Interview by Kris Peters
Bad Wolves hit the jackpot with their 2021 album Dear Monsters, satisfying existing fans of the band with their output, while also drawing a new breed of followers to their music.
It was a success in every way, which made their follow-up album Die About It - out now - all the more significant.
Die About It came with all of the usual fanfare, declaring it "pushes the boundaries of their soundscape in pursuit of new sonic dimensions" and more, but, as they say, the proof is always in the pudding. So is Die About It as good as everyone says?
HEAVY thinks so, but to gauge the album from the band's viewpoint we sat down with drummer John Boecklin to discuss more.
"Feeling good. Very fresh," he enthused. "It feels like a great start to a cycle. We hit the road with Bush in America. I feel the record has a lot of… not avant guard things… but things we certainly haven't tried before which makes us feel not stuck in a rut doing the same old. Rock radio, in general, is the kind of band we are, but we get very, very, very heavy in songs on this one. You can feel it, every album has a creative rut of getting kind of stuck in certain formulas, so we tried to do the best we can to stay out of that and do songs that feel more expressive and make you feel more emotions than some of the past songs."
We ask John to dive deeper into the musical side of the album.
"I think where we started it was we weren't going for anything," he measured. "We dropped any ideas of 'well, this worked in the past, let's do that'. Sometimes we did that stuff, like 'this did really good, let's do some of that'. I think some of the first songs that we wrote for this song musically were Die About It, the song, N.D.A which in the end has a two-minute saxophone solo, which is just stuff we had never tried before."
In the full interview, John explores the different sounds and approaches to making the album, the singles released and if they are a good sonic representation of the album, how much they experimented and where the band's limits were, if there was any extra pressure after the success of Dear Monsters, the overall theme on Die About It, having the band co-produce the album and some of the pros and cons with that, how Bad Wolves' sound has changed over their journey and more.