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“It’s not always ups and downs… Sometimes life is just downs and downs. Or there’s a tiny little up, right before you plunge back down again,” shrugs Don Broco frontman Rob Damiani, as we begin our conversation about the band’s latest era.

At first glance, that statement may appear a little defeatist, but there’s a particular kind of honesty that arrives when you stop trying to force the bright side of things.

Not because you’ve given up, but because you’ve finally clocked that optimism isn’t always the most useful response to pain. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit something hurts, and let it hurt, without scrambling to turn it into a lesson. That mindset sits at the heart of Don Broco’s fifth album, ‘Nightmare Tripping’.

“In terms of our personal lives, these have been the darkest few years,” Rob explains. “There are some things you get over quickly, others that might take years, and some that you never get over. This was the first time that we have had to navigate certain losses in our lives, and we had to work out how to navigate that not only as individual human beings but as a band. You should try not to lose hope, but sometimes trying to find a positive angle is not the right thing. You just need to live with that situation and with the feelings that you’re going through.”

If 2021’s groundbreaking ‘Amazing Things’ was a colourful celebration of finding hope in the darkness, ‘Nightmare Tripping’ is the opposite end of the spectrum. A heavy monochromatic comedown to soundtrack life’s toughest moments

This is Don Broco’s loudest and most candid chapter to date – welcome to the story of ‘Nightmare Tripping’.

THE SOUND

For a band as unpredictable as Don Broco, the idea of setting boundaries might seem almost impossible. But going into album five, Rob knew there were two guiding principles they couldn’t ignore.

First: make it heavier.

“We had such a good time taking things heavier on ‘Amazing Things’, so early on in the process, we knew that we wanted to do that again,” he says. “It makes our lives so much more fun when we’re on stage. This time, we wanted to take that further than we ever had before without falling into the trap of sounding like any other band. We wanted to embrace the heavier bands that have inspired us, and go back to the early Don Broco sound, before we even made an album. Back then, we were fresh out of school and just messing around. We didn’t care about any rules, and we didn’t care about trying to make a three-minute, radio-friendly rock song. When you’re just a band playing gigs to your mates at school, there’s no worry about how it’s going to go down from a commercial standpoint. We wanted to rediscover that feeling.”

Stepping back into that mindset with the knowledge they’ve gained over four studio albums, this time the band are wholeheartedly embracing their earliest musical influences. Pushing their sound into areas that they have previously shied away from, every track is underpinned by an undeniable strand of Broco DNA, but each one boasts something we haven’t heard from the four-piece before.

“It references the bands that first made us pick up instruments. Bands like Limp Bizkit, System Of A Down and Deftones,” Rob explains.

“That was such an incredibly exciting era in music history, and it’s awesome that people are discovering it again. There are teenagers now getting into heavy music for the first time, and you can see the same jaw-dropping reaction that we had when we were younger. We dipped our toe into that sound on ‘Amazing Things’, but this album was about delving into it further while still making it our own.”

If ‘embrace heaviness’ was the first mantra defining the course of ‘Nightmare Tripping’, then ‘chase cohesion’ was the second. Having written more songs for the album than they ever had before, Rob and his bandmates were able to whittle the tracklist down in an extremely structured way, picking each demo apart to ensure it matched the journey the record was taking in their minds.

“We wanted this album to feel like a real moment for us as a band. For the first time in our career, we aimed for a real unified sound and theme,” he says.

Journeying from the nu-metal bite of ‘Cellophane’ and the adrenaline of ‘Hype Man’ to the thumping, hypnotic spiral of ‘Disappear’ and the seductive electronics of ‘Euphoria’, while every song on ‘Nightmare Tripping’ clearly exists within the same world, Broco are still keeping us on our toes with this one.

‘Ghost In The Night’ and ‘The Corner’ lean into the more tender, introspective parts of their sound, ‘Swimming Pools’ adopts an indie swagger, but then – of course – there are the full-throttle party starters.

One of those is the title track – a five-and-a-half-minute beast that storms forward on crunchy guitars and chant-ready hooks – but perhaps the most arena-ready moment comes with the euphoric ‘True Believers’, a track fuelled by fun and destined to become one of the most explosive parts of the band’s live show.

