The U.K. pop rock band The XCERTS and their new album, Learning How To Live And Let Go, sound staggeringly ambitious, delivering a multi-colored world of changing colors and neon lights in which you’re not quite sure if it’s even day or night. The new record from the long-running group is an August release from UNFD.
It’s bombastic and commanding yet relentlessly invigorating, with rhythmic choices that explode and instrumentals that pop, sounding like their encompassing energy has been amplified literally as loud as it’ll go and filling the space within these songs with either ragged intensity or expanding atmosphere.
The fast pace of the songs gives you an idea like someone finally letting themselves out of whatever bonds weighed them down previously, with Learning How To Live And Let Go just getting right into it from the first track. It’s the sound of an extremely active push towards getting unstuck, whether there’s a sense of stagnation in life circumstances or you just need something musically to refresh the ears.
The XCERTS blend other production flourishes with their rock foundation, rather comprehensively exploring the possibilities of both approaches, including their rock background and the soaring pop.
There’s a relatable desperation to which the songs return, as Learning How To Live And Let Go relays an expansive experience of breaking into a brighter and bolder way of living. It’ll stick with you, with the hooks the group crafted extremely central no matter the method in which they’re delivered, but a kind of sourness seeps in that provides a perfectly fitting frame of reference for the explosions of the music.
The lyrics sometimes express intense, hair-pulling frustrations and creeping sadness, and the occasionally ragged instrumentals add an expansive grounding. Even the tones of some of the more production-based elements sound like bitter candy turned to sound, but the energy, steeped in understanding about the pitfalls yet relentlessly exciting, is undeniable. It’s a remarkable portrait.
Below, see what singer Murray Macleod and drummer Tom Heron have been thinking ahead of Learning How To Live And Let Go by The XCERTS, including about how forcefully they’ve launched themselves into a more positive approach. They’re joined in The XCERTS by bassist Jordan Smith.
What was it like for these songs to finally start taking shape? Having been in the band for this long, have you ever worried the inspiration would maybe run out?
Macleod: From a lyrical point of view, anyway, so much life happened prior to going into lockdown — and COVID-19 happening and life was put on pause then obviously. But before that, I was never too fearful that the inspiration well would run dry. A lot of life happened. A lot of things happened to us personally. A lot of things happened to friends. So I was drawing on a lot of different inspirations and scenarios that were taking place pre-COVID-19, which I’m still able to pull from when finishing the record.
I think musically as well, we’re always striving to create new and fresh ideas. So I think we really got a kick out of taking a left turn on this record and going against the grain and what would normally make us comfortable. We felt really invigorated to try something new, and that gave us a real energy every single day we were in the studio.
Heron: I feel like we’ve always been a band that never liked to repeat ourselves. We’ve always loved bands that evolve musically, and we’ve always done that. I feel like it’s the most we’ve evolved, but it was exciting to find where that was going, and because of the lockdown and stuff, we had a bit more time to work out what we wanted that to be. And then it took shape really nicely after we were allowed back in the studio.
Macleod: It basically took us the best part of a year to make this record. So, like Tom was saying, it allowed us to go down every avenue with every single sound and every single song. It drove us slightly insane, but it was definitely the most amount of freedom we’ve ever had in the studio just to kind of try everything. Nothing was off the table.
Heron: I feel like with the exception of maybe a couple, like “Gimme,” most of the songs probably sounded completely different from when we started writing them to how they ended up. They all had movements that just went through stages of sounding completely different. But I definitely feel we ended at the right stage. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you are in it and you are recording that long; it’s just like, is it done? We definitely had a lot of those conversations.
Macleod: And the thing is as well, you can overcook these ideas, and you can hear when it’s overcooked. You’ve got to strike that balance of — keep a bit of purity in there and keep a bit of off-the-cuff magic as well as putting everything under the microscope. You do have to know when to stop because there does come a point where you can drain the life out of a song because you’re trying to make it as perfect as it can possibly be. […] A lot of it’s based on instincts, and that’s the majority of our recordings. We’re not overly educated musical dudes. Our band just has a lot of heart, and we trust our intuitions as a band and as a collective just to move forward with what our gut’s telling us. It’s how our band certainly works anyway.
