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Everyone loves a sad band. That’s the tag Movements have been stamped with since first appearing back in 2015, and while they’ve delved into happier territory on occasion, their fourth album - the tongue-in-cheek titled ‘Happier Now’ - finds them firmly back in the gloom, albeit with a new lease on life.
“I've been saying for a long time that I'm happier than I've ever been, and I think I lived under the assumption that because I'm not in the same place that I used to be at emotionally, therefore I am better, right?” Vocalist and lyricist Pat Miranda opens. “But that doesn't necessarily mean that, I’m quote unquote, happy.”
Part of the Southern California crew's charm has been their blend of searing post-hardcore, put together by Ira George (guitar), Austin Cressey (bass) and Spencer York (drums), paired with Pat’s unequivocally open mindset. It all makes for a rather potent concoction. “I expected there to be at least one or two happy songs on the record, and then, sure enough, one thing led to another, and it was just sad song after sad song. It was pretty eye-opening for me, actually, because I was kind of like, damn, maybe there's some like unresolved shit that I need to work through,” he laughs now.
Which brings to mind that title. He admits it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek for a reason. Not only is he digging deeper once more, but it turns out people were also missing those maudlin elements after 2023’s ‘RUCKUS!’, which erred into less depressing territory. He claims it to be “everything. It's a statement. It's a question. It's a feeling.”
Four albums in, Movements are well and truly in the trenches of band life. They’ve established their identity, survived the chaos of their twenties, and that leaves the ruminative Pat on what that means for their lasting legacy.
“I don't want to be the sad band. I would love to be known as the happy band, but unfortunately, that's not our legacy," says Pat. "At the end of the day, that's just true to my writing, which has always been a place for me to let it all out, and I think that when you have music that is so deeply introspective and personal, it's hard to not be labelled the sad band.”
Continuing, he recognises how easily people latch on. "More often than not, myself included, people will latch onto the sad stuff more than the happy stuff because it just means more, and I definitely do that all the time. So I get why we're the sad band. I wish that wasn't my reality, but that is unfortunately just how it is.”
Pat is the reflective type. Perhaps an unsurprising statement given the previous discussion, but this tendency helps him recognise the growth he and his bandmates have undergone, both personally and professionally. “I don't even recognise the person who I was when this all started,” he admits.
Now in their early-30s, the gauntlet of being a 20-year-old in a band has been completed, and they survived, with only a few scars to show for it. “It's actually kind of scary, and maybe that's just my frontal lobe having fully developed now,” he chuckles. “It’s really weird looking back at certain choices that I made in my writing, certain ways that I behaved, and I look back, and I'm like, wow, that's freaky because that person is just gone.”
"That doesn't necessarily mean that, I’m quote unquote, happy"
A bit like looking in a funhouse mirror, Pat now sees a reflection that feels familiar. But it’s a warped one he can’t help but smile at, knowing that he remains free to move on to being a more mature version of himself: “It’s this human experience that we're all constantly evolving and changing.”
“All that being said, I also look back on those time periods with fondness,” he admits. “The early days, like touring in a van and sleeping in parking lots and playing shows to less than 100 people, and then talking to every single person who was there after the show, those periods of my life were really formative, and helped get this band to where we are now.”
He calls this retrospection “sobering and humbling”. Having a handful of albums behind them now, and a decade-plus of growth as a unit, is a special experience. “I cannot believe that we are where we are, and I'm so thankful for it, because we're truly living our dreams, and it's been crazy that we've been able to do this for over a decade now.“
When it came to making ‘Happier Now’, Pat recalls the group being nervous going into the writing process. The biggest question was what this new chapter was even going to look like. “How we wanted to approach it, what we wanted to do as far as where we wanted the continuation of our band to go,” he explains further.
Although there is a throughline with Movements, they’ve made sure to evolve around it, finding those sharpened edges of what it is to be a post-hardcore band. "We wanted to make sure that we continued that evolution, right? But also found a way to bridge the gap between fans of the older music and fans of the newer music, and find something that felt like a solid middle ground that everybody could come together on and feel really good about, and I think that we did a pretty good job of that.”
"I would love to be known as the happy band, but unfortunately, that's not our legacy"
Sonically, they were looking for the same energy as ‘RUCKUS!’, while splicing it with the emotionality of their earlier work. All of these elements came together naturally, and it also meant Pat tapping back into parts of himself he hadn’t in a while.
“Right now, you're seeing a lot of the darker stuff, a lot of the sadder stuff, because that's where I've been the last couple of years, and I don't know what the future looks like necessarily,” he shrugs. “I can guarantee that there will be happy songs, there will be more sad songs, there will be more angry songs, there will be love songs. But right now we're in one of those darker periods, and maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's what the people need?”
One key element of Movements’ decade has been mega-producer Will Yip, the Grammy Award-winning producer who’s helmed every release. Pat’s quick to gush about Will, who he was surprised even wanted to work with them all those years ago. “I didn't think that Will was even gonna fuck with us. Truthfully, I was like, I don't know if we're good enough for this,” Pat says. “But he saw something in us, man. I'll always be so appreciative of him because he was one of the first people who truly believed in the vision of what this band could be.”
Pat continues, “He was one of the first people you know that really took something that was so raw and so underdeveloped and brought it into the light of being something entirely different and good.”
“I think the ambition now is just like, ‘Okay, cool, what’s next?’ Is there a world in which Movements win a Grammy?” he says, nodding to Will’s Grammy win with Turnstile. “Is there a world in which Movements gets to a point where we're selling out arenas? Is that even possible for music that sounds like ours? Who fucking knows? I don’t.”
And his parting words are the ones that have kept Movements consistently pushing through all the weight that surrounds Pat. “But we're gonna try, and anything could fucking happen.”
Movements' album 'Happier Now' is out now.
