Alone - Sound In The Signals Interview

I recently had the chance to interview alone. Check out the full interview after the jump.

For anyone not familiar with your band can you tell me how guys got together and decided to form the band?

We’ve all known each other for several years and have all been in other local bands, and seen each other play over the years, and last year started talking about how it’d be cool if we just started a band together. We figured it would be fun regardless since we were all friends and if we were able to write well together then badass, and it was worth trying regardless. After like 6 months of talking about it and humoring the idea, we got together to jam and we all clicked. We were all kind of wanting to write a similar type of music, so it wasn’t like one person was wanting to do like pop-punk and one person trying to come in and write a metal song. So At our first practice, we wrote 3 rough versions of “You” “Hollow Head” and “Loner.” That seemed like a good sign that we should keep jamming and having fun.

No Youth is one of the better hardcore punk releases I've heard all year. How long did you work on the EP and what was the recording process like?

The writing process was pretty simple. Going into the band, A few of us had some riffs in our back pocket, and then when we got together everything really just clicked. We all understood what we were going for and how to actually structure music. I feel like we got all of the songs hammered out in the first few practices. We then just jammed them out for a while. We recorded some pre-pro demos ourselves,and then we decided to actually go record them in a studio. We hit up Ryan Morgan at Paper Crane, he has worked a couple of our members other bands. He understood what we were going for. So we lined up a few days and hammered it out. Ryan is super cool and awesome at what he does so it was a fun few days of tracking.


I really like the title track for the EP. What was the musical and lyrical inspiration and writing for that song specifically?

Musically, Andy just came in with the initial riff and we worked off of that, and we noticed the song was a darker so we felt the ending needed to reflect that. Lyrically, Devin had been talking about how he wanted to write a song about the idea of growing out hardcore. It’s no secret that hardcore is a youth driven type of music and many tend to grow out of it at a certain age or stop coming around to shows and what not. We understand that people grow out of things or get new responsibilities and what not, and that’s totally fine, but we’ve never understood not being able to enjoy something for the fact that you “grew up.” So when it came to writing the lyrics, Devin just reflected a lot on conversations he’d had with others who “grew up”  and the feelings of still enjoying hardcore despite his age. Music is cool, live music is fun, so why stop enjoying it?


I can hear a ton of different sounds in your music that sound like you could be influenced by bands like American Nightmare and Youth Of Today. What are some of your primary influences and how do you take those influences and make something unique and standout like the EP is?

We're really influenced by mid 2000’s hardcore. Go It Alone, Killing the Dream, Sinking Ships, Ruiner, bands like that. We’re really into melodic hardcore before it was a bunch of bands playing metal with a melodic lead over it. “Melodic hardcore” is a pretty confusing genre right now. So many bands cling to that label yet you cannot hear it in their music. It seems to be more about ripping a contemporary “melodic” band and riding the coat tails of being a hardcore band. We just took our influences and added our own “spin” to it to write something we were stoked on and happy with.

If you had to pick a song off the EP to recommend people check out what song would you pick and why?

Probably “No Youth” or “Hollow head” Both songs have elements for kids wanting to pit or sing along..and I mean..both of those are way fun so yeah, that’s what I’d recommended.

The vinyl/cassette craze is at an all time high right now. I've seen people on twitter requesting a vinyl or cassette release of No Youth. Is anything like that in the works?

Yes, Dog Years Records was cool enough to approach us about releasing our music and is going to be putting out a cassette of No Youth which should be out in the fall/early winter.  We’re also going to be featured on a comp they’re releasing shortly called “The Underdogs” with some awesome bands like Another Mistake and Safe & Sound.

What all do you guys have coming up for the remainder of 2014?

Alone: We're looking to get our physical release of No Youth out, play shows, and write some new music. We’re going to head up to Washington in November to do a couple shows hopefully with Safe & Sound and some other awesome NWHC bands.  Aside from that, we got some cool shows lined up locally, playing with some cool bands like Cruel Hand and Run with the Hunted.

I guess that about wraps it up. Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions. Do you have anything else you would like to add?

Thanks for taking the time to check us out, we really appreciate it. Thank you for the interview. Everyone be sure to check out Safe & Sound from WA who’s got an awesome 7” coming out soon on Live to Life records, and check out Beyond Repair out of Reno. Two awesome bands doing cool things for hardcore.