Patrick Miranda thought he was doing better.
In the years following Movements’ 2023 album RUCKUS!, the vocalist had been telling people as much, he’d worked on himself and he’d made progress. Mentally and emotionally, things were apparently moving in the right direction.
Then Movements started writing their fourth album.
‘Sad song was coming out. Sad song was coming out,’ Miranda tells us from Los Angeles, it’s now just days before Happier Now arriving through Fearless Records. ‘Every song, man. I’m like really like, huh? Like these are pretty tough songs.’
That disconnect became impossible to ignore.
‘I kind of had this moment of like self realization of like, maybe I’m like in something, you know, emotionally and mentally that I wasn’t even really totally aware of that I need to work out because I’m talking about a lot of things here that are are pretty heavy.’
That’s the tension running underneath Happier Now.
The title might sound like some neat declaration of emotional arrival, but Movements have never really dealt in neat resolutions. Instead, Miranda describes those two words almost as a challenge directed back at himself.
‘It’s more of a question to myself. It’s more irony than anything.’
For a band whose listeners have spent a decade attaching Movements songs to break-ups, grief, isolation and the particularly ugly corners of growing up, it feels fitting. Happier Now isn’t Miranda standing on the other side waving back. It’s him wondering whether there even is another side.
Movements ‘Everything Is Fine’ video
‘Am I As Happy As I Have Been Saying That I Am?’
There were, Miranda says, ‘some crazy things’ and ‘some hard things’ in his life between RUCKUS! and the writing of Happier Now.
Rather than confronting all of them immediately, he kept moving.
‘I think maybe I didn’t fully process and didn’t fully allow myself the time to heal from, because I was so wrapped up in like this idea that like, no, I’m doing better, right? Like I’m fine. I’m good.’
Writing exposed the cracks in that story.
‘It wasn’t until we started writing the record that I was like, oh sh*t, okay, I got some unprocessed sh*t I need to kind of like work on here, and it came out in music, and that’s sort of how I how I process.’
Eventually, it became a much bigger question.
‘Am I as happy as I have been saying that I am? You know, and you know I had a tough couple of years.’
And then another: ‘Is being happier like even like meant for me?’
That emotional honesty has been fundamental to Movements since the Southern Californian band first emerged in 2015.
Their debut EP Outgrown Things arrived the following year before 2017’s Feel Something turned Movements into one of the defining names of their corner of modern post-hardcore. Its legacy is still growing too, with ‘Daylily’ earning RIAA Gold certification earlier this year.
But Miranda isn’t interested in excavating his teenage feelings simply because people associate that version of him with particular Movements records.
‘It doesn’t feel honest to me to write a song about something that like I’m not still in or still feeling.’
Instead, Happier Now tries to recover some of the emotional intensity of those earlier records without pretending the people making it haven’t changed.
‘We wanted the emotion, we wanted the the feelings, the general, I guess, like ideas behind the the new songs to feel like they did back in the day, without reverting directly back to that.’
The challenge was simple to describe, considerably harder to execute.
‘How do we bridge the gap between the old feeling and the new sound, and like make it one thing?’
Movements ‘Separate’ video
Movements Know These Songs Become Bigger Than Them
That honesty matters because Miranda has seen what happens once a Movements song leaves the studio, people carry them around.
They connect them with specific years, relationships, deaths, recoveries and versions of themselves they may barely recognise anymore.
For Miranda, knowing a lyric can help somebody articulate something they couldn’t otherwise say remains one of the most important parts of the band.
‘We know that there is always somebody out there going through something similar that we’re going through, and. That you’re not alone in whatever it is that you’re dealing with.’
There’s no attempt to romanticise that connection. It comes from the knowledge that difficult emotions can become slightly less suffocating when somebody else manages to put language around them.
‘If my words and my lyrics in these songs can help them process what is that they’re going through, or at least relate to it in a way that gives them some sort of relief and makes them feel less alone, then that’s a win.’
Ten years into Movements, Miranda is also increasingly aware that those listeners span generations of the scene, some are now making bands of their own.
And that, apparently, is how you discover you’ve become an ‘old head’.
‘I’m Becoming An Old Head’
Miranda was barely old enough to enter some of the venues Movements played when the band started touring.
‘My first tour. I was 19 or 20 years old. I mean, I couldn’t even drink.’
That created some spectacularly unglamorous early touring experiences.
‘There were there were places that we would play where I technically wasn’t even allowed to be in the venue because they were 21 plus venues.’
On several occasions, Miranda was permitted inside long enough to perform before being sent back outside.
‘There was like probably three or four times where I would play our set and I would go sit outside in the van for the rest of the night while everybody else could be inside and hang out because I wasn’t old enough.’
