“Running throughout all our records, there is a theme of sorts that is indicative and reflective of our collective consciousness, but we’ve haven’t moved into that concept thing yet. We haven’t done enough drugs yet – give us time.”
“From what I can gather, this record Light Grenades, I don’t think it sounds like anything or even resembles anything that’s currently popular in music at all,” posits Incubus guitar Mike Einziger. “Which could mean one of two things: that it’s either dated and nobody’s going to want to listen to it and it sounds out of touch, or it’s amazing and it’s different.
“Watch which one they edit out,” says vocalist Brandon Boyd with a laugh. “This record is a revolution; it’s amazing.” He draws my attention to a Light Grenades poster that Boyd is currently drawing on, turning the band into ‘Ye Ol’ Incubus’, and the quote which reads ‘it kicks, it bites, it loves, it hurts. It’s the closest we’ve come to the band we want to be’. ”This right here, I didn’t say that. A journalist said to me, ‘you know Brandon, this record kicks, bites, loves and hurts. Would you say that?’ I was like ‘yeah, why not. I think it’s the closest we’ve come to the band we want to be’. So they print ‘it kicks, it bites, it loves, it hurts…’”
Despite the fact that Boyd doesnn’t say it, he might as well, because it’s an apt description of Incubus’ sixth full-length record. Boyd and Einziger have flown into Sydney to promote the new record, which encompasses the full range of Incubus sounds, making for one of the most well-rounded Incubus LPs in years. They explain that the process for creating Light Grenades was much different for the band as compared to previous albums. Whereas the majority of Incubus’ records have been made in a short period of time, the band deliberately took much longer to write the songs, allowing them time to grow and develop.
“This time around, when we had good ideas we chased them just as fast [as the older material], but if an idea wasn’t amazing, we were like ‘hmmm, let’s put this one aside, and think about it a little bit,” explains Boyd.
“Even the good ones too,” continues Einziger. “We would say ‘we know we love this, let’s put this aside’ and we’d move on to something else. Going into the studio and recording them, it was like unwrapping a present and discovering them again for the first time.
“We don’t really make demos. We’ll record us playing the songs live and maybe add a couple of things to it… and that’s really all our records are anyway, just playing the songs live and adding things to it. Except for S.C.I.E.N.C.E. and Make Yourself, the last three records we’ve made have all been pretty much live. Even the majority of Brandon’s singing is done live with everyone in the room.”
“I do better,” adds Boyd. ”There are a few things that I rerecord when I’m just by myself in the room, but I love the energy of being with the band in the room and playing and recording my parts at the same time. I feel like we capture the energy better. We’re a live band, and we always have been. So we set up in the recording studio and go and it sounds awesome and I love it like that. It’s not studio trickery – we sound like that when we’re playing the songs live too. I’m proud of it.”
Light Grenades was produced by Brendan O’Brien, who also worked on Incubus’ previous record A Crow Left of the Murder. ”From my point of view, Brendan challenges me as a writer and as a singer more than any other producer ever has, partly because I ask him to,” explains Brandon about the reasons behind the choice of producer. “Both records we’ve come into, I’ve asked him to push me. So when it comes down to it, if I have a lyric or melodic idea, I’ll show it to him and a lot of times he’s like ‘great, let’s put it down’ but sometimes he’s like ‘this is cool, but it’s not done yet. I think you know it’s not done yet’. And I’m like ‘no, I think it’s done’.”
“It’s totally reverse psychology,” laughs Einziger.
“And it fucking works too,” says Boyd. ”He’s like ‘dude, its cool, don’t worry about it today. Go home and think about it. Think about where else the song could go. Just start digging’. I leave the studio, at home late at night and I’m like ‘he’s right, damnit!’”
“You’re like a little kid wishing death upon his mother after being sent to his room,” Einziger says. ”God, please kill her!”
“Then the next morning you’re like [fakes crying] ‘I’m sorry mum’,” laughs Boyd. ”He’s able to get more out of me artistically than I knew was there. I know from a sonic and musical point of view, he can also get some of the heaviest, most amazing-sounding rock shit I’ve ever heard. Like the Rage Against the Machine albums – to me it’s some of the best rock music that’s come out in 20 years.”
The album’s title, Light Grenades, comes from a track off the album of the same name. Inspired by Mike’s guitar work, Brandon says the music conjured up images of “bursts of energy, light and truth. So basically a light grenade is a weapon that you throw, but it’s a weapon of truth and consciousness, as opposed to a weapon of destruction. So it’s hopefully a weapon of change through literacy and consciousness and integrating thought.” Rumours were abound on the internet that Light Grenades was a concept album, and while Boyd admits that there are concepts in all of the lyrics, it’s not a concept album In the traditional sense. ”Running throughout all our records, there is a theme of sorts that is indicative and reflective of our collective consciousness, but we’ve haven’t moved into that concept thing yet. We haven’t done enough drugs yet – give us time.”
While the majority of the band’s artwork in the past has been created by Boyd and drummer Jose Pasillas, Light Grenades is a departure for the group, with famed psychedelic artist Alan Aldridge drawing both the album’s cover and individual artwork for each specific track. ”I gave Alan all the lyrics,” Boyd says, “and he just started emailing me these literal interpretations of the lyrics and these cute cartoon things. They just came out so beautifully, kind of camp but kind of psychedelic. Some of them are dark, some of them are funny; they’re really cool. We’re going to try and do some kind of an animation sequence with all of them at some point. There’s a lot of potential just looking at the imagery by itself, but there’s a lot of potential for movement.”
With A Crow Left of the Murder, Einziger experimented with guitar sounds and intricate guitar lines, and whilst some of that flair is maintained, Light Grenades sees the guitarist hark back to chordal riffs and grooving rhythms, similar to older Incubus material.
“There’s some songs which are very straight forward,” explains Mike. “A song like Diamonds and Coal is a very straight forward song, which Brandon wrote the guitar line for.”
“That’s why it’s so simple,” interjects Boyd, laughing.
“But also songs like Oil and Water are more straight forward,” continues Einziger. “Then there are songs like Light Grenades, which is just chaos, and I like the contrast between those things. It’s okay for me to write things that are reminiscent of old things that I wrote because I wrote them. They’re mine. I can do whatever I want with them.”
“We’ve been hearing it a lot,” Boyd says. ”[The new songs] are reminding people, so we’ve been told, of the better bits of our old music. That’s not a bad thing at all. I don’t think we’ve heard that yet in quite a few albums. We’ve always been hearing, ‘we want to hear more of the old shit’. We’re not trying to cater to what people think we should be doing, we’re much more selfish in our approach when it comes to writing music. We want to move, we want to continue moving. We don’t ever want to stagnate.”
Incubus’ new album Light Grenades is out through Sony BMG on November 25
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