Don Broco “Life can feel a nightmare. Sometimes it’s good to accept that, rather than pretending you have some sort of answer”

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The Don Broco frontman’s only had this once or twice, but it was enough. “It’s weird, it just comes out of nowhere,” he notes. “I'm sure there are some scientific reasons about why some people get them more than others. I haven't actually bothered looking into that. I probably should!”

Rob partly documents this curious phenomenon in Nightmare Tripping, the song with which Don Broco have finally announced their forthcoming album of the same name.

“I found it an interesting tool within a song to parallel the kind of emotions you go through when a relationship’s falling apart, and you're in a really tricky spot, how those thoughts and feelings then creep into your dreams,” he says. “You don't know if you're dreaming or not, and you wake up and you go, ‘Did that happen in real life?’ I thought that was an interesting idea of combining those realities within the song, and then for the album.”

The song itself is very Don Broco. Heavier maybe, with perhaps their biggest lean into nu-metal yet, but this is just the latest update for Bedford’s finest. Even roping Nickelback into being part of it feels like a very Broco thing to do, the ultimate get (more on that later). But when Rob says the idea of a nightmare is a theme that pops up over and again on the album, you don’t have to look far to find it. When K! tells him there’s something that feels more aggressive than usual to it, he nods his curly head in agreement.

“It’s a less hopeful record than some of our previous albums have been,” he admits. “I’ve always been trying to find the silver lining in bad situations. And sometimes life can feel a nightmare. And sometimes it’s good and healthy to just accept that, rather than pretending you have some sort of answer. Just engage with the bad times a bit.”

So, they instead got “a nightmare week of rescheduling shows, trying to make it to shows, then getting there and the crowd not making it… It was a week of rubbish, basically.” While they made their way through, they also had the joy of “no days off, because it was too dangerous to drive on the roads at night as you couldn't see anything”.

He laughs about all this, though, the sort of thing that puts hairs on your chest as a band. But other stuff has been itching away at the singer over the past couple of years. In the song Cellophane – with its shameless, proudly Korn-esque intro – Rob sings how he ‘pulled a sickie and woke up in The Matrix’. The leather trenchcoat he found in a vintage clothes shop “that I swear only existed for a month” may have been serendipitous banter, but elsewhere, there was a Neo-ish feeling that something has shifted in his perspective of the world, and won’t go back.

“That line is about feeling like you've woken up and realised this is the new world, and this is reality. You're actually suddenly aware of what's going on around you. You're realising the world maybe isn't what it was. You’re in a make-believe place, and you're realising your own fallibilities.”

Inevitably, a good deal of this falls at the feet of it being increasingly hard to not listen to every crazy thing that goes on in an increasingly crazy world. It’s not just omnipresent, for Rob it’s become profoundly disruptive.

“It’s not just me, it’s consuming a lot of people’s thoughts every day a lot more than they were, even a couple of years ago,” he says. “For me, even from writing the last record [2021’s Amazing Things] to this one, there’s so much stuff going on in the news that you can’t ignore it. That’s something that’s consumed my brain for many, many months in a way that never has before.

“It feels like one thing after another. It feels like there’s no escape. Sometimes it can feel quite oppressive. It’s become a lot harder to be able to balance it out, and go, ‘That’s a bit of a worry, but I can focus on my own life.’ The stakes feel so much higher these days. As a title, Nightmare Tripping kind of encompass all of that in a quite neat way.”

Rob talks about having “the courage to talk about these feelings with others”. He says this is particularly present on the song Pacify Me. It finds him trying to square the “fairytale existence that I've been very happy to believe in, and where I’ve been so busy in life to not worry about every waking moment,” with what’s changed.

“The wars in the Middle East, the way politics are heading across the world, this feeling of suppression that our voices are very noticeably being made as small as possible… I've never felt this much government control in our lives, where you're feeling, ‘Wow, if I say the wrong thing, there can be severe repercussions.’ It's a scary place to be. I definitely didn't feel this a few years ago.”

