Their second album, ‘This Too Won’t Pass’ showcases a more ambitious Can’t Swim. Having begun as a laptop project for band-leader Chris LoPorto in 2016, things swiftly caught fire after signing to Pure Noise Records with the release of debut full-length, ‘Fail You Again’, the following year. It resulted in a somewhat haphazard evolution that left Chris feeling as though there was a lot more they could achieve.
“I’m not saying that I’m not proud of that album [‘Fail You Again’],” he considers, “but that definitely wasn’t thought of as a project. We just wrote a bunch of songs and picked our favourite ones. It’s very all over the place, and it has a lot of contrast. Some poppy songs, some lighthearted songs – whereas this record, I think it’s very dynamic. It has a bunch of different flavours on it.”
Chris began demoing tracks almost immediately after ‘Fail You Again’ wrapped up recording. Going in with a more assured line of thinking, it’s elevated Can’t Swim to the next level while retaining all the essential parts – dark aggression with delicate touches, Chris’s painfully personal lyrics – that have kept them steaming forward over the past few years.
“This time was a little bit more focused, and we were very concerned about what our sound was, more so than what our favourite song was,” Chris explains. “We had a lot of songs that we may have liked, but we were trying to pick the ones that sounded most like Can’t Swim rather than picking ones that sound different from each other. Now it’s been, what? Three years of being a band? So we’re starting to hone in on what we sound like, and trying to focus on making sure kids keep following it,” he chortles.
“Before anyone cared about Can’t Swim it all started as something just to deal with certain things in my past. They always say ‘write about it and make it into a positive’, and I still think it’s coming from that place, but certainly, I’m conscious that a tonne of people are going to hear other than just myself. It comes from a therapeutic mentality.”
How does it feel having to live in this darkened world consistently?
“It has its pros and cons!” Chris laughs. “Reliving those stories every night can be draining at times, but now at this point, [it’s] the job of the band. Like we had some sort of, I dunno, I don’t wanna say image, but some sort of…” He pauses, thinking. “…identity that the fans can find solace in, and can relate to. If I made a record about happy, good stuff, people would be thrown off by it, so I accepted it, and it’s just finding different ways to portray and get creative. But yeah, sometimes it is quite depressing!”
