We sat down with the rising NWOCR stars Revenant last week to chat about their upcoming EP and plans for the year. Check it out below!
How would you describe your sound?
Sam: We’d call it Southern rock with a modern twist, I guess. Having said all of that, though, we have gone more of a classic rock sound, all of our influences are that. But yeah, I definitely think Southern rock with a classic twist!
And so the lead single for the EP last week? It seems to have gone down well!
Sam: Last Tuesday, 18th of Feb it came out! yeah, we’re really happy! I think today it’s been streamed over 10,000 times, which is mad! It’s always a nerve wracking thing because you put your heart and soul into these things and when you release it it’s like watching your kid go off to school, how’s it gonna do? But we’re chuffed with it!
It’s the start of the EP cycle, is there a theme surrounding it or is it more individual stories?
Sam: I wouldn’t say there’s a theme. We’ve kinda… we’ve got five songs… I guess the theme is we write about what we know and we write about things that we think other people have experienced as well. So there’s a song about being a teenager and not wanting to listen to anybody. There’s ’Best Medicine’ which is effectively a love song. ‘Runaway Rage’ is about being super angry. There’s ‘Least I can Do’ which Matt write about his other half and his crow children. Then ‘Miss You’ I wrote after my grandparents passed away. So all of these things, although personal to us, everyone can relate to it!
And what’s your writing style like?
Sam: From my point of view I’m a guitar player first and a singer second. I really struggle to see an overall song so I generally tend to bring in a riff or a lyric idea and then the four of us really get together and wrap our heads around it and contribute our own bits and pieces. Matt and Carl (drummer) are really good producers, they can see the whole thing from above and put it together that way!
Are you planning to let us hear any more of the EP before its release?
Matt: There’s som more singles planned but there’s no point putting out previews or stuff like that. There’s no point going ‘here’s a preview of a song you can’t listen to’. I think gone are the days now of buildups to releasing songs, I think it’s pretty pointless. Just get the song out and then promote it.
We’ve got a couple of singles coming off the EP, though! They kinda follow on from where ‘Best Medicine’ started, really. It’s a very catchy, hit you in the face straight away kinda thing. I don’t know who or what it sounds like, but yeah, I think it makes people listen. I think the next two tracks, ones really happy and the other is just angry and pisses you off. So there’s a mixture of emotions that come out of it and, from that, a mixture of sounds too.
And looking ahead, are you planning on sticking with more of an EP format, or are there talks of an album?
Sam: I think we’ve got… we know what we want to do and what’s gonna come from that. All I can say to you at this point is that there is more music coming and we’re always writing and always looking to see where we can take things. This is the second EP we’ve done and the reason we did that is that today’s society is quite immediate. Matt’s really good at looking at what the audience wants; everyone wants it now. I think you’ve gotta be really established before you can do an album and get people to commit to that.
Matt: also an album… realistically if you were to write 10-12 actual good songs, or even if you went away and wrote 15-17 songs and threw away five of them, that’s not a quick process. We’re not into going… well, we did it with one song on the EP but we got lucky, where we’ve had a two-hour period where the bare bones of a song has come out of it. But we don’t work that way. The riff that we had that grew that song, Sam and I had been playing that riff for about four years. Sam finally said ‘we’re gonna do something with that riff today’. We had a studio day where we were in there all day. To be honest they don’t always come like that.
Going back to the whole album thing, being an independent band at this level, how much time and effort does it take to write an album and go ‘cool the album’s out’, and it’s like ‘sounds good, what are you doing next?’. It’s just taken us a year and a half! Maybe we’ll do another EP, maybe we’ll do an album, maybe we’ll just put out singles. I think it’s an ever-changing landscape. You’ve just gotta keep doing what you’re doing, and we’re still working it out really. It’s taken us seven months to get the EP ready, we need a bit of a breather to work out what the next step is!
In terms of the live stuff you seem to be all over the place this year!
Sam: I think we’re definitely a live band, that’s where we thrive. I think we just want to get the music out to as many people as possible. Again I’m sure it’s the same for fans like yourselves. Matt and I have come into contact with people who are more obsessed with how many people they can play in front of and what they look like. With us though, if you said to us ‘there’s three people in the Dog and Duck, do you wanna go play a gig’, we’d go yeah! Having said that though, we wanna get out and play as many high quality shows a we can and deliver.
Matt: I think that’s the necessary thing to do, to start to step up and network in this environment. However, that’s not taking away from smaller shows. We’re playing the Coin Exchange on March 14th that holds 450 people. It’s 50% sold out at the moment which is great, it’s looking like it’s going to be a massive gig for us. A week later we go play at The White Heart in Basingstoke, which is just a pub. But then we’ll taylor two different things for those shows. For the Coin Exchange it’ll be a more professional setup, the whole show is completely thought out, from a fan perspective. Then in Basingstoke, we’ve got three or four new songs, we need to play them live to see how they are live and what we can do with them.
