Bedford lads Don Broco have just finished off their first ever tour in America supporting State Champs, and if fan videos from the shows are anything to go by, it seems like attendees didn’t go just to see the headline band.
“During [support] shows I find it quite interesting to do a quick shout out to get a feel if people have heard of us before," frontman Rob Damiani explains. "It’s a pleasant surprise that people seem to know about us in the US now. We didn’t know what to expect when we came out, we thought maybe it’d be like it was in the UK when we were first playing shows; playing to this crowd who have no idea who you are - but people do, which is awesome. There have been a lot of people who discovered us years ago when we were doing our first album, so it was great to meet all of them.”
As well as being a relentless touring band, the four-piece constantly churn out new music, releasing at least something every year since they started in 2008. Their latest release is the gargantuan ‘Pretty’, featuring their signature lyrical style of problematic love mixed with humour, but sonically the track steers away from the funk driven indie of 2015’s 'Automatic', and focuses more on the post-hardcore roots of their first two EPs. Paired with a music video featuring the band cutting off each other’s faces, and wearing them as masks at bassist’s Tom Doyle’s fake wedding, the track is Don Broco at their finest.
“We worked on ['Pretty'] towards the end of last year. We got off the Bring Me The Horizon tour in November, and we kind of just started writing over Christmas, working on the next album. We just wanted to get as much headway as we could over the holidays, and it’s pretty much one of the first songs that we wrote, and recorded it straight away. When we were coming out to tour, we thought rather than waiting for the full album to finish and going through the whole process of that, that it would be cool to shoot a video and get music out to play on the [US] tour. I’m glad we did because it’s been a lot of fun, we’ve been playing it at the last few shows, and it’s just been one of the most fun songs to play live.
“We didn’t think about the video too much at first to be perfectly honest. It started with [previous single] ‘Everybody’, we wanted to make something different to our other videos, something we hadn’t done before. We put out this vague email to a load of directors, saying: 'Do you want to make something fun and weird?' and like, 'Surprise us'. We got ‘Everybody’ back [directed by Dominar Films], which was this weird cowboy cult dance move weird as fuck video, that reminded us of Twin Peaks or The League of Gentlemen. We just loved it.