Tuesday, July 15, 2025
HomeMusicHardcore band Anxious says "Bambi" is their most genuine document : NPR

Hardcore band Anxious says “Bambi” is their most genuine document : NPR


“Bambi” is as Anxious as something the band has ever performed.

Rebecca Lader/Run For Cowl Information


cover caption

toggle caption

Rebecca Lader/Run For Cowl Information

Your teenage years are for determining who you’re and possibly for becoming a member of a band.

Grady Allen and Dante Melucci – together with three different associates – fashioned the band “Anxious” in 2016, earlier than they may even drive.

Six years later, their first full-length album “Little Inexperienced Home” smashed the hardcore scene.

Now of their 20s, Allen and Melucci say you may name their second album, “Bambi,” hardcore, melodic, punk… no matter you need.

However make no mistake, it is ALL Anxious.

There isn’t a time wasted on “Bambi.”

Lead singer Grady Allen’s voice can soothe and unsettle like an angsty lullaby one second, earlier than Dante Melucci’s thrashing guitar breaks the relative quiet the very subsequent.

YouTube

They open their new album with the monitor “By no means Mentioned” — a darkish ode to the uncertainty of relationships after hitting it huge.

Grady Allen says: that is all a part of the plan.

“I prefer it sort of beginning with this sort-of chaotic sentiment,” he provides. “After which by the point it pulls round to the final track on the document, you already know the final track is sort of actual light and candy.”

Guitarist Dante Melucci says the intro track is supposed to evoke the band’s earliest days, however he additionally snuck in a bit of foreshadowing of the place the fellows find yourself.

“It is possibly one of many extra like ‘Anxious-y songs.’ However my largest inspiration on the time of us engaged on that was the primary Panic! At The Disco document, which is sort of a actually divisive document… in our sort of scene,” Melucci says.

“A bunch of, just like the chords in that track, I noticed, whereas we had been writing [it] are completely simply taken from the primary track on that document.”

Melucci calls that “controversial” as a result of Panic! At The Disco’s 2005 document “A Fever You Cannot Sweat Out” was instantly well-liked, and through the years that sort of polished emo grew to become too mainstream.

Anxious is not daring the hardcore scene to activate them, however Grady Allen says “For me, in writing that track, I believe it was simply coming from a reasonably uncooked frustration that I believe I skilled in our little nook of music subculture.”

Nonetheless, Allen says he would not name their new album a “departure” from the style that made them well-liked, both.

“That is simply who Anxious is. And these are the songs that we write,” he says.

After years of touring following their shock success, Grady Allen hit a wall.

Too younger for even a quarter-life disaster on the time, he nonetheless agonized about whether or not to return to varsity and get a level or the studio to attempt to seize lightning putting twice.

“I wished to have the area to have some experiences and simply stay some life exterior of a[n] eight passenger transit van,” Allen says.

“It has been so cool dwelling on this very unconventional, punk nook of the world. However in a whole lot of methods, my life felt very homogenous. You recognize, everyone was in a band, or managing a band … and so to step again in an area the place individuals may be pursuing, you already know, what are thought of like much more standard issues or careers. I really feel like that is given my life a whole lot of range that I did not have prior.”

Now 24, Allen has realized that the advantage of rising up is with the ability to replicate.

And upon additional reflection, possibly naming your band Anxious may not ship the message you need it to.

“I want we had named the band Bambi. That may have been such a very good band identify. You recognize, the draw back of naming a band once you’re 15 is, uh, I do not know. They don’t seem to be at all times winners,” Allen says.

So who’s Anxious now? Nicely the primary single off “Bambi,” would possibly offer you a clue.

YouTube

“Counting Sheep” combines the band’s hardcore roots and their melodic curiosity into one track. Pepper in some guitar riffs that sound straight from the Nineteen Nineties and also you get what Anxious has grow to be.

“After we had the final sense of all of the songs, I believe that was probably the most ‘Bambi’ one we had. I believe we simply wished to be fairly shameless on that track,” says Melucci.

Melucci provides that there was a acutely aware effort to squeeze as a lot into these 4 minutes as potential. The whole lot that impressed them, what they realized on the street and what they appeared ahead to.

Nevertheless it feels wealthy, not over-stuffed.

It is the right single as a result of it mirrors their very own younger lives — a lot expertise in so little time.

“I hope ‘Bambi’ affords us the power to maintain doing what we love,” says Allen.

Melucci provides that he hopes the album “helps see us for who we’re. So I am excited as a result of it looks like we’re probably the most genuine we have been.”

RELATED ARTICLES

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular

Recent Comments