Nails: Meet the New Angriest Band in Hardcore
“Music is emotion,” says Nails guitarist and vocalist Todd Jones. “When we started as a band, the idea was to project the emotion of anger – and as of today, it’s still the same goal.”
Like the two Nails albums before it – 2010’s Unsilent Death and 2013’s Abandon All Life – the Southern California trio’s forthcoming You Will Never Be One of Us (out June 17th on Nuclear Blast) delivers one cathartic burst of unfiltered rage after another. Eight of the album’s 10 tracks fall short of the two-minute mark, the arrangements assiduously avoiding any softer sections that might give the listener a brief reprieve from the band’s intense death metal-meets-hardcore assault.
“We have to keep the wheel moving,” says Jones of the preference for compositional brevity that he shares with bassist John Gianelli and drummer Taylor Young. “We could make our songs longer – we could repeat the verses and the choruses another two or three times and accomplish a longer song. But that would make the momentum of the wheel slower. Our band is built on extremity and aggression, and we just want to keep the momentum going as hard as we can.”
That said, You Will Never Be One of Us – produced by Kurt Ballou of Converge – does contain some surprises for Nails fans, including their longest track to date, the eight-minute album closer “They Come Crawling Back,” as well as more defined vocal and guitar hooks across the board.
“When we made Abandon All Life, we set out to make a really aggressive record that was just pummeling,” Jones explains. “But in all that pummeling, I think some of the hooks got lost. At the end of that record, you feel like you got beat up, but you don’t remember much of the beating. So with this album, we still wanted to have the intensity there, but we also wanted to focus a little more on hooks.”
Still, the You Will Never Be One of Us track “Savage Intolerance” – which makes its debut above, along with its new video – is easily one of the most punishing things Nails have ever recorded. “That was one of the first tunes we wrote for the record,” says Jones. “We were trying to go real fucking heavy, and take it as far as we could; we were just going full bore, with lots of double bass and some blast beats on the breakdown. It’s a step to the next level for us, in terms of being extreme. It’s one of our favorite tracks on the record.”
The lyrical inspiration for “Savage Intolerance” came from one of the things that pisses Jones off the most these days: the violence being committed by the Salafi Jihadist group ISIS.
“I wanted to make something lyrically that matched the intensity of the music,” he says. “I can’t go online or turn on the TV or listen to talk radio these days without hearing something that’s going down with ISIS – these people are just totally intolerant about anything and everything that’s going on around them, and they just don’t give a fuck, and I think that’s total bullshit. I believe in peace; I think people should live in peace. But the fact is, that’s what’s going on, so we wrote a song about it.”
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