Did you find your own experiences emotionally or mentally challenging to approach in a creative environment?
Jim: “I think the whole process has been really cathartic for us. When we started it, the band was in a tough spot, with both our health and our mental health, which was starting to suffer from the uncertainty that surrounded the future of the band. Writing this record and spending all that time together, as the five of us again, really rekindled that brotherhood and that bond between us. Re-establishing that intimacy together was really healing, as I felt we were definitely starting to like drift apart because of the distance between us. Writing this record reconfirmed that we are five best friends, and it let us pour out a lot of the stuff that felt like it was just sitting there simmering away. There's some really poignant, honest, and vulnerable stuff on the record. There's a line in the song Unseen that asks, ‘Am I lucky to be alive?’ That's not a place that I think the band would have gone to before. It doesn’t have the positive, uplifting thing that is The Ghost Inside. There's a dark honesty to that which we've never delved into before. But it was important, I think, for us to heal, and to be able to close this chapter of our lives in the way that the record is done. This stuff is over. We let it all out. And we can move on now.”
Jonathan, when Kerrang! spoke to you at last year’s Los Angeles comeback show at The Shrine, you spoke at length about finding new meaning and strength in lyrics you had penned some years earlier – almost as if you had written words that you would yourself need in later life. To what extent do you think the lyrics you’ve written on this record are the words you yourself needed to hear right now?
Jonathan: “I don't know if ‘closure’ is the right word, but I think a lot of this is about being able to set things right. In the past, there were lyrics and songs that we wrote because we believed in them, but we didn't have to live them. We didn't have to live some of these experiences; how rough could we have it if we're ‘rock stars’ travelling the world, having a good time with our best friends? How much adversity and how much struggle could we have really gone through, you know? We wrote songs from this place of, like, a pedestal, and this new album and lyrics were written from a place of, ‘Okay, I've been on the top, and I've been at the bottom. I know what they both feel like, and I need to write this for me and for the people who feel the same way as me.’ It's opened my eyes up to a lot and really put a lot of things into perspective. I don't think we have that kind of clarity in the past.”
What can we read into the meaning behind the decision to self-title the album?
Jim: “When you listen to our back catalogue, you hear us take this winding path to end up where we are. We feel like this is where we were trying to get to all along, and that this is who we are – both in terms of the music, but also who we are as people. This record is the five of us. When you listen to this record, you are experiencing these five people, our lives, our struggles, our triumphs and our brotherhood. All of that is in there, this is who we are, and trying to put some other title on this record felt very contrived. How do you come up with one line that sums up all of the things that combined into this record existing? The idea of having the record be self-titled came up pretty early on and it seemed perfect.”