Don Broco: ‘Our fans expect us to switch things up’ | Music | Entertainment

After five years of anticipation, Don Broco have finally released their fifth studio album, Nightmare Tripping via Fearless Records. The 11-track record follows the success of their 2021 album Amazing Things, which reached UK Number 1 on the Official Album Charts. A bold, genre-blending mash up, the Bedford band’s latest album pushes their musical boundaries by fusing early influences with the heavy metal sounds of today. Across the album, the band explore themes of sadness, anger and self-doubt, while taking a sharper look at the the world around them.

Since its release last Friday (March 27), the band have been celebrating with a handful of intimate release shows. Next comes a packed summer of festival dates, including a one-day event in Finsbury Park supporting Biffy Clyro, before they return for a headling tour in later September.

It’s already been a huge week, and the momentum behind Nightmare Tripping is only growing. This is Don Broco through and through – and, as Simon Delaney says in our interview, the fans are very much along for the ride. The Daily Express caught up with the band’s guitarist to dicuss the new record, the road to getting in finished, and what it means to finally have it out there.

Hi Simon, how are you? How does it feel to have the release out now?

Very good! It’s a real relief to have it out because we’ve been sitting on the finished album for at least six months now. It’s like a sense of closure on something that you’ve worked so hard on. Getting the feedback on it from people, that’s the thing that you’re looking forward to so much, and knowing that people are into it is good.

Fantastic album by the way, congratulations! It’s bold and unapologetic, were there moments you were concerned about pushing the boundaries too much?

I don’t think so. I think we’re really lucky, because we’re now onto album five our current fan base definitely expects us to switch things up a bit. I think if you’re into the band, you know that at the point we release an album it’s not going to be exactly the same as the last one.

From a creative point of view, being in a band for this long, if we’re not pushing things to a point that excites us, there’s kind of no point in doing it. The whole thing for us is creating something that makes us excited, that hopefully people can relate to. There’s never been, ‘oh, I wonder if we’re doing things a bit too heavy for some people?’ or ‘we’re doing things a bit too pop for some people’. It’s always just what’s going to make us feel good because we know that what makes us feel good in the past has made our fan base feel good. Even next time, on the next album, I think there’d be no hesitation in going even heavier or no hesitation in going even more pop. It’s just whatever feels right for us.

Would you say this album is an evolution of your sound or do you think it was more about the here and now, and just giving it a go?

I think it’s probably the here and now. For us, this is what felt right in the moment. Our musical journey, as fans, has always been rooted in heavy music. Our more formative years as musicians and consumers was when heavy music was booming, in the early 2000s. Definitely right now, it felt like the right time for us to make a heavy record and embrace that side of our sound.

Heavy music is having this moment and a lot of the bands that we grew up idolising are having these moments in their careers where they’re bigger than they have ever been. So, it’s just an incredible time. You kind of felt like, well, if we’re ever going to make a record that is a heavy iteration of what we do, now is the time to do that. It has felt so good making this record that I could see the next record being an evolution of this chapter, but whether we would indefinitely stay on this trajectory, I’ve got no idea.

You’ve already kicked off your release shows, and I saw Nightmare Tripping is a new addition to the setlist. How does it feel to play the new songs?

It feels amazing. That song was very special, and very exciting. Now, getting to play it and seeing the feedback in a live arena has just been insane. I normally can’t really hear the crowd singing along because we’ve got our in-ears and everything’s so loud, but the first time we played that in Kingston a couple of nights ago, it was like, oh my god, I can really hear the crowd singing. It was just amazing. I think it’s going to be a special song in the set list for many years to come.

Why did this time round feel like the right time to have features? What was different?

When you’re five albums deep you’re always looking for ways to keep things fresh and ways to keep things exciting. In the past, when we thought about features, we were like who do we know that we could bring in? It was just a case of sitting down and thinking about the songs and thinking how we could freshen them up and then just taking that punt on asking people that we didn’t know too well.

Is that what you did with Sam Carter from Architects?

We’ve never really crossed paths with the band, even though we’ve existed in the same scene for so long. We’ve never played shows with them, [and] we’ve never really hung with them. But when we wrote [True Believers], it felt like, wow, this lyrically would be so well suited to Sam, I wonder if we chatted to him whether he’d be up for it?

With the Nickelback thing, we had a really nice email from their management a few years before just saying the band were fans, and that was as far as it went. It felt so far-fetched that they would ever be on a song, but Rob [Damiani] was like, we should just ask them, you never know. So I think there was this big kind of thing as well of just not being scared to ask, and it just worked out really well.

It must have felt amazing knowing they were fans?

It was crazy, and then the fact they made the whole interaction and experience so seamless and professional. A lot of the time these things can be quite long winded and they’re like, oh, yeah, we’d like to do it, bit wishy-washy. But they were like, yes, what do you need? Here it is. Let’s go.

