Inside A Day To Remember’s surprise new album: “So many different emotions have fed into this”

Brace for… a surprise! With a huge year of touring already slated, including a headline appearance at this year’s Slam Dunk, A Day To Remember have announced that they’re dropping a new album. And it’s coming as soon as Friday!

Big Ole Album Vol. 1 marks the Florida quartet’s eighth full-length, and their first in four years. The 12-track collection sees ADTR re-embracing their core pop-punk roots while also pushing into ever-heavier territory. The album is released this Friday (February 21) on physical formats, though you’ll have to wait another month for it to hit streaming, so make sure to pick up a vinyl or CD from your local record store this weekend.

For a glimpse of what to expect from the record, and to learn about how it all came about, vocalist Jeremy McKinnon gave Kerrang! a call from his Orlando home to spill the big ole beans. And if all this excitement has got you in the mood for more surprises, make sure to keep an eye out next week, as this little chat isn’t all we’ve got up our sleeves…

Coming off of your last album, You’re Welcome, and the pair of singles released in the past years since, what were the conversations around where the band wanted to go next?
“The thing with A Day To Remember is this: we never do things purposefully. We don’t sit down with a specific aim in mind; we just let things go where they take us. All we’re trying to do at this point in our career is to be inspired, and to never feel like we’re at a moment where we have to do something. For me, songwriting has always been my way of letting stuff out, and working through whatever I’ve got going on in my life. Ever since I was a kid, that’s all I did because that’s all I had. That was my escape if I needed to exorcise something. So for me, personally, it really was a question of: ‘What feels like the next step that I want to write about? What do I feel like in my gut? What’s inspiring and exciting me?’”

How did Big Ole Album Vol. 1 come together, then?
“We chose to block out chunks of a couple of weeks at the time where we could just be together and feel inspired in the moment, rather than taking a quarter of a year to push through until we had something. It meant that the energy and the vibe of our work was so good, and those gaps between working left you feeling like, ‘I can’t wait to get back in there.’ We’ve written in all sorts of different ways in the past: in the back of a tour bus with New Found Glory, which became Homesick; we’ve disappeared into a cabin as a full band to make Bad Vibrations. What felt new and exciting was working in a way that made it feel like we didn’t have to get something done. When you have to produce something, you have to keep going and keep moving, whether you’re completely happy or not, because you have a deadline. With this album, all we had to worry about was focusing on what felt exciting in that exact moment, and I think that comes across on the record.”

You worked with Zakk Cervini and Drew Fulk. What did they bring to the table – and why, as an experienced producer yourself, do you look to outside collaborators still?
“First off, I’m an ideas guy – I’m not the guy who can get behind a computer an engineer a record. Zack’s incredible in that sense – probably the best I’ve ever worked with at that – but what I’m always looking for, and which we found in both of the guys, are people who can nerd out with us on a creative level. I think they both really helped bring certain things out of us as a band, and pushed us really hard. I always have an idea loosely mapped out in my head, I’ll know what I want a song to be or what I want to say, but they really helped bring that to life. Flowers is a great example of that.”

Oli Sykes also gets a credit for the song Die For Me – what’s the story there?
“We show up to the studio one day with coffee, and Zakk says, ‘Hey, we’ve got this little idea that we’ve been messing around with.’ He’s obviously worked with Bring Me a lot in recent years, and he’d told Oli that he was working with us. Oli had sent Zakk a voice memo of this melody with some lyrics, a few of them mumbled here and there, and Zakk put some music to it. We hear this idea and were immediately like, ‘Well, it’s obvious what we’re working on today – this is badass!’ We worked up the story to speak to what was going on in our life, and that became Die For Me.”

That track is a great example of the ‘classic’ ADTR sound that has come back with force on Big Ole Album, but there’s a weight and a darkness to this record, too. Gojira would have been proud of the riff to Silence…
“That’s funny that you say that, because that song is obviously very inspired by them. We also worked with Cody Quistad on this record, who I love writing with, and he was messing around one day and just went, ‘(Makes riff noise).’ That whole chorus immediately popped into my head – I’ve no idea why, or where it came from. It took me back to this time when I was a kid, when I had a buddy who was super into heavier music. He had gotten me into the first Coal Chamber record, and I had always said to him, ‘I can do that [Dez Fafara] voice, y’know!’ He would make me do it in front of him to prove it. Hearing that song from Drew made me think all that way back and be like, ‘I could do that voice on this song…’ I think it sound fucking crazy. It’s my dad’s favourite song on the record – every time I saw him, he’d make sure we had kept it on there!”

Big Ole Album comes with a Vol. 1 suffix – presumably there is a Vol. 2 to follow?
“There is another album, yes. It’ll be its own entirely separate thing that comes later. We’ve got quite a bit done for Vol. 2, but it’s not quite finished yet. What will be cool is that we can react to what people like about Vol. 1, and write more towards that. That’s a place we’ve never been before, to adjust in real time like that to give the fans more of what they liked, and less of what they didn’t. That feels exciting to me.”

In the fullness of time, when you look back on this record, what do you think it will say about where you were at when you made it?
“Oh, man, that’s so hard to imagine. There’s so many different emotions, so many different subjects that have fed into this. All I can say is that this is a snapshot of where I’m at in life, where we are as a band, and the things we’ve been going through together.”

Big Ole Album Vol. 1 is out on February 21 in physical formats via Fueled By Ramen / Parlophone, and receives a digital release on March 21.

ADTR headline Slam Dunk Festival on May 24 – 25, and play London’s O2 Academy Brixton on June 24 – 25. Get your Slam Dunk tickets now.

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