Punknews.org recently conducted an interview with YOUR DEMISE members Ed McRae and Stu Price.
You’ve recently released The Golden Age and it seems to have caused quite a stir. I saw an interview with Ed a little while ago and you said the new album sounds like Pennywise and The Offspring, I didn’t really believe it, but it kind of does. Why the drastic change?
Ed: It wasn’t really like, “Yeah, we just want to change, because we don’t like what we do anymore.” We just wrote what we wanted really.
Stu: It just happened. We all love bands like Pennywise and The Offspring, so it was going to come out in some way, but it just all came out.
Listening to the first single These Lights, did you choose it deliberately, because you knew it’d cause the biggest reaction?
Stu: We released it because we liked it and we knew a lot of people would be like, “What the fuck?” but we didn’t care. We like it, it’s a great song and it’s great to play. We released a heavier song first, because we wanted people to go, “What the fuck?” a little bit. It was expected that kids would chat shit. I think once kids see us play the new songs in the context of the record, they’ll get a new kind of perception of it, but some people won’t give it a chance, but that’s their loss. It’s a great record.
Even on your last album, there were still clean vocals, so I guess it shouldn’t have came as much of a shock.
Stu: Exactly. It’s almost as if a lot of kids forgot that The Kids We Used To Be… happened, there was a pretty drastic transition, so if you look at it that way, it’s just a natural progression.
Ed: Some kids are just fucking idiots.
Do find that people within ‘hardcore’ are generally narrow-minded?
Ed: Not everyone. Some people are. I think a lot of the younger, new kids who are trying to be Mr. Crucial Hardcore feel the need to be narrow-minded, because they feel the need to impress.
Stu: When you’re younger and growing up, and getting into a thing, you want to be the one, like if you’re into movies, you want to be the one who watches movies that two people have seen. You want to be the dude wearing a t-shirt that’s spray-painted and buy the t-shirt from the band that presses 10 t-shirts a year, and that’s those kids, but those kids will look back in a few years and change their outlook on life, and think, “Oh, I was a bit of a prick then.” I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’ve stood at the back of a room and stuck my fingers up at bands that have done that, but those were the kids that were telling us we were their favorite band last year, but fuck them.
How did your label respond to the new sound?
Stu: They were actually really supportive. I think because they got a lot of pre-orders. [laughs] As soon as they saw the money coming in, we could do what we want. Apart from Bring Me The Horizon, everything else is shit. Lostprophets are just done, aren’t they? We toured with them at Soundwave and they were just haggard and washed up. But yeah, Bring Me The Horizon are our mates and they’re great.
Is it frustrating that people still compare Ed to your old vocalist George Noble? Even though you’ve now probably done more with Your Demise than he did.
Ed: I’m not going to lie; it’s quite funny. A lot of the kids who are saying all this, they probably didn’t even listen to the band when George Noble was in.
Stu: The fact of the matter is that the dude got kicked out nearly three years ago and we’ve moved on, so much that it’s not the same band as it was, because we’re allowed to do what we want now and it’s not a dictatorship. The band as a whole is happy. All these dickhead kids that say they liked the band when George was in the band, we’d probably have sold out Brixton Academy, so it’s bullshit, because no one really liked the band back then and everyone thought he was arrogant that saw us. I’m not going to say anything about him, because what’s been said has been said, but whatever, you’re going to get that. Most of these kids who are saying it are about 16, so they would have been 12 when that happened. Simple mathematics, you’re idiots.
Feel free to read the rest of the interview here.
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