vinyl you’ve decided to use for pre-orders. Whose idea was that? :)
We all have a very good, but different, idea of how everything should look like and when it came down to choosing colors for the vinyls we were all so sick of arguing with each other that we’ve decided to let Kristof (Flood) pick the colors. And it turned out just perfect, I think we should let him decide more things in the future haha :D Thanks for loving it, all credits go to Kristof :)
You’re using cassettes, too. Personally, do you still use tapes?
I have a few tapes but I don’t have the equipment, so no I don’t listen to tapes anymore. We wanted to do something extra for the pre-orders and we wanted to share an acoustic version of ‘your turn,I’ve failed’, and tapes came up as a rather cheap but cool medium for doing that. I think most people just like to collect things like that, there will be a download code for those who purchase the tape so you can listen to the songs digitally. I think it’s about the same with vinyls, I do listen to vinyl records but not that often because I’ve got all of them on my computer, so most of the time I listen to music that way.
You’ve just released the official video for the song “Your Turn, I’ve Failed”. Tell me more about the idea for this picture.
A friend of ours, who studies film, made a little video for fun and the moment we saw it we had the feeling that it was made for this song. So we contacted her and asked if she was in for making a video for our song by adjusting the video she already had (BTW she’s the girl in the video). Her boyfriend is a professional cameraman and he came down to our rehearsal space to make some footage that he could use in the video. They’ve worked on this together for a small price, big thanks goes out to them!
The song handles about the feeling that someone who used to care about you doesn’t care anymore. In time it starts to feel like that particularly person roams away and you stand still. So I guess the girl in the video is the girl that roams away and the bandshots that lay over the video makes it all a bit more dreamy and personal. At least that’s how I feel and see the video, there’s room for interpretation off course, there always is …
Will there be more clips for the album?
We’re planning to make another video but it will be totally different, with more live footage and stuff like that. We’ll start with that right after the summertour :)
Alright, let’s forget about THE HOMELESS for a while. How did you get into hardcore in the first place?
I got influenced by friends a lot and off course by the internet, but still, I think that the music I’ve listened to for the past 10 to 15 years kind of represents the way I went through life. It’s probably a more common thing to be rather carefree when you’re an early teenager, I listened a lot to punk rock back then. When I got a bit older, anger and a more ‘I want to change the world’ feeling got me, puberty I guess :D. That should be the time I got more into ‘hardcore’, it’s hard to define hardcore here ’cause I’ve been listening and playing more metal tinted stuff a lot, but it was also the time bands like Have Heart, Verse, Comeback Kid, .. got to my attention. And they got me digging much deeper into the positive hardcore scene. Since I am quiet an emotional person and some personal life changes took place the past few years I started listening to more emotional music in all kinds, from screamo to some more commercial music.
I’ve always been listening to all kinds of genres but in general I am just some cliché kid I guess :). But this is all pretty personal, we we all got into it in a very different way and with different music tastes.
You live in a small country with quite amazing music scenes. What’s your take on today’s music scene in Belgium? Any local bands in particular that really excite you?
There are some amazing bands in Belgium indeed. Unfortunately we had to say goodbye to some great bands way to soon. Like ACCEPT THE CHANGE, their last release ‘Get Out There’ left an enormous impression on me, MIDNIGHT SOULS are quitting now while they’re becoming pretty known around the globe, MADHOUSE and REBUILD were great friends but they both stopped playing a while a go. On the other hand much new bands are making their appearance in the Belgian music scene like DEPTHS. (ASSHOLES!) MY LOVE YOUR LUST, ATLAS, … Some things fall and other things rise which is a pretty good evolution in my opinion. Belgium also has some great pop punk bands like OFF THE CHARTS, SOLSTICE, … Worth to check out!
The only problem in Belgium is that we’re such a small country. If you play a show in Belgium almost every weekend people will get sick of seeing you because everyone is able to go to almost every show here with a maximum of a three hour drive. Another weird thing is that we don’t play in the French part of the country, except for one time and we’d love to play some more gigs over that stupid language border.
Why can’t you?
I don’t think that there are many bands in our genre in the French part of Belgium, I can’t think of another reason …
Ok, buddies. Lastly, what advice can you give some of the young, up and coming kids everywhere who want to start a band, play music, scream their minds, be on the road, and so on? :)
Try to do everything as honest as possible, make it fun, do what feels right and don’t think about what people will think just scream your heart out.
Or do it totally different … I mean whatever there’s no manual to be in a band :)
Nice. Thanks so much for your time! :)
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