Photo Credit: Wyatt Clough
Silverstein
It could be argued that pop punk and emo have never been bigger than the current resurgence that the genres are seeing. Two simultaneous waves are moving right now in the alternative music subgenre, as a new generation of talent are bringing emo aesthetics and subject matter in vogue once again, while a previous generation, now with disposable income, are reveling in the nostalgia of their angsty high school years. It’s an interesting phenomenon, especially as streaming services work as the bridge between the generational divide.
Some bands, however, have remained consistent through the lean years, thanks to a disciplined touring schedule and a loyal fanbase. One of them is Silverstein, who with 10 albums in their catalog, and an eleventh on the way this May, are currently touring with hardcore acts Beartooth and The Devil Wears Prada. The tour will be in Milwaukee this Sunday night at The Rave, and frontman Shane Told discussed the state of both the band and the genre.
There’s a new album on the way, but the band released a record in March of 2020. Have you had a chance to play songs from ‘A Beautiful Place to Drown’ yet?
Not too much! We put out the record, and we're really proud of that last album. So we'll be playing a few jams from that one and also a few jams from the upcoming record which is coming out on May 6. It's called Misery Made Me. We’re going to be playing some new music from those records but then also also some old stuff too, so it'll be a nice mix, and we're with some really great company in Beartooth and The Devil Wears Prada, so it'll be a really great night.
I’m assuming it wasn’t the plan to put out two albums in quick succession. When did you guys start writing the most recent record?
We put out records pretty much every two years, almost like clockwork, so it was pretty much on schedule. But I think after putting out A Beautiful Place To Drown in March 2020, we went back home. It was depressing, because we had to cancel the rest of our shows, a 20th anniversary tour and all this stuff. We head home and then it was like ‘Okay, we just put a record out we're not going to start writing another one right now.’ We were creatively kind of tapped. So it took a little while, and I think we had to do some minor mental gymnastics a little bit to get ourselves into a place where we could feel like ‘the world is a mess, everything's crazy, but let's try to write some songs.’
That took a while, but I think at the end of 2020 was when we started putting some ideas down, and then we recorded the record last year. It was a really great experience. We all lived together. The first time we lived together and made a record since like 2007, and I think you could hear it. You can hear the that we’re a unit on this record, and we all had the same kind of goals that we were trying to achieve. We're pretty proud of it.
In addition to the tour, you’re one of the many bands playing the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas later this year with lots of other bands from the Warped Tour years. The announcement was all over the internet, but how did you guys get involved with this?
It's funny. Las Vegas is like my second home. My sister lives there, and she's lived there for 15 years. I spend every Christmas there. I actually happened to be in Vegas and I got an email that said ‘Hey, are you down to play Vegas in October 2022 with My Chemical Romance?’ and I replied to the email pretty much instantly, saying ‘Yeah, sure. Sounds good.’ That was probably at the end of September. Didn't think too much about it.
I was like ‘this isn't happening for like a year’ and then literally the morning they announced the full bill I got an email saying ‘here’s the ad mat, here's all the bands playing, we're announcing it in 30 minutes.’ I looked at the lineup because I hadn't seen any of it before. The only band I knew that was playing was My Chemical Romance, and the more I looked, the more excited I got. I couldn't believe some of the bands that were coming out of the woodwork to do this thing so it was like ‘this is probably going o make a pretty big splash’ and isn't that an understatement. People are still freaking out about it, and it's been like months now that it’s been announced. People thought it was a scam, like it was fake, which is funny, but it's real and there's a lot of bands. You’re not going to be able to go see all 64 bands or whatever it is, but it's going to be a pretty epic celebration of you know that era of music, and we're pretty excited to be a part of it.
There’s a nostalgia feel to things like that even though you’re still consistently putting out records. Is there any concern about affecting the integrity of your music?
That’s a really good observation and a really good question. Honestly, we are probably one of a pretty short list of bands that have been together the whole time and putting out records. We’re still putting out relevant music. I think we're very proud of the fact that we're able to do an event like this, which obviously has a lot of nostalgia, and then we're also able to do a tour like we're doing with Beartooth this month. I think that that is a pretty special thing, and we're proud that we're in a fairly short list of other bands there.
It's always been important to us that every time we do an anniversary tour, whether it's celebrating an anniversary of Discovering The Waterfront or When Broken Is Easily Fixed or one of those albums, we're also celebrating a brand new single or a brand new album that a big part of our fanbase even more excited about than the anniversary. So I think it's a pretty cool position to be in, and we're happy to do that. There's going to be plenty of people that come out to this thing to see bands like My Chemical Romance or The Starting Line or Armor For Sleep that haven't been doing much, or haven’t been putting music out in a long time, and they're gonna say ‘oh yeah I remember Silverstein’ not realizing we've been together the whole time or that we've just put out our tenth album. Those people those are great people to have on our side again. I think it's exciting to be able to do both, and that's going to be a fun thing. We're also doing an emo cruise later in the year with Dashboard Confessional and Underoath and some of our other friends as well. It's going to be a really good time.
