Following a four-year wait between their debut EP and album, the two-and-a-bit years between Demob Happy’s ‘Dream Soda’ and its follow-up feels almost impatient. “We’re always eager to get stuff out,” begins singer and bassist Matt Marcantonio. “Then it just depends on the boring industry side of things.”
Matt, drummer Thomas Armstrong and guitarist Adam Godfrey have cemented themselves a second outing with ‘Holy Doom’. In addition to their usual self-set pressures (“We set very high standards for ourselves; we’d never allow anything less than what we deem to be perfect”), following a rapturous reception to their debut, their second album also comes bearing the weight of expectation.
“People were coming up to us and saying [‘Dream Soda’] was their favourite album of the last ten years, and wild things like that,” Matt marvels. “You have to go, ‘Okay, I want to make sure that it lives up to that’, and goes even further. But then you also have to try and factor in the things that you want to do, and where you’re at.
“We couldn’t have written another twelve songs like ‘Dream Soda’…most of those songs were old when we put them on the album anyway. There’s pressure to live up to it, but in terms of an overall quality, we don’t ever think that we have to write the same stuff again otherwise it won’t be as good.”
The first peek at new Demob came in May 2017 with standalone single ‘Dead Dreamers’. Originally supposed to be included on ‘Holy Doom’, it instead served as a precursor; filled with the underlying themes running throughout the album such as religious lyric play. “We’re always aware that if we’re doing an album, we’re making something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, so it comes down to thematics,” Matt considers.
“We set out with quite a clear vision in mind. We had, in the end, seventy songs that we wanted to choose from, some more complete than others, but we knew we had to get that down to eleven. So at that point, we were able to go, well, this isn’t about whether or not the album’s going to be good because all of that stuff is good, it just depends on what album we want to make.”
What they’ve made is an album that’s chockfull of dirty riffs in that classic Demob way. “We were given the sort of freedom where we could’ve made three or four very different sounding albums out of all the stuff we had,” Matt reveals. “We tend to write whatever we feel like writing, so it covers quite a few genres, but it never strays from being us. We were able to say; this is the confinements of the album that we want to make, we want to do something and nail it.”
Religious imagery runs through the centre of ‘Holy Doom’ like a lifeline vein. “Sweet and sour, yin and yang, a balance of good and evil; it was inherent in everything that we were doing [at the time], this sense of balance,” says Matt. “In music, we want things to have a sweetness in them; a melody and a harmony, a dirtiness and an edge in the guitars and the bass and drums.
“I thought it was very important for us to get [it] across, so we spent a lot of time figuring out how we were going to get the right sort of sounds for the guitars and drums that translated that. Where the harmony and the melody could sit in this sweet place and quite soft nice melodies, but the guitars and everything else underneath it just provided this bedrock of dirtiness.”
“If it’s a positive message then the music has to sound gnarly,” he adds, “and if it’s a gnarly message, then the music can sound a little more positive.”
That’s basically what it all boils down to for Demob Happy: “As long as you’re having fun with what you’re doing then the rest sorts itself out,” Matt says matter of factly. “It’s undeniable when you can hear a band having fun because even if you don’t like it per se, you can’t deny it sounds like three people actually enjoying themselves. I think that comes across no matter what we do.”
Demob Happy’s album ‘Holy Doom’ is out 23rd March.