“When I first heard that riff, I was transported to that feeling you get during a show,” Rob explains. “I mentioned us wearing our influences on our sleeves a little more this time around, and that’s our Rage Against The Machine song. It’s that same anger at the world, and that refusal to mince any words. Musically, it doesn’t sound too similar, but the energy, the vibe and the simplicity feels in that realm to me. A few years ago, I would have shied away from that song because it sounds too obvious. I’d have been worried that people would listen to it and just know I’m a huge Rage fan. Now, I don’t care. We’re five albums deep, and if it feels right then we should go for it. I’m so stoked about that song, and I can’t wait to play it live. I’m hoping that we cross paths with Sam [Carter, Architects vocalist] at a show in the future too.”

THE LYRICS

Don Broco have never been afraid of emotional honesty, but ‘Nightmare Tripping’ feels like the first time they’ve stopped trying to soften the edges of it.

Created during the global lockdown, ‘Amazing Things’ was an album that strove to find the silver linings. This time around, there’s less ‘everything will be all right’ and more ‘this is what it feels like when it isn’t’.

Grounded in emotional acceptance, ‘Cellophane’ confronts fragility and the fear of admitting you’re not coping, ‘Disappear’ tackles the impossible weight of trying to love someone through their darkest moments, and ‘True Believers’ grapples with Rob’s anger at the world around him.

Elsewhere, ‘Euphoria’ is about desperately trying to recapture something you once felt, and the album’s title track blurs the line between dreams and reality.

“I saw an interview with Rick Rubin where he spoke about using albums as a snapshot of your life,” the vocalist nods.

“They’re almost like a diary entry of what you’re going through right there and then, and that’s how I approached this album.

“It’s a dark album… Probably our darkest and heaviest yet,” he shrugs.

“It felt like the most appropriate music to soundtrack our lives over the last few years. We’re dealing with those emotions and not trying to sugarcoat anything from a lyrical perspective. The solace in it was knowing that we could experience these things together as friends. We’ve been friends since school, and going through it all as a team really helps. That’s what the song ‘Hype Man’ is about, having that person to lift you up when you are going through something difficult. No one in this world can get through the things that life throws at you alone. You need friends and family around you to support you.”

THE COLLABORATORS

To pull off an album this heavy, this textured, this deliberately chaotic, you need to ensure you’re teaming up with people who understand the vision on the deepest level.

With that in mind, there was no one else Broco could have tasked with making these songs glow than longtime producer Dan Lancaster. Having worked on both ‘Amazing Things’ and 2018’s ‘Technology’, he’s become an integral part of their sound, mastering the art of making a riff hit like a truck without sterilising any of its humanity. Someone who’s distinctly in tune with the band’s DNA, that same instinct shaped how the album’s guest features came together.

Take, for example, ‘True Believers’, and how from the second Rob first heard that buildup, he knew precisely the kind of crazy energy they needed to add – and precisely the man for the job.

“I imagined it live, and I imagined the buildup being twice as long. It’s going to build the tension, and we knew that we needed some mad bastard to run on and tear up the stage at the end of it,” he laughs.

“I just knew Sam Carter was the right guy because the aggression he brings to his vocals is insane. With what Sam stands for as a person, and the nature of what ‘True Believers’ is about… It was the perfect fit.”

“I’ve never actually hung out with Sam much before. I’ve only met him at occasional festivals, but I get a kick out of collaborations that people might not necessarily expect. I sent him an Instagram DM, and he got back to me within a day. I’m pretty sure he was down before he even heard the song! We were missing every deadline we had for this album, and he had one day to get his stuff done. Architects were so busy, and they were on tour with Linkin Park at the time in Europe. Sam was back in the UK for two days for a wedding, and during that time, he came to the studio and got it finished. We were so grateful that he managed to make it work because it’s so much more fun when you can be in the room together. He could have done his parts on a computer and sent it over, and it still would have been sick, but being able to vibe it out in the studio together was special.”

You may have noticed there that Rob mentioned his penchant for unexpected collaborations, and we guarantee that Nickelback being on the latest Broco record wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card.

One of the most perfectly judged curveballs imaginable, it’s a move that couldn’t make more sense. But how did they know it was right?

“We didn’t,” Rob grins.

“It was a lovely surprise when we got his vocal back! We did talk about using AI to put Chad [Kroeger]’s voice in, to check if it would work, but it felt too icky.

“It came about after Nickelback sent us an email after their guitarist saw one of our shows in Canada. They had checked out all our tunes, took a deep dive into our catalogue, and just wanted to let us know that they had become fans. They’re a band that we’ve grown up listening to, so we were beyond excited.”