But yeah, we are getting about here there and everywhere. Maid of Stone I’ll be good. And they seem to be bigging us up! We’ve never met them, well we know Darren Wilson, one of the scouts, but he just became a fan, that’s how we know him! But they seem to be sharing our music. They said the other day, ‘current Maid of Stone favourites, Revenant’, which is lovely! We are so new on the scene so it’s just nice to see that really!
We’re playing up in Sheffield for Steel Paws, too. I’m struggling to remember them all now. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, there’s nowhere near as many as last year, but when there’s so much going on I can’t remember!
Sam’s big thing is let’s create a show and take it out there, inside of let’s go on stage and play some songs. But yeah, the gigs are coming in thick and fast! We’re lucky that it’s all coming in towards the end of the year, but we’re looking good!
You’re relatively new to the scene, but what would you say it’s like at the minute?
Sam: Now, I say this a lot. The great thing is about music is that anyone can do it. I think the scene, particularly with the NWOCR one, there’s good bands, and then there’s great bands. And I think it’s a case of how much you want it, and what you’re willing to do to get your music out there. I can’t knock anyone who says I’m in a band, I love doing pub gigs, I love what I’m doing. Fine, wicked. We all know it’s really hard making a living out of this. The bands like us and like The Dust Coda and AK and the Red Kites that look people in the eye and go ‘we’ve got good songs and we’re coming for it’. I love building a show and delivering that to people, making the live experience different from the recorded experience. But yeah, it’s just how much you want to do it and put on the line and back yourself.
Matt: I think a big part of that too is how far can you take it. You’ll never know if you never try! I don’t think we’ve got any delusions of grandeur, but I don’t see any reason why we… I’d be personally happy if in 10 years time we say we’ve had enough but we look back and say ‘well we supported them and played these massive shows and in this country’. Yeah, it’s just great fun. We’re musicians, we don’t know what to do aside for be musicians! We’ve gotta play, so why not take that as far as we can. It’s not about being the biggest and the best, for us it’s just giving it a good crack and see what happens.
The scene is really good, we’ve met so many lovely people! The guys up in Manchester and Firevolt, leaf promotions, we’ve made so many fans up there. It’s lovely really. We got invited up there for the Christmas do and stuff like that. It’s a lovely scene, but maybe there could be more for bands to do to connect with each other. Like you said, we saw your name on the poster, but we’d never connect if it wasn’t for this. Is there more that bands can do to like gig swap and stuff. There needs to be more of that, more working together for everyone to rise, instead of bands trying to step over each other. I think it needs to be more prevalent in any music scene, really. A few nobs as well, let’s not shy away from that!
You guys seem to be doing good on social media, any advise for bands just starting out on that front?
Sam: hire Matt as your social media guru!
Matt: Social media can be the key that really unlocks a lot of doors, but it isn’t the be all, end all of what we’re trying to do and achieve as a band. A lot of people, and who wouldn’t, want their song to go viral. Okay, but the how are you going to back that up, what’s next? Are you even ready to be thrust into it. If we went viral on a song and then Slash was like ‘wanna come out on tour’, we’d say yes but then we’d be like a rabbit in headlights, we wouldn’t know what we wear doing. But obviously we would do it!
One of the main things with social media, and it’s the hardest part, is consistency. I struggle, I’ve got a family, I don’t have time to always be like ‘let me sit down for an hour today to work out what to post, and then another hour to make it’. But there are ways that you can approach it to get a good result out of it. I put up a video about buying Black Sabbath tickets, I was really lucky and I’ve been studying these creators that teach you how to get views. And one of the main reasons that video worked really well was because that was the hot topic on that day, on that week, so people are gonna sit and watch that. Then you’re like ‘cool, our new songs out’, and 2000 views. It can be pretty disheartening. But at the end of the day, if you’re gonna post a video about your music to get people to listen to it, you’ve gotta be genuine about it. If you’re gonna get 2000 views a day, do it for 10 days. That could be 10-15000 eyeballs on that song, all it takes is 500/600 of them to listen on Spotify and then Release Radar is triggered. It’s all about a snowball effect.
But it is so disheartening, you’re just trying to cut through and keep going. But then randomly last night, I got a message on TikTok from a kid saying he and his dad were listening to ‘Best Medicine’ and they love the track. And I had no idea who he was, I’d never spoken to him! So yeah, you’ve just gotta keep going and attack all of them!