The last time we spoke to Against The Current was at last year’s Reading Festival. Fresh from a Main Stage performance, they were already looking towards album two (“We had three-quarters of it done, then we wrote some more songs and suddenly, it’s different”) but we’ve had to be patient since.
There was a taster of new music during their arena tour with Fall Out Boy, and the double single drop of ‘Strangers Again’ and Almost Forgot’ but today, everything is unveiled. Chapter two has opened. The ‘Past Lives’ era has begun.
Alongside the tick-tock battle of new track ‘Personal’, Against The Current have announced that their second album ‘Past Lives’ will be released on September 28th – i.e. Really Rather Soon.
New songs, albums, tours – it’s all go, so we interrupted Chrissy Costanza’s first rehearsal for their upcoming shows to find out more. Turns out we’re not the only ones excited.
Hey Chrissy. We’re start at the beginning. Why call this album ‘Past Lives’?
We felt like every single song on the record encapsulates one of those key, formative moments in your life. Everything is about either an emotion or an experience that is one of those building blocks for you as a person. Sometimes when you look back at experiences that are so significant, you almost don’t recognise yourself in them. When I look back like, four years ago, I can’t believe it was me in that situation but I know the story as if someone told it to me. It looks like it’s someone else and you’re looking in. It’s one of your past lives, almost.
Did you have a vision for the album going in?
Not particularly. We thought we were going to be quick about it. We thought we were going to write a few songs, get the record done and try not to do what we did on ‘In Our Bones’, which was write a ton of songs. We ended up writing over forty for this record as well. But that’s ok.
We don’t want to put anything out that’s half-assed. We don’t want to put out anything that isn’t it, that doesn’t give us that feeling. We didn’t want to put out songs we didn’t love and that we didn’t care about. We wanted the right songs on the record. In terms of sound though, we knew the direction. It was inspired by ‘Wasteland’, off ‘In Our Bones’. That was the last song we wrote for that album way after everything else was already done. When we wrote that song, something lit up for me. I felt like this is where I want to go. We wanted to write the next album inspired by those sounds. We wanted it to be a little more synth based, definitely more intricate and less straight up. We wanted everything to be interwoven in the background with lots of smaller, subtle details that makes the songs what they are, and that’s what a lot of the songs have come to be. Now we’re in rehearsals for our first shows with these songs, and they’re a lot harder to play than any others we’ve written, because they are so intricate and so finessed, whereas the others were more to the point. We’ve been playing them for so so long, it’s becomes second nature. When ‘Gravity’ comes on when we’re rehearsing, I don’t even have to think but with these new songs, I’m fully focused on every single note because it’s not muscle memory. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect the first time. Or the fourth time. Or fifth time but it’s really cool, because it feels like this is a really big stepping stone in our growth.
