The Sound Lab recently conducted an interview with frontman Justin Hawkins and drummer Rufus Tiger Taylor of British rockers THE DARKNESS. You can watch the entire chat below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). On the band's latest studio album, "Easter Is Cancelled": Justin: "The new album is called 'Easter Is Cancelled'. It is a quasi-concept record with three different themes running through it, one of which is multiverse theory, one of which is matters of the heart, and the other one remains to be seen. There's a lot of sort of childhood memories and allegorical tales from our upbringing that we've used to sort of depict scenarios, or to understand our existence." Rufus: "It's life-affirming." Justin: "It definitely is. It expresses some frustration at the way music has been reduced to a mere service. The thing about the album is it's brilliant; it's probably our best one ever. It was a real team effort and you know Rufus has been in the band, he's getting on for being the longest-serving drummer we've had. His contributions to the writing have become integral to the whole thing. He's the heartbeat of it. Also, we're all taking it super seriously. I feel like what we do isn't bombast, but it's nuanced bombast. You can't just make funny jokes and do big riffs and all that — that's not how you do DARKNESS. That's how you do other stuff. We're better than that and I think this album proves it." Rufus: "Let me just say, lyrically, this guy hits it out of the park." On how THE DARKNESS's music has developed since its 2000 inception: Justin: "When we first started THE DARKNESS, it was like four frustrated people who had been trying to do sort of luxurious, layered, perhaps quite complicated arrangements and getting nowhere. When you start a band, all your mates come to the first show and few less come to the next one, and eventually, life gets in the way and no one shows but one of them and you give up and that's it. With our band, we started off, that happened to us a lot — me, Dan [Hawkins, guitar] and Frankie [Poullain, bass] worked on a lot of different stuff before and it never really worked out. I've done everything — I've played keyboards, rhythm guitars, even, that sounds shocking — I've done additional guitar stuff, but I was never a singer before. Then it began to snowball and we ended up with more fans than friends, then all fans, then we had a following, then it just snowballed. But the way we did that was by doing sort of frustrated good-time rock with a load of swear words in it, and you can't do that for 20 years. Not because you lose the anger, but because you find other things to be angry about and they're better expressed in other ways. So, I think we're sort of writing more complex music than we ever used to. Mainly because we have the ability to play it and we've developed collectively and individually and you become better at what you do. Basically, we're the same as we used to be, only better. We're still angry. We're just angry at people like you. I'm just kidding. [Laughs]" On his relationship with the rock press: Justin: "I literally hate the press. I hate them with a fucking vengeance and I have a reason to hate them which will all become clear soon." "Easter Is Cancelled" was released October 4 via Cooking Vinyl. It is the follow-up to 2017's "Pinewood Smile", which was the third album since THE DARKNESS's 2011 reunion. THE DARKNESS burst on to the scene with its multi-platinum 2003 debut album, "Permission To Land". Having initially split up in 2006, following the departure of Justin Hawkins, THE DARKNESS decided to get back together five years later and released the comeback album "Hot Cakes". This was followed by two further LPs, "Last Of Our Kind" and the aforementioned "Pinewood Smile".
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