A Skylit Drive’s Michael Jagmin reflects on the band’s 2008 rise and how a slower, more sustainable creative process is fuelling their resurgence.
With their 2008 album Wires…and the concept of breathing, A Skylit Drive were launched into the epicentre of the scene’s ‘move fast and break stuff’ era.
Post-hardcore was business and business was good. Local bands were thrown before an international audience and some, like Californian outfit A Skylit Drive, went from MySpace favourites to Billboard charters.
It was a time when career-defining decisions were made without a moment’s notice. Lots of them were right, but many were wrong leading to burst bubbles and missed opportunities. “There was a lot of ‘you guys should do this’”, recalls A Skylit Drive vocalist Michael Jagmin. “It was, like, why should we do that?”
Naturally, any rapid acceleration will meet turbulence. Many of the bands making noise in 2008 fell forever silent. By 2015, it looked like A Skylit Drive would be one of them. But, by 2022, the ASD flag flew once more leading to tour announcements, new music, and an upcoming return to Australian shores alongside Scary Kids Scaring Kids this November.
The band is starting to reach an acceleration similar to the one they experienced in 2008, only this time, there’s a new MO. Coming up on two decades in the game, Jagmin has seen first-hand the troubles that come with over-engineering a project, and the burnout that follows. These days, the key to doing A Skylit Drive is to do things with “a little more breathing room and flexibility.”
“It’s a totally different beast now,” says Jagmin of the latest incarnation. “I’m getting to make decisions that I wish I had the foresight to make when I was younger. There was so much happening.”
“When we go on tour now, we don’t rehearse. Everybody practices on their own. The first show of that run is the first show that we had done since the last show. Whereas back in the day, we would all show up two weeks before a tour and practice every day.”
Jagmin remembers the less than stellar results – “you might see a live video from those [older] shows and one song is going this fast, and then two nights later it’s going that fast.”
By giving members more time to prepare at their own pace and putting less emphasis on whipping and chaining their live prep, A Skylit Drive have rediscovered the magic to performing. “Everybody’s going to get the same thing out of us, I think that’s what every crowd deserves.”
The concept of giving members breathing room may be relatively new to the A Skylit Drive project, but it’s been so effective, they’ve brought it with them from the stage and into the studio. “It definitely keeps things not as stressful” as it once was for the band to write and record music, Jagman says.
“As much as I love the older albums, It was always so sporadic. It was everybody in a room butting heads and arguing. Imagine an entire basketball team being responsible for drawing up their plays. Imagine the coach is sitting there trying to draw it out, but you’ve got this guy three rows back going, no, no, no. Do this instead.”
“By the end of it, you’re just exhausted. A lot of ideas get cut off.”
Now, things are deliberately slowed down. Each band member is given more time and space to develop their ideas before bringing them to the table. Things are more patient and considered resulting in less creative clashes and a more shared vision.
Jagmin points to 2022 singles ‘Dead Serious‘ and ‘Sucker‘ and 2024’s ‘Count Me Out‘ as examples of what the band is capable of doing when “everybody gets to be in their own space where they feel creative, yet still completely involved in the process” without the tension that comes with “literally being stuck in a room together”.
This deliberate deceleration has brought with it a level of sustainability hitherto unrealised within A Skylit Drive camp, it’s an ethos that could very well power them through the next two decades of being a band, “That’s my hope” says Jagmin.
“Unless you have some form of structure around what you’re doing, some belief in what you’re doing…things will crumble.”
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