Now Movements are the experienced band looking across the room at teenagers beginning the same process.
Midrift, who Miranda says will be joining Movements on tour, are young enough to make the passage of time feel particularly brutal.
‘These kids are so young. They’re so young. They’re like 17/18, years old.’
For Miranda, the reversal is surreal.
‘Now I’m going to be looking at them the way that they were looking at me, where I’m looking at them like you’re a child.’
He laughs at the absurdity of finding himself here.
‘Here I am, like this older guy who’s been doing it for 10 years, you know. And yeah, it’s just weird. It’s weird. But I’m again weird, weird but cool.’
Movements have certainly earned the veteran status.
Across the last decade, they’ve generated more than 200 million US streams, toured with everyone from A Day To Remember and The Used to Knocked Loose, and watched 2020’s No Good Left To Give and 2023’s RUCKUS! push their sound well beyond the parameters of their earliest material.
On Happier Now, Grammy-winning producer Will Yip returns as Movements attempt to pull those different eras together.
‘Dissolve Me’ supplies the immediate punch, while ‘Back In My Ways’ initially made Miranda nervous precisely because it wandered closer to the melancholy of older Movements.
The record isn’t a retreat. It’s the sound of a band realising it doesn’t need to amputate its past to keep progressing.
Australia Is Getting A Movements Headline Tour
Australian audiences got a substantial taste of that evolution recently when Movements joined Pierce The Veil on their sold-out arena tour, those shows answered one question and created another.
What comes next?
‘I think that’s like the next logical step for us in in Australia is doing a big headliner.’
And it doesn’t sound hypothetical.
‘That that Pierce the Vale tour was was awesome. We’ve never played to that many people in in Australia before. Those shows were enormous.’
Movements have history with Pierce The Veil stretching back to 2016, and Miranda remembers seeing firsthand how fiercely their audience supports bands brought into that world.
‘If Pierce the Vale f***s with with a band, their fan base f***s with a band.’
He’s hoping the same thing has now happened Down Under.
‘The hope is that that happens again in Australia, and that when we come through on the headlining tour, that will inevitably happen in the next year or two, that we get a lot of people from those peers shows coming up to us and telling us the same thing or something similar.’
That’s about as direct as an Australian headline-tour tease gets without a poster attached.
Miranda also makes his feelings about coming back fairly unambiguous.
‘We love Australia. It’s it’s one of my it is probably my favorite place in the world and certainly one of my favorite places in the world to play shows.’
There is one exception.
During Movements’ trip for New Bloom Festival, Miranda became seriously ill, eventually forcing the band to cancel shows.
‘I don’t know what it is with the germs down there, man. But they f***ing destroyed me.’
The effects stuck around long after he returned home.
‘I felt residual from that sickness for like two months afterwards.’
Missing those shows still bothers him.
‘I felt like I was letting people down, and and that’s never a fun feeling.’
His solution? Come back and do it properly.
‘We’re gonna come back on this headliner next, and we’re gonna make up for it.’
Professional Hobbyist
The person speaking about all this is also considerably different from the teenager who started Movements, and maybe the clearest example has nothing to do with records.
Teenage Miranda hated public speaking. Today, he routinely addresses thousands of strangers from a stage.
‘It could be it could be 50 people. It could be 50,000 people, and it would feel the same to me.’
That confidence arrived through Movements, but music is increasingly only one piece of Miranda’s creative life.
His Instagram describes him as a ‘professional hobbyist’, which turns out to be fairly accurate.
Photography has become particularly serious. Miranda shoots 35mm film and is now working towards publishing his first photo book.
Then there’s music production, DJing, House music and competitive swimming.
‘I used to swim on a club team’ as a kid, Miranda explains, and he has recently returned to the pool through an adult swimming league.
‘I’ve been swimming, I’ve been working out, and and that’s like been my my thing.’
Three sessions a week, plus the gym, he hasn’t started racing again yet, but he isn’t ruling it out.
His explanation for how all these seemingly unrelated pursuits fit together might also be the cleanest summary of where Patrick Miranda finds himself in 2026.
‘I just kind of do whatever the f*** I want, whenever I want.’
Maybe that’s what Happier Now ultimately captures.
Not happiness as some permanent destination or a clean ending where the difficult sh*t disappears and stays gone.
Just somebody becoming more comfortable asking themselves the uncomfortable question and being willing to listen when the answer comes back differently than expected.
Movements ‘Happier Now‘ Tracklist
- Pulse
- Dissolve Me
- Everything Is Fine
- Happier Now
- Flowerbed
- Back in My Ways
- Spellbound
- Ill at Ease
- Live by the Sword
- Everyone I’ve Ever Been
- Fragile Hands
- Separate
Happier Now is out Friday, September 4th via Fearless Records.
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