You Me At Six have wound up their follow up album to the hugely successful Suckapunch, with Truth Decay slated for release on January 27, 2023.
Suckapunch saw You Me At Six experiment musically like never before, with the band going back to their roots somewhat for the incoming Truth Decay. So much so that the band sat down pre-production and outlined the path, direction and sound they wanted Truth Decay to follow before starting the writing process, with a unanimous decision to focus on the albums and period between 2010's Hold Me Down and 2014's Cavalier Youth being the focal point for proceedings.
Frontman Josh Franceschi sat down with HEAVY to help paint the bigger picture. We start by asking how this period between finishing the album and waiting for it to come out feels.
"You've gotta put it to bed," he replied, "if not... because ultimately a song's never finished. There's always something you could do or convince yourself that you have to do rewrites or change aspects of the song. I think this period of time now is kind of... luckily for us, we've got that sweet Christmas period coming up where we can switch off if we like but traditionally the lead up to any album is quite frustrating. You wish you were one of those artists who could drop an album the next day. It's the build up and anticipation of hoping people feel the same way that you do about it and that it leaves an imprint on your fans that they stick around (laughs). That sort of vibe.
As mentioned, Truth Decay follows a slightly different path sonically to Suckapunch, with Franceschi admitting the music has taken influence from You Me At Six's earlier material.
"I think at the start we were talking about... when we started the writing process we went on a couple of Air B'N'B writing trips and we were talking about what You Me At Six meant to us and I think the value of what kind of record we wanted to make, because Suckapunch was a great record - it had versatility and lots of different layers to it - but it was also a bit of a mix and match record. It wasn't one thing and it wasn't the other, it was spread across lots of different genres and sub genres, but with this I think we were really keen to focus in on one particular sound. So we started listening to our band, basically, and going through our back catalogue and identified what we thought our strengths were and we all unanimously agreed that we loved - and we still love being in the band generally - but we loved the period of time between Hold Me Down, Sinners Never Sleep and Cavalier Youth; the emo rock and pop punk stuff. And we thought how can we do this in 2022 without it feeling contrived and forced, and if it felt natural and sounded good then we were gonna run with it. We started writing a couple of tunes and it felt good, so it was like we have evolved enough that we can come back to this and we have something different to say. Something different to offer that particular route, if you like. The easy way to describe it would be retrospective You Me At Six, but in 2022."
In the full interview, Josh talks more about going back to the band's roots, how they did that, the difficulties in going back to go forward musically, why they chose that era of music, what being in You Me At Six means to him, the collaborations on the album and why those musicians were chosen and more.