Against The Current: Running wild

From the outside looking in, Against The Current are such a confusing band,” admits Chrissy Costanza. “We started on YouTube, and we did all these cover...

From the outside looking in, Against The Current are such a confusing band,” admits Chrissy Costanza. “We started on YouTube, and we did all these covers, but we also did so many tours, and we played Download Festival, but then we also play in Asia all the time. ‘What is going on with this band?’” she asks, not entirely knowing the answer. “It must be very confusing for a lot of people. It’s confusing for me, but we just do it.” If you take the little things that make up Against The Current and look at them in isolation, they shouldn’t fit. Three kids from outside Poughkeepsie, New York building an online community around the idea of being your true self, a band who toured the world twice with nothing but a couple of self-released EPs, a group with a fiercely independent vision who have signed to Fueled By Ramen and are distinct individuals. They want to mean something to kids, and they want parents to like them. There are big songs and bigger dreams; milestones come thick and fast, but ATC aren’t following anyone else’s path. Maybe it’s a revolution, maybe it’s the new sound, maybe it’s just beginners luck. However intricately you want to look at the pieces, though, it’s impossible to ignore just how well it all comes together. There’s something about Dan Gow, Will Ferri and Chrissy that just works. Against The Current makes a weird sort of sense and that’s just fine. “We don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it,” continues Chrissy. “We didn’t sit around before Download saying, ‘Hey, is this going to be the wrong look for us? Are people going to all of a sudden think we’re something that we’re not? Are people going to think we’re more rock than we are?’ No, none of that matters. We got a cool offer to do something fun, so we took it.” It’s how Against The Current run. Heart first, excitement in sight. “It doesn’t matter if we describe ourselves as underwater-symphonic-metal-alternative-nu-wave,” laughs Chrissy, adding words one at a time. “Whatever you want to describe it as, it doesn’t matter. It should just matter if you listen to it and like it or you don’t. People get so hung up on genre, but we don’t care what you classify us as. We don’t care what our genre is. We don’t want to close ourselves in too hard. We just want to make our music, and we just want to play our music to other people.”

“People get so hung up on genre, but we don't care.”

It’s a simple dream for a band who are so comfortable wanting to be the biggest but it’s the motivation behind everything they do. Forming back in 2011 after Dan and Will, who had been friends since they were eight, were introduced to Chrissy and the band they’d been struggling to make sense, made sense. Still in school, the group played a couple of local Battle of the Bands contests, as you do, before using the internet instead of dive-bar support slots to get their music out. Weekends were spent round each other’s houses, building, practising and finding their path. Their ‘Infinity’ EP came in 2014, ‘Gravity’ in 2015 and this year saw the band’s debut album ‘In Our Bones’ released unto the world. There’s no rest for the wicked. There’s also no rest for those with dreams to chase. Years ago, a careers teacher told Dan that he and Will couldn’t do music. It wasn’t going to work out. They’d have to find something else. “That’s such a typical example,” admits Dan. Luckily, the band have always kept a very close circle of people around them, so the naysayers have become few and far between. However, “When we were having early discussions with other labels before we signed with FBR, there were people who would say things like, ‘We could do this with the band’ or ‘We could do that’.” The response was simple: “Why? Why can’t we just do what we’re doing with the band? I’ve also had people imply, ‘How long do you think you’re going to do this music thing for?’ What do you mean this music thing? What do you mean how long? It’s my job. It’s my career. This isn’t a hobby to me; this is my life. I don’t think people understand, especially when you’re looking at it and it’s not massive yet. People don’t understand it when it’s just starting out. People forget that they had to go to law school; they had to pass the Bar. We don’t just come out and get famous and be this big band. We have to start from the bottom and work our way up, but I plan on getting there.” “It’s definitely an unpredictable life path, so it makes sense,” offers Will. “But we have a lot of reasons to take it.” Against The Current have been reaching for the stars since the start, but 2016 has seen them become brighter.