Heron: It’s sometimes not completely obvious when something is right, but for us, it’s usually pretty obvious when something isn’t. We’ll all be having feelings like, this definitely isn’t working. That’s handy.
So, Learning How To Live And Let Go is very energetic. Was pushing towards something that bombastic and uplifting an important part of the process for you?
Macleod: Yeah, I think so. We’re big fans of juxtapositions. Some of our favorite records are incredibly joyous sounding, but actually lyrically, once you dig a little deeper, there’s a lot of weight there and it’s a lot darker. It’s like Fleetwood Mac or Bruce Springsteen, they’re like the masters of doing that, where something sounds danceable and joyous, but actually lyrically it’s really heavy. So we’ve always been attracted to that style of writing. And on this record, I think maybe — because lyrically I do think it’s maybe the heaviest record we’ve written in terms of depth and the experiences that I wanted to sing about — we’re not really in the market for bumming people out anymore.
We’ve done the miserable rock thing, and if you’re good at it, these bands are incredible, but we just wanted to move on from it. It’s no shade on bands that do the kind of darker rock thing, but for us it was like, it’s more exciting to us to write these really bombastic, almost euphoric alternative rock songs whilst singing about heavy stuff. We still want people to dance and if they want to dig into the lyrics and cry, then they can cry-dance. It’s balancing the light and the dark. That’s what we’re trying to do a lot more of because that is a representation of our actual lives; that’s real life. It’s not always miserable, it’s not always euphoric, but you can certainly feel all those feelings in a day. So we want to paint that on our records now, I think.
Heron: I think from the beginning, even though the concepts changed over the time of recording, there was always the idea of having that arc to the record and having that. There’s some heavy stuff in there and especially lyrically, like some of the stuff Murray’s singing about, but then we wanted it to sort of end on an uplifting, positive note, and that’s what we want people to come away with listening to the record.
Macleod: The record starts to breathe a little more towards the end of the record; before it’s quite claustrophobic. It’s all kind of in the record title, but a lot of it’s to do with self-acceptance and finding peace and knowing that life is going to throw curve balls and hurdles your way a bit. You’re still here, so be proud of the fact that you’re still here and still living, and it’ll probably continue to be tough, but it’ll also continue to be really beautiful. So it’s that acceptance that you’re in a good spot and you’ve survived all these things that are negative and hurtful.
In using your life experiences to guide the creative process, was it difficult to get that stuff out in this honest way? What was that like?
Macleod: I think the hardest part for me for the lyric writing on this album was just, “How do I tell this story?” Because there were so many experiences that I had that I wanted to sing about that it was kind of just hard to filter. Honestly, we could have written a triple album and that still wouldn’t have covered it. The hardest part was seeing what would make the cut because I had a lot to sing about. And so I filtered all these little stories. I wrote all these little stories down in a little notebook and basically filtered out the ones that really held weight and that I could expand on. As soon as I did that, and I knew — because quite early on, we knew what the concept would be about the entire record.
As soon as we figured that out, the lyrics came really, really naturally and very quickly. There were a couple of songs I couldn’t finish because, obviously we were in lockdown, and I’ve learned that in terms of lyric writing, it’s much easier for me to do so when I’m actually in motion. Even if I’m recounting a story from my past, it flexes some muscle in my memory whilst I’m just out living and that’s how I write best. So there were a couple of songs I struggled with throughout lockdown, but as soon as we came out of lockdown, the record is very current. I was still writing lyrics up until the point that we submitted the album to be finished to go to print. Because I experienced some more stuff, so I was able to draw upon very recent, recent experiences, which also tied in with the theme of the record. So yeah, it wasn’t too bad. It was definitely cathartic and I’m just really proud that we’ve made what I deem a really beautiful record out of something that was a pretty messy time and not that beautiful.
