Matt McAndrew from Slaves talks new record 'To Better Days'
Scene Daddy had the opportunity to speak with vocalist Matt McAndrew of Slaves as the band approach the release of their fourth album To Better Days. The Voice alum covered everything from wanting to tour with Bring Me the Horizon to how he’s meshing his own style with the California band’s sound.
How has the transition been joining the band since you started in 2019?
The transition has been interesting. So, I feel like any time you are an artist, your audience is always trying to play catch up in terms of… we’ve gone away and written this album, and you haven’t heard it but we’ve heard it, you know? So it’s always that kind of a vibe. I mean we knew what we had on deck and obviously nobody else did. So to be able to slowly sparse it out to people and get their reactions has been cool. And seeing the comments [range from] pretty negative to pretty positive has been the journey.
To Better Days is going to be released on August 7th. How was the process of creating this album with the band?
The process has been really fun because it was me writing to instrumentals that the band was coming up with. So sometimes there would be two or three pretty fleshed-out instrumental ideas, you know pre-production, and they would go re-record everything perfectly. I pretty quickly had a pretty fat stack of instrumentals and I was trying to play catch up. It was like, “This all sounds great but I have to write a lot of lyrics.” It was fun.
This is the heaviest type of music that I’ve been a part of. Just the tone and the vibe of the songs musically is what determines my writing. Usually when I do my solo stuff I might come up with an idea in my head and then I’ll put an acoustic guitar and it will just grow from that. And it’s very limited to whatever’s in my brain. So to hear these guys come up with stuff that I would never come up with and then write to that is really awesome.
What are the general themes of the album?
I think the whole record is just about relationships. Whether that’s romantic relationships or one with a friend or just one with yourself, a kind of inner monologue or a dialogue at times. A back and forth in your own mind. To me, that’s the theme. You know overall it’s kind of melancholy. Things are not super hunky-dory happy. It’s a dark, moody, minor kind of feel. I was able to write about a lot of things that have been on my mind and put them on paper and I was happy to find music I could put that to.
Do you have a favorite track on the upcoming album? If so, which one and why?
I would say that “Talk to a Friend” is probably my favorite record off the album. It’s fun because you never know what fans are going to like. So going into it, I thought maybe that it was not going to be a big smash hit for us, but I just know that I really liked it and the band really liked it. So we were like “Come on, we should do a video for this one.” It’s an important song.
You guys have put out quite a few singles and just released a fifth one. Is there a reason you are releasing so many before officially dropping the album?
So the record has been recorded since last year, like it was finished last August. So the plan was to record a bunch of music videos so that we would have a long runway because we didn’t know exactly when we wanted to drop the album. I think we eventually planned earlier this year or spring the latest, but we were hoping to drop it with some kind of a tour. Now because of COVID and nobody is touring, we didn’t want to delay it anymore. This is the longest we put it off, but the good news is we have all these singles to keep people engaged as we’re putting it out.
As it turns out, I personally think it’s a good way to drop an album. It seems kind of funny that somebody would put out two or three songs from a record and then just drop the whole thing and hope people listen to it. I feel like people’s attention spans are so short and that’s not how people listen to music anymore anyways. This way each single is going to be heard and people can have a chance to digest it and when it goes up, it’s almost going up as a playlist nowadays. Much more like a singles-driven market like you would have had back in the 50s or something. I think it just makes sense and it makes me laugh when they are like, “Come on guys. You can’t release every single song on the album.”And I’m like “… or can we?” We aren’t going to release every single song but I haven’t seen a downside of doing it this way, so we’ll see.
With the coronavirus pandemic, how has the quarantine affected Slaves? What have you guys had to put off? Have you been trying to work on new music?
I mean we’re talking about trying to get a next record going right now as far as writing goes. I think we all prefer to do it in-person with each other. We came to the last one by starting with a blank slate and getting in the room together. I had like one pre-chorus idea written down and the guys had a few riffs but for the most part, we like to vibe off of each other. Honestly the last thing we did together was a little Florida tour in December. We haven’t really done anything since. It’s just been rolling out this record because everything has been stopped. I’m glad that we’ve had so much stuff that we can put out now and I’ve just been trying to not die. Stay alive. Stay safe.
If you could go out on tour to support the new album tomorrow, who would you bring and why?
What I really want to do is go back to Europe and take my mom because she has never been out of the States. I don’t know how practical that is, but maybe at one point if we have a lot of room so she could travel in luxury that would be kind of awesome. That is definitely a big goal of mine and she’s kind of a history nerd. I think she would get such a kick about going to Paris or something. She lives in Philly which is about as old as it gets for US history, but that’s nothing compared to Europe so I think she would just really love that.
If you could create your own dream tour lineup, which bands would you bring with you?
As far as a headliner, I would love to tour with Awaken I Am. Obviously Jimmy [Alexander] from Awaken produced our record. Super cool guys. I think the band is a big fan of Sun Fleet. I freaking love Dayseeker. In terms of us touring with a bigger band, I would love to tour with Sleeping With Sirens. Bring Me [the Horizon] has always been a goal of mine for anything. It’s always been, “Let’s open for Bring Me.” To me they’re the pinnacle of a modern rock band right now.
Do you think it will be easy for fans to transition from the previous sound of Slaves to the new album To Better Days?
I mean if they have some singles of mine from The Voice, it should be pretty painless. I would imagine someone who is a die-hard Johnny Craig fan, who has been following him from before he was in Slaves, it will be a little challenging. I think at that point you have to kind of look at the band as a new band, which is what we sort of do. Again, the writing was really based off what the guys were bringing to the table with writing instrumentals and me building on top of it. There is a natural continuation from Beautiful Death to this record because the band is largely unchanged. I think a big part of the band’s sound comes from members that are still in it, so it will be similar in a lot of ways.
I think we are trying to use this record as a pivot record where we’re really grateful for everybody who stayed with us and gave us a chance. We were able to engage that audience and I hope they’re able to follow us on this journey. I mean it’s not going to be much of a departure, but it’s going to be a signal of the band moving forward.
Is there anything that you want fans and listeners to know about your upcoming album or any news in general you want to share?
Speaking about the upcoming album, I do like to tell people that it was recorded last year because I always want credit for stuff like that because we were moving at such a fast pace. Maybe the next one will be able to be released sooner. We all worked really hard on it and we are looking forward to a time when we can hopefully emerge in a different way and play them live.
Slaves will debut ‘To Better Days‘ via a livestream release show on August 5th