There’s confidence to the band, a self-acceptance and a knowing that they’re going to make it and they’re going to make it their way. “I don’t know if we were always confident, but we definitely liked to give off that aura,” laughs Will. “You gotta own it,” grins Dan. “I was terrified of walking out at Download, but you have to own it. They’ll see right through you if you don’t.” “On stage, I’ve always felt comfortable with myself but the further we get into this and the more shows we play, I’m discovering who I am more and more,” admits Chrissy. “Just having that knowledge makes me even more comfortable with being myself. I think that’s something everyone can understand, that feeling of self-discovery and that feeling of confidence coming from understanding yourself a little bit better every day.” Ask any of Dan, Will or Chrissy to reflect on the past twelve months and they’ll struggle to find an answer. It’s been relentless. So much has happened, and they’ve not had a chance to sit down and process it all. “I know it’s been a big year for us, but I haven’t been able to look at it in hindsight because we’re still doing it.” There’s a feeling of pride. Of achievement. “You get lost in it when you’re on tour, but when you’re sitting at home in the bedroom that you grew up in, in your hometown and nobody is around ‘cos they’re still in school or working you step back and remember ‘Well, we did that,” reflects Will. “Walking out on stage at Shepherd’s Bush was amazing. It’s moments like that where we realise ‘Wow, this is actually happening’,” smiles Dan. It’s in those moments a light goes on. “This is more than we’ve ever done before.” The band’s debut album ‘In Our Bones’ is the very definition of more. Distinctly ATC but dialled up, stripped back and amplified in every way imaginable, it captures a band with a world before their feet and in their lungs. Pushing them out of their comfort zone and pulling other people in, the days, weeks and months after its release saw everything got bigger. The band made a new sort of sense. “We expected a little more negative feedback than we got. I don’t want to say no I’m not surprised [by the reaction] because it sounds cocky and douchey, but at the same time…” starts Chrissy, before pausing. “I think what it is, I’m very grateful for the reaction. We are so thankful that it’s been so positive but at the same time, we worked so hard on this record, and we’re such perfectionists. It’s so hard for us to take our hands off of anything and put it out in the world unless we think it’s perfect, so for us to step back and put it out there... We’re our biggest critics, so if we like it, we hope that everyone else will too. If people didn’t like it, I think I’d be really upset. We never think something’s awesome just because it’s our song. We’re very realistic, sometimes almost pessimistic, with our sound. We want it to be better. We’re always trying so hard to make sure that we’re putting out the best reflection of something that we really put ourselves into, instead of just half-assing anything.”

Mind, body and soul, Against The Current’s debut album takes it all in. Every track, from the knee-scraping bounce of ‘Running With The Wild Things’, to the solemn reflect of ‘Demons’, hits hard. ‘In Our Bones’ swings with a twelve-for-twelve banger average and those things don’t just happen by accident. “The thing with the album is, we didn’t want there to be any deep cuts. We wanted every song to have its own story.” There’s no concept beyond great songs that mean great things. ‘Outsiders’, despite being a stone-cold rager, isn’t present ‘cause ‘Running With The Wild Things’ does the same job, only better. “It wasn’t going to be a record where every song has the same overall feeling because it’s hard not to have deep cuts on a record like that, it’s hard to have twelve singles that are all about the same thing.” With singular ideas off the table, the band want “people to connect to it in their own way. We didn’t want to force something down their throats, ‘This is the point of the album, do you get it or no?’ We wanted everyone to find what it is that connects with them.” Their album might be without a singular focus, but the band have always stood wholly for being yourself. Single minded, Against The Current come fully-loaded with a contagious sense of freedom. “It’s about doing you and defying the idea of precedents and standardisation. We don’t do standardisation. We don’t do precedents.” It connects. “I think people respond to honesty, to being genuine, being open and being very upfront with them. If you’re showing who you are to them and revealing those vulnerable spots, that’s something people really appreciate, and it really connects you because it feels like now they can be vulnerable with you. I think a lot of people want to feel like it’s okay, that they can open up a little bit and show themselves a little more and not be so defensive and wear camouflage over their colours. We show all of our colours, and we want our fans to be able to do the same thing. We want them to feel that comfortable with us. Whatever it is that we’re doing, whether it’s at a show or with us online, we want them to feel like they can just be themselves with us.”