Though he reveals there isn’t a silver lining so much this time around, what there is in examining these feelings is the weight-off sensation of knowing that you aren’t the problem. Because everyone is weathering this oddness at the same time.

“For me, the solace is that at least everyone else, or a lot of other people, are feeling that too. It's not a fix at all. But rather than trying to find the positives in these bad situations, it’s about embracing the reality of the negatives in general, and at least finding comfort that you're not alone in these thoughts.”

This is all pretty broad, rather than specific. Rob explains that as a lyricist, it’s more about expressing a feeling than actually getting a detail down in words. “There’s still times where a random line or phrase just works, or someone says something at the demo stage, and then when you come to change it, anything else sounds wrong.”

This is, though, the band’s heaviest record. Also what Rob describes as “our most cohesive”, in that things don’t bounce around quite so much as they have done. It all bounces, though, in that usual Don Broco way. Just when it does, it lands harder.

“This is the first time I’ve really gone for it, screaming on a record,” he says. “We’ve always done it live, and it’s a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card there. But in the studio you end up going, ‘I’ve got to find something more complicated or more intriguing or interesting.’ This time I went, ‘Nah. If it’s feeling good and the riffs are demanding some shouting and some screaming, I want to deliver that.

“It can be hard with heavy music to stand out from the crowd, because the nature of heavy-as-fuck riffs means you can only get so heavy before you start losing the character from them. But there’s inventive ways of doing it, which is what we’re looking for.

“I think it’s a really exciting time for metal at the moment, because bands are doing that and carving out their own paths. Bands are almost rediscovering what it is to be a new wave of heavy band, challenging people with that. We’re excited by that, but we’re also excited about dialling in what makes us Don Broco.”

And so we come to Nickelback. “I know, it’s the most Don Broco thing we could have done!” Rob laughs. It turns out that the brother of guitarist Ryan Peake is a fan, leading to him and Chad Kroeger coming out to see them live in Canada.

“We didn't see them at the time, but a week or two after, we got the loveliest email from them saying they loved the show. They’d never heard of us before, but Ryan’s brother had told him he needed to check us out, and they'd done a deep dive of all our videos. We were blown away, and it was so out of the blue!”

Don Broco love Nickelback. At school, the uncoolness of the Canadian band was appealing. “Whether you loved them or hated them, you knew who Nickelback were. You don't even have to be a rock music fan to know Nickelback. Everyone knows Rockstar,” enthuses Rob.

“Working with them was a real crazy one for us, because we loved them at school, and we took pride in loving them when everyone decided they were uncool. We took it as a point of pride to be uncool and be like, ‘Nah, if the majority of our friends and people think it’s cool to hate on them, we’ll be the opposite. We’ll back it.’

“They’ve always held this special place in our hearts. They’re just this crazy band who don’t pander to anything like styles or genres. They’ve written some crazy pop hits, but also done some crushingly heavy music.”

Making it happen was something of a moonshot. Nickelback are one of the biggest rock bands of the century, having sold well in excess of 50 million albums. Still, Rob shrugs that, “We just threw it out to them. Why not?”

“It’s one of those collaborations that no-one would expect,” he grins. “It's not really the sort of song that Nickelback would usually write themselves and we had no idea if they'd like or not, but they got back instantly and said they loved it! It was a really lovely, very easy process.”

And when they got together finally to film the video, Rob is delighted to report that Chad was as Chad as Chad could be.

“He was hilarious! He was super, super chill. I wouldn't want to stereotype him as ‘the cool rock star Chad,’ but he lived up to this cool idea of a rock star. He was super nice. Came in, did his thing, had fun, and whenever we were like, ‘Oh, could we try this? Could we shoot this?’ he was down to give everything a shot.

“It's one of those things that somehow just feels right,” he chuckles. “It feels so left-field, but also not, in a way. Once you put it together, you're like, ‘Oh, of course.’”