So, thinking about the instrumentals, was the transition into this more pop-inflected direction pretty smooth? Were you pretty interested in, for one, keeping the process interesting for The XCERTS and Learning How To Live And Let Go?
Macleod: It was relatively natural. I think basically after we finished up on the last album campaign, we just felt like we needed a rebirth and a rebrand. Otherwise we foresaw ourselves going down a particular road that I don’t think really excited any of us. If you’re in a guitar band and you’re getting a little bit older, I feel like a lot of people just kind of expect you to conform to this dull, boring indie rock that really didn’t excite us. Truth of the matter is we’re three total freaks. So we wanted to let our freak flag fly and just do what we wanted to do.
There was zero input from anybody else on this record. We signed with UNFD pretty much when the record was like 90 percent done. This record is very much the sound of freedom to me and to us. We wanted to have fun with it. We wanted to showcase the kind of music that inspired us when we were teenagers that we’re still in love with today. That ranged from referencing shit like Gwen Stefani to Tom Waits to Taking Back Sunday to Elliott Smith — all this stuff. When we were growing up, we all loved a lot.
Heron: There’s really great artists that specifically Murray and I listened to who tow that line between hip-hop and emo at the moment. That’s really exciting to us. So our influences were seeping in from there as well. And it just made it feel quite eclectic when we came to finish these songs.
Macleod: There’s a jazz song on the record, and when that first got proposed, it was just us laughing in the studio. And then we worked on it some more and it was like, this feels authentic and we love this style of jazz. So a lot of the time in the studio it was just like, fuck it, let’s do it.
Because at the time we were making it, we didn’t have a label and we didn’t even have management. So I think sometimes we quietly thought that this record may never come out. So we were just like, if we’re gonna go down, we’re gonna go down doing whatever we like.
Heron: We were in the studio writing it. And actually for me, it was a different and interesting way of writing drum parts because it was like, I was writing them on a computer, like on a drum pad that I have here. And it meant that, because you’re not sitting at the kit, all your things that you go to — your go-to drum style, they don’t come into it as much. You end up making more interesting beats because you’re not playing like a drummer, you’re playing it like a musician. And then when it comes to actually recording it, it’s like, oh, that’s quite hard to play. Or that’s more interesting. It’s like, I wouldn’t naturally go there, and that was really cool for me.
So, the quieter songs on Learning How To Live And Let Go — it’s a bit of a general question, but can you share some of your thoughts around them? They definitely have their own unique impact.
Macleod: “My Friends Forever” — so it’s funny, the origin of that song’s funny because I had the chords just on bass I think. I think I just had the really simple bassline. And then, a guy who we were working with in a co-writing space, he put down these beautiful jazz piano chords, and I thought it would be funny to sing the song with hard auto-tune on. And that’s what we did initially, and it was just to experiment with it and just see, again, those juxtapositions that we were talking about. I was like, how funny would it be if this really raw, organic jazz song, which just has drum brushes, double bass — like upright bass, and piano, and some horns, how funny would that be if we had a hard autotune and that works? It didn’t work.
But what did stick with us is the music really felt really special to us. So what kind of started out as a joke, we then turned into a ballad anthem about my friends. It’s like an ode to Jordan and Tom in the band and also about our friend, Tom Searle, who used to play guitar in Architects who sadly passed away a few years back. I thought he could maybe live on in this beautiful little jazz song. So we actually sample an Architects song within “My Friends Forever.” We sample “Gone With the Wind” by Architects, which is cool.
[…] And then with “It Ain’t Easy,” it was meant to kind of be the story of the whole record. I think we’d really wanted to write a song that kind of was the summary for the record where it was just like a huge sigh of relief. The record does at times feel really claustrophobic. “It Ain’t Easy” was meant to represent that finding inner peace feeling of everything’s gonna be okay. Finding that zen-like state, knowing that moving forward everything’s fine, everything’s gonna be fine.
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Image courtesy of Zak Pinchin.