It’s a lesson that goes way back. When Chrissy was twelve-years-old, she was on the soccer team and was driving down to a tournament with her friends and teammates. “They were all listening to a very popular radio station which only played the most popular pop and rap music, and I remember over the next few weeks, I would constantly put on that station in the car because it’s what they were listening to. It’s what everyone else my age was listening to. I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t know the songs, and I was just listening to it because everyone else was - but then I realised, it doesn’t matter what everyone else likes. I’m going to go back to listening to Bon Jovi. I don’t care that I might be weird, I like listening to Bon Jovi, so I’m going to listen to Bon Jovi. You don’t have to like the same music that everyone else is listening to; you don’t have to wear what everyone else is wearing because it’s the cool thing right now.” Instead, ask questions and follow your own path. It’s what ATC do, and they’ve done it from the start. “That’s just really what we believe,” explains Will. “And that’s why we’re living the life we are now.” All three of them have grown up loving music and wanting it to be their life. Instead of compromising, they chased those dreams. Now, “we want to encourage people that if they have a passion, to chase it, to cultivate it. And if you don’t yet, everyone has something they’re meant to do. Maybe we can help them find that?” The band have proudly forged their own path. At their shows and during their workshops on Warped Tour, they “drive the point home. What we did works for us because we did what we felt worked for us. We want to emphasise that point to other kids. What we want you to take away from us is not what we did, but why we did what we did. We did this because it’s what felt right to us, it felt natural to us, it felt true to us. We didn’t do something because we were trying to follow another precedent or we were trying to emulate someone else. There are always things to take from other people; there are always different things you can be learning about but the overall picture, we’re always just doing things because they’re right for us.” The band “didn’t know what we were doing,” they just knew why they were doing it. “We want to encourage other kids to do something like that as well. Whatever it is that you do, music, art or whatever, do it in your own way. Don’t do something just because a band or an artist you love is doing it that way, do it because it best represents who you are.”

“You don't have to like the same music that everyone else is listening to.”

And who you are is allowed to change. Living with ‘In Our Bones’ all summer meant they found new meanings in some of the songs. “It’s what makes them enjoyable and keeps them interesting,” explains Dan. “I think a lot of them have developed way more than I thought they would,” starts Chrissy. A song like ‘Roses’, the bridge is about someone passing away, and when I wrote it, no one close to me had passed away, so I wasn’t writing about a direct experience, I was writing about a feeling. Then I lost a very, very close friend of mine, who was a huge influence on my life, a couple of months ago and that song gained an entirely new meaning for me. I loved that song to begin with, and then it became so much more to me because every time I would sing it, I would think of him. I think all of the songs have had something like that, where we’ve rediscovered them. You’re writing your own soundtrack when you’re writing a record.” “We’re learning a lot more about what ATC is about, especially in the past couple of months,” continues Will. “We always try and outdo ourselves. For better or worst, we always try. Every tour turns out to be an improvement in some way. We’re excited to get out on this US headline run because I think we’re the most united we’ve ever been. We’re all on the same page right now, and we’re ready to do it good. We had time off after a crazy Asia and Europe tour, so we sat down, talked and asked ourselves ‘What is ATC?’ ‘What does Against The Current stand for?’ ‘What does this record mean to us?’ ‘What does it mean to the people listening to it?’ We found a lot of clarity, and we just know what we want. We know what we’re doing right now.”