Both bands sharing a love for huge riffs and an unstoppable live energy, that email made asking for a collaboration feel possible. Rob and his bandmates assumed it would be a no, and at first, it was. After an email landed in their inbox from their management saying the guys were too busy working on the final details of their own album, they shrugged it off and carried on with their day. And then, suddenly…

“The day after that, we got another message saying they loved the track and wanted to be part of it,” Rob grins.

“There aren’t many rock bands that even your grandma’s heard of, and they have so many hits under their belt. People forget how meaty Nickelback’s riffs are, though.

“‘Nightmare Tripping’ is a song all about the twists and turns, and their parts on it just added another level to that surprise. Ryan [Peake, Nickelback guitarist] played the solo at the end of the song, which is huge because Si [Delaney, guitarist] is proper militant about Broco being a one-guitar band. He broke his rule to allow us to have those parts, and they took it to a whole new level. It meant a lot for a band like them to have given us that vote of confidence.”

THE TITLE & ARTWORK

For the first time in Don Broco’s career, the album title came last.

In the past, every one of the band’s albums has taken its name from a track that instantly felt like the glue that binds the whole thing together. This time, though, there were two or three other names floating around throughout the process (one of which Rob is particularly keen to withhold in case it’s used for a future project). When they first hit play on Nickelback’s collaboration, however, there was no denying what the title track needed to be.

“We had finished it and put it to one side. Hearing them on it made it feel like a whole new song,” Rob smiles.

“With Chad singing the chorus, I was almost able to listen to it as someone outside of the creative process. We always loved that song, but when it finally came together, I realised that it was probably the best song we’ve ever written. I don’t think anyone would have even considered it as a single before then, but once Nickelback were on it, we realised that it encompassed a lot of what we’re trying to do on this album.”

With the song encapsulating the sonic ambition of this era and its title capturing life’s tendency to move from one nightmare into another, never giving you the chance to regain your footing or find clarity, the more they considered it, the more perfect it felt.

Pushing everything about their band into new territories, it makes sense that the album artwork for ‘Nightmare Tripping’ also looks starkly different to anything Don Broco has shared before. A deliberate reaction to the vibrant colour palette of ‘Amazing Things’, the stunning monochrome piece was created by artist Barbara Kuebel by drawing directly onto wood.

“To me, it represents the interconnectivity between people,” Rob explains.

“There are a lot of songs on this album about relationships. Not just romantic ones, but the relationship between friends and the confrontations between two people. It also signifies the battling that we do within our own minds.

“We wanted something that felt as real as possible for the artwork, and Barbara’s work felt perfect for that. There are all these imperfections that come about because of the wood grain, and every piece she does is completely different. She roughly plans it, but you never really know how it will come out.

“I liked that, because even though we’re trying to make a modern rock record that sounds as big as possible, we also tried to keep some of the little mistakes that we made during the recording in there. The technology exists now, and the temptation is to just process everything to within an inch of its life. We wanted to find a balance, and part of that was leaving in those things that make it feel human, while still making sure the songs slapped.”

THE FUTURE

When asked what he hopes people take away from ‘Nightmare Tripping’, Rob pauses.

“I haven’t thought about that yet… I guess I’d like to think that it’s a bridge between our past and our future.”

An album that sharpens every aspect of Don Broco’s sound into something built for the biggest rooms, that feels like the perfect way to sum up album five. But beneath the riffs and the genre-switching whiplash, the heart of ‘Nightmare Tripping’ is simple. It’s four friends, in a room, making sense of the worst years of their lives, the only way they
know how.

“Making this album has reinforced how exciting making music can be for me. There’s this kick I get out of being in a room with those guys and surprising ourselves,” Rob finishes.

“There’s so much music out in the world, and you can find it all at the click of your fingers. To feel like we’ve made any impression on the world of rock music is my biggest buzz in the studio. Writing this album has solidified how important it is for me to be doing that.

“Talking to fans, hearing how these new songs are affecting them, and connecting with them… That’s the best thing about music. The pain, the struggle, and everything that we’ve been through has inspired these songs, and now they’re helping other people. Even if it doesn’t give anyone hope, it can give them some sort of enjoyment. Turning these negative emotions into something that has value for so many people is the best thing about music, and the greatest thing about being a musician for me. That’s why I do it.”