Alternative Rock
Lowlives, ‘Freaking Out’ | Track By Track
Jun
Lowlives guide us track by track through their new album ‘Freaking Out’, out now via Spinefarm.
FREAKING OUT
“This was one of the first songs we wrote for the new record and we’ve actually been playing it live for the last couple of years as we were stoked with how it came out.
It came together pretty quickly writing wise, the main riff was pinched from an older song that just wasn’t working so we changed the key and sped it up a little then it all came together. It definitely has an early Foo Fighters’ kinda vibe to it. Lyrically it’s about that never ending vicious cycle of being miserable and feeding it with vices in the hope it’ll fix everything which it obviously never does.”
LIAR
“I [Lee Downer, frontman] wrote ‘Liar’ right in the middle of the first COVID lockdown once the panic had kinda settled down. The song came together in about 10 minutes which is usually a good sign that I’m onto something. Lyrically, it started out about putting on a brave face, pretending that I was OK throughout it when I probably wasn’t… almost convincing myself that everything would be alright. When we worked on the demo at Luke [Johnson, drums]’s studio, we wrote the rest of the lyrics, and it became more about being someone you’re not and feeling like you don’t fit in, to the point of creating a fake world in an attempt to feel more comfortable. You really want to tell the truth, but you’ve bought into the lies so much that they have become your own personal truth.”
GETTING HIGH ON BEING LOW
“This is the only song on the record that started with the lyric tag before anything else. Usually, it’s always riff and music first before any lyrics start to take shape. It’s kinda self-explanatory…it’s about embracing being a miserable cunt and accepting the hovel that you’ve created for yourself and being content and happy being on your own.”
SWAN DIVE
“‘Swan Dive’ is my personal favourite song on the record. Again, it came together really fast and was written in the height of COVID. I wanted to write something that had an Alice in Chains vibe to it hence the Staley/Cantrell type verse melodies. The line ‘I’ll swan dive without a care’ line was just a scratch vocal from the demo that we just built upon. It’s about feeling helpless and basically wanting to leap off a cliff. Happy as always. Fun fact… The interlude between ‘Swan Dive’ and ‘Loser’ is a rework of one of our previous singles called ‘I Don’t Like You’. The Pixies-esque vocals are actually my wife and Luke.”
LOSER
“‘Loser’ is a love song about a self proclaimed ‘loser’ who has fallen in love with someone they also see as a misfit outcast like themselves. Both as awkward and weird as each other just wishing they could be losers together. Musically it’s definitely the most pop song on the record and is an ode to 90’s alternative radio.”
YOU DON’T CARE
“I wrote ‘You Don’t Care’ as a total Smashing Pumpkins rip off and I have no shame in admitting that. I heard another band release a single that sounded so much like a ‘Gish’-era Pumpkins song and thought ‘oh, bands are allowed to do that?’ So I figured I’d write my own ode to them. I didn’t think ‘this has to be a LOWLIVES song for the record’ so I just rolled with it. I’m not too much of a shredder but it was a lot of fun to lay down some Corgan-esque solos.”
OUT OF STEP
“This one is entirely Luke’s baby…came fully fleshed out and I had zero notes. Really knocked it out of the park. Definitely has an early Nirvana vibe with a sprinkling of Brit pop thrown in.”
CLOSER THAN YOU KNOW
“Lyrically this is probably the darkest song on the record. I read an article about a husband writing a poem to his wife in the newspaper that was basically a love note to her about why killing himself was the best thing for her. I just rolled with that as I wasn’t particularly in the greatest place mentally and it was extremely relatable at the time.”
DAMIEN
“This is the only concept-based song on the record. We’d had the music element of the song down for a couple of years, but we never finished it. Luke came with a chorus, and I wrote the other riffs around it. We are both big fans of Alkaline Trio and in particular the song ‘Private Eye’ as the lyrics are on another level. I grew up on the Isle of Wight and there was a disappearance case about a boy named Damien Nettles who was only a couple years older than me. The story became nationwide news and has always fascinated me. Still to this day no one knows what happened to him. Some think he was murdered; some think he tried to swim across the Solent. Hopefully one day we’ll find out what happened.”
VERTIGO
“Musically I wrote this in maybe 20 minutes with the melodies. Just kinda clicked and came out fast. Writing the lyrics was fun though. Luke came over and we just sat outside on my deck and wrote them whilst feeding a bird we call Chaz who eats nuts from our hands. Lyrically it’s a love song about how that feeling can be so intense that it feels like you have vertigo. Makes you feel so high that it’s tough to come down. We wanted the song to be super stripped back, just acoustic guitar, vocals and cello so we had Nick Trygstad lay down some cello on it.”
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