WOM Interviews – 30.000 Monkeys
Photo by Leon De Backer
30.000 Monkeys is one of those bands that you have to “expect the unexpected”. It’s a clichet but it’s still the best way to describe what the band does. They’re back with another masterpiece in distortion and noise – “Honesty Integrity Friendship Passion” – and World of Metal had a little talk with them. Check it ou below:
Hello guys and welcome to our World Of Metal. You’re back with “Honesty Integrity Friendship Passion”, your newest album. What are your expectations for its reception?
We try not to have too many expectations and just let it all come as it does, but if you insist: the new album is somewhat more adventurous (whatever that means) then the previous ones, so I would expect some extreme reactions in both negative and positive direction. Less ‘meh, shrugging’ kind of middle ground stuff. But hey, who knows!
Being such an experimental band, what is more important to stay in mind when writing new material? And what was the focus for this new album musically speaking?
The main thing we are trying to achieve is not boring ourselves when writing new music. Trying out new stuff and surprising ourselves. Currently we have a lot of fun with balancing (or unbalancing?) the extremes and creating seemingly random progressions. Although we have to admit that it is less fun memorizing random progressions when preparing our new live set.
For this album specifically had the idea of writing one big song in four chapters, constantly shifting in different directions. But it got out of hand and we ended up with four separate songs, each with a different vibe, but fitting the title we already had in mind.
The album was record amidst the Covid pandemic. Can we say that what we can hear was greatly affected but what happened this last two years?
Not really. We recorded it all by ourselves for the first time, in Ruben’s FVN KVLT Studio. But planning on doing that anyway when we started writing the album before the pandemic. The main difficulty was writing and practicing together due to the extra measures that were taken to battle the pandemic, but that’s about all.
What’s the story behind the title of your new album, “Honesty Integrity Friendship Passion”?
The title comes from Lil B’s 2012 NYU lecture, in which he reveals a wonderfully naïve positive worldview, talks about kindness, love and: honesty, integrity, friendship, passion. This sequence of words has been living in our minds since then. We kept thinking about doing something with it and finally decided to write the music to fit these words. In the end we wrote a song for each individual word, sonically and thematically inspired by it. Even though the disarming and emotional quality of Lil B’s worldview is what initially prompted us to work with these concepts, the songs are not necessarily a representation of it.
Intensity is always the result of your songs, does it drain you to play the songs that seem (and must be) very emotional?
Actually the main emotion we feel when playing this music is joy. We play this music because we love doing so and are having a lot of fun. Even if it may sound dark and heavy, we just really enjoy this kind of music and like to celebrate its power! So no worries about drainage over here at all, if anything playing this music is energizing to us. SO WE ARE NOT ABOUT TO STOP!
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