As always with ATC though, right now also means thinking about the future. There are more tours in the pipeline, “We did a lot this year but the first half of next year is already packed,” and the band are “thinking about writing some songs on our own. I don’t know if we’re thinking about the next record yet, we haven’t sat down and written in a while because we’ve been on tour, so we’ll see,” offers Dan. “We’re going to start working on some new music because we want to keep showing ourselves off,” promises Chrissy. “Even on this record cycle, I already feel like I’ve changed as a person so much. We want to keep showing who we are to people because we are constantly changing. I’m excited to show people who I am now and what this record has shown me and how I’ve grown through it.” Gravity was an entirely stream-of-conscience writing attempt,” she continues. “We just sat down, wrote six songs and recorded them start to finish in 9 days. We started with nothing and ended up with an EP. There was less planning, less thought to what it all meant; it was just raw emotion. ‘In Our Bones’ was a defined, edited and rephrased statement of what we were all about.” Reaching people old and new, ‘In Our Bones’ saw the band reintroduce themselves to the world. It’s something that’s going to happen time and time again. “I’ve seen so many artists, especially those big pop stars, do that. They re-imagine their world on every record, and that’s cool. It shows growth and how you’ve changed. It’s like, ‘This is my new world I’ve created over the past couple of years. This is where I am now.’ Every record should be a reintroduction; every record should show you that this is who I am now. Kids our age, I say kids our age because I’m 21 and I consider myself a kid still, we’re constantly changing. This is such a time of growth, and I’m definitely so different to how I was three years ago. I want to continuously reintroduce myself to people. Maybe someone didn’t like this record, but maybe next time we put out a record, they will find something they do like in it because it’ll have changed and grown. You always have to be making a new statement. If you want to be making new fans, you have to introduce yourself like it’s the first time with every new release you do otherwise people will feel as if they have to play catch up.” The band are living a life they’ve always been dreaming of. The reality is “better and worse” than they imagined, though. “It’s way more work than I could ever have expected it to be. It’s a 24/7 job. Even on off time, there are interviews to do and things to dream up. You can never truly sit down and pretend you’re on a break but this life is also way more fulfilling and amazing than I ever expected it to be. I never expected to connect to people like we’re connecting with people now. I didn’t realise what sort of relationship you end up having with your fans. Our fans are very close to me; it feels like they’re part of our family and I don’t want to ever let them down. I never realised how much you could drop that barrier and connect with people.”

The self-proclaimed outsiders have got to this point by doing things their way and no one else’s. It might look confusing, but it feels right. Along the way, they’ve united people who feel the same and surprised others who don’t. Against The Current are an open door, everyone is welcome. “We are all so different to each other. There are certain threads, empathy and our basic human traits that make us alike in a way that we can all bond and connect but everything about us is so diverse and beautifully unique. Having such diversity is what promotes change, growth and all of those amazing things. If we were all the same, everything would be stagnant. It’s important to be who you are and let your colours fly because you’re going to contribute something to this world that no one else is going to contribute, even if you don’t see it,” beams Chrissy. “You might not realise the value of it, but you are a piece of this world that no one else can be. It’s so important that you are that piece. We’re not all the same, we all have our strengths and weaknesses,” and your weaknesses will be shouldered by someone else’s strengths. “It doesn’t matter what you can’t do; it matters what you can do. Focus on your strengths.” Against The Current know their strengths. They know who they are and what they want. No one can tell them any different. “We want to be able to do what we do, just bigger and bigger,” states Dan with absolute conviction. “I want to achieve everything,” adds Chrissy with just as much determination. “Not in a mean or a rude way but we don’t care what everyone else wants or thinks. We just do our own thing. It’s what the band has been about since day one; it’s just doing you the way that you do you. Whatever it is that makes you, you, whatever it is you’re into, you can do that, but you still don’t have to follow a precedent. There are a billion other bands out there in the world, and so many of them are incredible, but it doesn’t mean their path is the path for us. There are so many different paths to get there. Some of the most amazing, influential bands got to where they were because they didn’t follow someone else’s precedent. They said this is us, this is so truly and deeply and genuinely us that we’re just going to do it the way that is us. We’re not going to do it the tried, tested or safe way.”

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