Heralding from California, Movements declare themselves purveyors of the ‘loud & sad.’ Preserving the house that emo built, the band have attracted a following of loyal fans that revere the cause of acknowledging feelings on the darker side of the spectrum. With their sophomore album, No Good Left To Give, out later this month, we caught up with frontman Patrick Miranda to discuss the release.
Tell me about how you guys hooked up with Will Yip. We love him here at BLUNT.
This is the third release that we’ve worked with Will on, pretty much everything from the beginning of this band until now has… 90% of it has been produced by Will, and that’s something that I feel like a lot of bands can’t say. We’re very committed to one producer. And so I feel like that helps with our consistency, with our sound, but it’s so amazing because when we signed with Fearless Records, that was like one of the big talking points for them is they were like, “If you sign to us, we’ll get you Will.” And we were just like, damn, that is such a hard offer to refuse because ever since this band started, we all said collectively, like yeah, Will is the one producer that we all would love to work with, like bucket list type shit…We just worked so well with him and he’s such an awesome dude, and straight up every single record that he touches is good. I don’t think that we’d really ever want to work with anyone else, and if we did, I’m sure that Will would still have a hand in what we did in some way.
This album is dark, it’s heavy. Were you in a bad place when you wrote it?
I don’t know honestly. I don’t think that it was necessarily intentional. I think that as I’ve grown older I’ve just become better at talking about the things that happen in my head, and I’ve spent so much time really fine tuning how I want to say the things I want to say and what I want to say and the way that I go about that. And I think that with this record in particular, my lyrical choices and the subject matter that ended up being the bulk of the material on the album was just really dark. And there were songs that we ended up cutting from the record or that we didn’t record at all once we got into the studio, because we went into the studio with 18 songs or something, or maybe even 20 songs, I’m not sure, but we went into the studio with a fucking lot of songs, and we trimmed down a bunch of them, and the ones that ended up not making the record were all of the ones that were more uplifting and way less dark.
And so it just made for a much darker record, but it wasn’t the goal to create something like that, that’s just what the best songs ended up being. And I mean, I think that you asked if I was in a bad place, and if I’m being totally honest with you, I don’t know if I’m ever really in a good place, and that’s one of the constant things that I have to deal with being a person who does suffer from multiple mental illnesses, and that’s just part of my life. I’ve said it before, if I were ever in a position where I felt totally happy go lucky all the time and I didn’t have depression anymore magically I’d probably write really happy songs, but my depression or my mental illness are what makes me, me, and I wouldn’t be the same person without it. And so I try to put that into my music because I feel like it’s the most authentic version of myself.
For the people that can relate to that, what does coping with mental illness look like for you?
I am on an antidepressant and an antianxiety medication that has helped me mentally. And once I started actually treating my anxiety and my depression and my OCD with something other than talk therapy…When it comes to, I mean, the fact that people who are in my position we have a chemical imbalance, and oftentimes therapy is not the only thing that’s going to help you. And I for the longest time thought, ” don’t need to take anything. I don’t need medication. I can do this on my own, I’ll go to therapy, whatever, but I don’t need medication.” And it got to a point where I was just like, I cannot continue to go on like this, I need to do something about my mental state, and talk therapy just wasn’t doing enough.
I have social anxiety disorder and I thought that if I started taking something then it would resolve it completely, which of course it didn’t.
Totally. Yeah. No, I get you. I totally feel you. I think that that’s a common misconception that a lot of people have that, “Oh, I’m going to take this and I’m just going to be better.” And maybe for some people that’s true, but I think a lot of times it takes a lot more than that.
There is one song on the album, ‘Skin to Skin’, which didn’t sound as dark. Was that intentional?
Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think that as a whole it is much lighter than a lot of the songs on the record, but there is still an undertone of the heaviness, and maybe that’s just in the instrumentation of it all…I mean the song as a whole was pretty much just written about being horny for lack of a better term, that’s literally what the song is about, it’s about meeting somebody new and the excitement that comes from not quite being on that physically intimate level yet, but impatiently waiting for when that time comes. And then when it does.
And maybe this isn’t everybody, maybe I’m just a fucking freak, but I feel like there’s a level of almost an obsession that comes with a new relationship, where you’re just like so enthralled by that person or you’re so hypnotised almost by someone else’s beauty or personality or whatever the fuck it is, that thing that draws you into a person and you get like magnetised to them. And that’s the feeling that I wanted to portray in that song, not being able to get somebody off of your mind because you just want to be with them so badly. You know what I mean?
I’ve always wondered, is it my anxiety that makes me feel like that, or is it actually the way that everyone feels? It seems like you think the same thing.
Absolutely. That’s how I feel every single day. Every single day I’m like, do normal people feel what I’m feeling right now, or am I really just that weird?
No Good Left To Give is out on September 18 via Fearless Records/Caroline Australia.
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