“I’m pumped up,” exclaims The Front Bottoms' frontman, Brian Sella. The band have just finished sound checking for the first UK show on their tour at Manchester’s Albert Hall and are taking a break before taking to the stage that evening.
Sella has lost track of exactly how many times he’s been to the UK now, but this tour – supported by The Smith Street Band and Brick + Mortar – marks the band’s first time playing the UK since their latest album ‘Going Grey’ was released. It’s an album that came together with little thought as to what the finished product would sound like, taking a more freestyle approach to writing than with The Front Bottoms’ previous albums. At the start of the process, Sella claims that he had no idea what the outcome would be, laughing as he stated, “When we started the album it was just as likely to turn out like a friggin’ country album.”
When described by Sella, the writing process comes across as being almost nonchalant, although that’s difficult to believe considering the album is so tightly recorded, produced and curated, feeling deliberate and coherent throughout. The freestyle way in which it came together was unlike anything the band had done before, reflecting the past few years of the band’s career, during which they toured extensively and found themselves trying to be creative when any small opportunity arose. The entire vibe of the album comes back to growing up and changing, and this process is just a small part of taking the necessary steps to continue to add to his catalogue of art; art that stands out from its predecessors and shows progress.
It’s impossible to deny that The Front Bottoms have made progress, evident in the change in sound that TFB have taken on in ‘Going Grey’. The addition of synths is something that many bands are incorporating, and yet for TFB it was another ‘accident’, so to speak – a result of discovering and then playing around with programmes such as Garage Band and then incorporating other elements until it became what is now ‘Going Grey’. Sella makes an almost conscious effort to not overthink, “otherwise you just go nuts. You know, I love to write poetry I write all the words and then I’m just like, yeah let’s make some music.”
While this method clearly works for TFB (‘Going Grey’ is, after all, an exceptional album), Sella finds that this way of creating art can be frustrating as well as liberating. It does allow for more creativity and flexibility, though, and it means that whatever the end result may be, authenticity is guaranteed. It’s “more of an experiment really, like having fun with the process which is the whole point, kind of seeing what develops. It gives you the freedom to go anywhere”. This isn’t just exciting for the band, but for fans, too because waiting in anticipation of new material from your favourite band, only to have it end up sounding like a carbon copy of its predecessors will only ever lead to disappointment.
Sadly, it’s often also the case that bands face criticism from fans and music critics alike when they change their sound so radically. Sella hasn’t experienced too much of that though, choosing instead to avoid “all the frickin’ online things” and just be pleased that people are finding their music at a point in their lives where they need it the most. His response to the idea of such criticism is refreshing though, and the more he speaks, the more apparent his positive outlook on life becomes. “If anything it kind of makes me relieved that, people aren’t seeing the development and it makes me happy that people are like you know like oh this band has released friggin’ 10 albums or whatever, each one is different so we get different fans at different times in the history of the band.”
