Meat Wave: "We wanted to change things up"

“Pretty much all of my experience writing before this was very outward looking, observing what was going on around me,” Chris Sutter reflects. When Meat Wave released ‘Delusion Moon’ in 2015 it pushed the band to new heights and saw them perform in front of more people than ever before. Around this time things started to change a lot for the then 24-year-old frontman. Separating from the girlfriend he’d been dating for half his life, the musician found himself experiencing the world in a wholly unfamiliar way. “It was kind of like learning to ride a bike again,” he describes, “or like learning to walk again after coming out of something very traumatic or intense.” It’s these intense emotions that became the building blocks for Meat Wave’s newest album, ‘The Incessant’. “This record was soundtracking the internal struggle of feeling anew, and feeling the confusion of ‘What am I feeling?’ and ‘Why am I feeling this?’ then ‘What do I do next?’” Chris depicts. The spark to start influencing the album might have been a separation, but ‘The Incessant’ is far from your typical break-up record. Raging with an almost unyielding energy, the album drives forwards with a gripping momentum. “It comes from a brutally honest place,” Chris construes. “I feel like if the music reflected that any more it’d be a real fucking downer of a record,” he laughs. “We like to play really loud and really fast. I think we’ll always retain that in a way.” Putting pen to paper in the months after ‘Delusion Moon’ was released, one motif emerged that would go on to shape the group’s future output. “I would do these stream of consciousness poems when we were touring,” the frontman recalls. “Just day to day, when you’re in different cities, trying to journal and remember things. Amidst that, this phrase ‘The Incessant’ kept coming up...” Struck by its resonance, this phrase was the “guiding light” in the creation of Meat Wave’s third record. “I appropriated it into this feeling of feeling overwhelmed emotionally, and feeling very confused - like you’re in this whirlwind of emotion and feeling,” Chris illustrates. Drawing from his own very real experiences sculpted the writings into the songs you hear today. But the prospect of sharing these songs - and the admissions within them - with the world wasn’t one what came easily. “I felt that seeing this project through would make it, so I was just focusing on the negative points of my life or the wrong decisions I’ve made,” Chris mulls. “I’d have to see that through. I thought that it didn’t sound like that much fun.” Singing about the past every show while trying to move on from it all wasn’t exactly what the frontman had in mind. “I feel in a different place now,” he clarifies. “I feel more positive and like I’ve got my head on my shoulders. I’m just trying to be a good person and live my life.”