And how was that experience for you? I know you’re quite used to it just being one guitar, what was it like mixing it up?

It was awesome. It was really liberating. In the past, the one rule we’ve had as a band, and I’ve always had personally is, we’re a one guitar band, so everything has to be very one guitar focussed. But then when Nickelback said they were keen to go on the song, it was like we can suddenly have a guitar solo that has a traditional lead and rhythm guitar going on and it’s allowed. It was really cool.

Tell me a bit more about working with Dan Lancaster, how did the experience of working with him shape the album?

We knew that making a heavy record and making a really punchy record Dan was the guy to go with. The thing that Dan brings to the table for us, is he is insanely musical. If we’ve got a musical idea, he’s very good at refining and honing it in a technical way, but he can also make stuff sound incredible really, really quickly.

This was like a really good case in point with Nightmare Tripping. The demo was all there and all the parts were there, but our version of it felt so disjointed and really clunky. We were like there’s definitely something in this song, but we can’t figure out a way to make the journey satisfying. He was able to use his production skills to make that journey really slam and feel amazing within the space of like a couple of hours. Suddenly something that felt disjointed and unsatisfying felt really exciting and tightly knit together. He’s amazing for that.

Was the overall journey of the album carefully mapped out in the studio or was it very sort of instinctive?

So, it was interesting. The sequencing of the record came right at the end. When we’re writing the songs and when we’re putting it all together as a body of work, we’re not really thinking about the journey as a whole. We’re just trying to serve each song. Trying to figure out the journey of it all was really difficult. We were like, oh, this one doesn’t flow into this one. How do we make this song go into this? It was a really tough sequencing process, and easily the toughest out of all the five records we’ve done.

But then Rob came up with this sequence of tracks that felt like it fit really well. The theme of the album is very much rooted in those parts of life where everything’s going really badly, and then before you see any kind of upswing, it can feel like it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. But then The Corner felt like this moment of relief and light at the end of the tunnel. It’s like there’s the potential that everything is going to change and everything might be all right. So having The Corner at the end felt like the cornerstone, so let’s just try and figure out how we get to that point.

On that note, were there any that were dropped off the album that you had lined up?

We probably took about 30 to 35 songs to Dan and that’s when he becomes really useful because he can listen to them all and go: I know that I’m going to work best on this tune. So he’s really good at funnelling down what we’ve got into the songs that then make it onto the record.

Do you have any personal favourites on the record?

It always happens, but the songs that aren’t singles! It always tends to be the song that you haven’t listened to a million times that become the favourites. I think at the moment on the record, Somersaults and Ghost in the Night are currently my favourites. I can still really enjoy listening to them, whereas if I listen to True Believers, I’m like, this song’s awesome, but I’m also tarnished with this memory of listening to this song 150 times while having to play the hardest I’ve ever played in a music video last week. There’s this trauma attached to the memories of some of these processes. But with Somersaults and Ghosts In The Night they still feel really fresh.

Are there any songs that you’re seeing fans particularly enjoying?

Interestingly a lot of the reactions I’m seeing online are of people loving Pacify Me which was interesting because that was a song that we really weren’t sure whether it was even going to make the record. Typically, it then becomes the song that everyone’s talking about.

What did you want the fans to get from the album, or feel as they were listening?

From a fan perspective, we wanted to let them know that it’s okay. If you’re in a dark place, it’s okay to be in that dark place. Everyone around is probably going through really difficult stuff. Even when things go from bad to worse, there is going to be a way to get out of it. But you want to combine that feeling with all these different elements.

There’s so much frustration in the album, there’s so many parts of it that are speaking about more personal difficulties, but also in a song like True Believers, it’s very much a commentary on the state of how things are in a broader way in the world, and in this country. You want people to be able to relate to it on many different levels and to pair the music with that sense of frustration and then bring people out of the other side of it.

True Believers is probably the most confrontational on the album – it can’t necessarily be interpreted in any other way. Do you feel a responsibility to do that?

So, Rob is 100% the lyricist, he sits down and he pens everything. If he sees or feels something in a social or political point of view that he does not feel is right, he does feel a responsibility to put pen to paper and to talk about it. Me, personally, I’m not as comfortable. I don’t know if I should be saying that or I’m scared about what people might think. Rob, to his amazing credit, is like, no, we should be talking about it, and we should be dealing with it because we are in a privileged position where there are some people that are going to listen to us.

With that, do you feel making the album has helped confront those darker and heavier themes?

Yeah, I definitely think it’s been cathartic. Using the record to talk about some things and feel a certain energy has been so useful for us, but I think if you carried on making those records again and again, in the same theme, you might put yourself into a bit of a downer.

I’m not saying the next record’s going to be sunshine and bunnies and everything’s lovely, but I think it will definitely have a different tone now that we’ve been able to work through this one.

Nightmare Tripping is out now.