Seaway: "Our record is a bit of a roller coaster"

It's been two years since Seaway's last record, ‘Colour Blind'. Since then, the band have racked up a ridiculous 2,000,000 streams of their single ‘Best Mistake', and earlier this year they took Slam Dunk by storm - and deservedly so. They're taking the band's progression in their stride, however, and weren't afraid to try new things when it came to working on ‘Colour Blind''s follow-up, new album 'Vacation'. "We went into this album with a different mindset," frontman Ryan Locke enthuses. "We wanted to be prepared, to have a lot of material going into the studio. When we did ‘Colour Blind', we had pieces of songs, and then we kinda figured the rest out in the studio. But for ‘Vacation', we did two weeks of demoing pre-production. We did one week at home in Toronto with our friend Derek Hoffman, and earlier in the winter, we did a week with Alan Day from Four Year Strong. "We've just been crafting songs, putting everything together, getting all our ideas on the table from those two weeks. We got like twelve or thirteen songs ready, so we were very prepared. We had just over a month to sit on all the songs and consider changing a few things. That was a huge advantage for ‘Vacation' - we got to let the songs marinate instead of just writing and recording. Preparation was super key." There's a more easy-going feel to this incarnation of Seaway, a breeziness that comes with confidence and maturity that revitalises their brand of pop-punk. The band are now at a different stage of their lives and were able to dedicate themselves to the new album. "When we did our first record [2013's 'Hoser'] - which was kinda like getting your foot in the door, I wouldn't even call it a proper full-length - but we were all in school in separate areas of Ontario, so it was kinda disjointed. It was our first crack. When we did ‘Colour Blind' we were working, and some of us were still at school. With all those factors and it being our first record on Pure Noise Records, I think we were a little wide eyed…" "I don't think the record's grown up," Ryan muses, "but we as people have grown up a bit more. We know what we want, how we want to sound and where we want to go with the band. When we started Seaway, we had an idea of how we wanted to sound. We don't really go for the 90s to early 2000s pop rock kinda stuff. 'Colour Blind' started to touch on it a little bit, but we were able to hone in on it on 'Vacation'. "That's what we really wanted to do: make a record that could exist in the pop punk world, but some songs could maybe get a little radio play, or have more of an indie rock feel. We wanted it to be a diverse but also very fun throwback feeling record, and I think that's kinda missing in our genre right now. It's like, a lot of bands will write their record, and you can listen to it front to back and nothing really stands out. It'll be a really good record, but the songs all have the same vibe. Our record is a bit of a roller coaster in that sense because from song to song, it'll take a different turn. That's something that could definitely set us apart."