Roaring back with their best album to date, Stand Atlantic have a clear message - Fuck Everything And Run.

Words: Jack Press.
Photos: Tom Berridge.

We’re living in weird times. The cost of living is rising, wars are being waged, and the pandemic is still cancelling concerts. In a decade of disarray, at least our artists have got something to sing about. It’s time to climb up on the soapbox, raise a fist to the sky, and talk about the state of, uh, crumpets?

“Dude, I was thinking the other day about how the English muffin got so big in America, but crumpets didn’t – they’re so much better than a McMuffin. They’ve got the holes to hold the butter better!” exclaims Stand Atlantic bassist Miki Rich from his home in Sydney, while vocalist Bonnie Fraser yams down the delicious treats over in Manchester.

On a rainy night Down Under and a sunny day in the UK, Stand Atlantic are serving up hot takes on their new album ‘F.E.A.R.’ (That’s ‘Fuck Everything And Run’, FYI). Once the crumpet crusade is over, it’s clear they’ve got plenty more to sing about. From Christianity and homophobia, to long-distance love and imposter syndrome, to the kind of garlic bread they serve at MENSA - nothing is off-limits.

But before they could bring themselves to raise a middle finger to the world, Stand Atlantic had to reassess everything. 2020 should’ve been a victory lap for second album ‘Pink Elephant’, but Covid-19 closed the borders, scattered the band across continents, and had them second-guessing everything.

“There was a point where we didn’t know if we’d ever release another album. We had no idea what the world was going to do, let alone us,” Bonnie admits. With ample time off to write an album, were the creative juices flowing through their veins?

While the hazy dream-pop of ‘Bloodclot’ battles with Bonnie’s very real, very personal long-distance relationship difficulties rather than Covid, everything comes back around to the growing pains the pandemic inflicted on her. When you’re so done with the world, what do you write about?

Caught in creative limbo, with nearly two years to write rather than two weeks, Stand Atlantic stared the death of their band in the face. Forever rebellious, they found themselves throwing their frustration into everything, coming out with the longest album they’ve ever made. And, it turns out, their most diverse.

For 14 tracks and 36 minutes, ‘F.E.A.R.’ doesn’t stay in one lane long enough to be labelled. Once a straight-up pop-punk act, Stand Atlantic are genre-bending rebels ripping up the rulebook.

Opener ‘Doomsday’ shakes up a cocktail of sweet synth-pop and bitter alt-rock, whilst ‘Deathwish’ deals in the kind of pop-rap that Machine Gun Kelly wouldn’t bat an eyelash at. Elsewhere, there’s the punchy hardcore punk of ‘Molotov [OK]’, the gritty grunge vs glitch-pop hit of ‘Cabin Fever’, and the sing-alongs of ‘Pity Party’. But with the ghost of writer’s block haunting them, how did so many genres come crawling out?

By bringing themselves to the brink of no longer being a band, they found themselves feeling freer than ever. Pop-punk’s elitism had held them in a chokehold for far too long, something they felt ‘Pink Elephant’ suffered from.

If you’re beginning to worry that ‘F.E.A.R.’ is too far-fetched for you, don’t. It’s still the same Stand Atlantic we know and love. They’ve put more quality control into this album than a pizza delivery company.

It’s a thought Miki shares fondly with Bonnie. “You and [producer] Stevie [Knight] were writing songs that were leftfield and almost not us. Like, let’s write a completely 2010 Kesha song; obviously, it’s not going to make the album but write it anyway. And then we’d be like, ‘well, this is not Stand Atlantic’, but it’s a really good song, so let’s do a cover of it and make it a Stand Atlantic song. It’s how ‘Dumb’ became one of my favourite songs.”

“Oh yeah, it sounds like a fucking Marshmello remix or something,” Bonnie quips, with the pair erupting in laughter.

Little moments like this encapsulate what recording ‘F.E.A.R.’ was like. Considering they were split across continents whilst writing it, kept in quarantine to record it, and stuck in writer’s block for most of it, they could still kick back and appreciate the finer things.

These moments found their way into the record, too. Like little earworms hiding in the cracks for keen listeners to seek out. Whether it’s cut-and-pasted samples or off-record conversations, it’s courtesy of long-term producer Stevie Knight’s mischievousness.

While some are sillier than others, there are moments snuck into songs that let the band address serious concerns with tongue-in-cheek wit. Take ‘Hair Out’, for example, where Bonnie jokes about fans hating the track.

“We were reading YouTube comments on our videos, and I was like, ‘look at all these fucking haters just hating us just for the sake of it’. I think we wanted to have those little jokey, stupid moments because that’s who the fuck we are.

If ‘F.E.A.R.’ peels back the Stand Atlantic curtain and teaches us anything about Bonnie, Miki, guitarist David Potter, and drummer Jonno Panichi, it’s that alone they’re strong, but together they’re unbreakable. When they’re firing on all cylinders as friends, they can push through their problems and find out plenty about themselves along the way.

Take ‘Bloodclot’, for example - a song that soundtracks the highs and lows of Bonnie’s long-term, long-distance relationship with Hot Milk’s Hannah Mee, which was put through its paces during Covid-19.

“It’s definitely the most personal song on the record. Throughout the whole Covid experience, I spent six months in Australia and six months in the UK, where my partner is and where we live, so it was a very difficult time.

However, ‘Bloodclot’ goes beyond being just another love song. It’s a song that helped Bonnie open up about her feelings away from the page for the first time in her life. Ultimately, it’s what she hopes we all take away from ‘F.E.A.R.’.

It’s a comic book cliché, but all that great power does come with great responsibility. While Bonnie believes it’s important to open up space for others to talk about their feelings, she admits it’s not been an easy road for her. In fact, it’s ‘F.E.A.R.’ that’s helped her open up.

“I do think that it’s important, but I also feel like a complete hypocrite because I don’t really talk about my feelings in my daily life. I know it sounds corny, but it’s true. When I was growing up, and even now, writing is the only way that I feel like I’ve gotten over an emotion.

In some ways, for both Bonnie and the band, expressing their feelings came through the music as much as the lyrics. ‘Molotov [OK]’ is a fiery furnace of pop-sensitive hardcore punk that punches its subject matter in the face with the kind of infectiousness that tops charts.

Without tapping into their creative frustrations, Bonnie would’ve never found the courage to confront memories from her past that have plagued her in coming to terms with her sexuality. On ‘Molotov’, she returns to the Christian school she grew up in, where homophobia was taught as regularly as English and Maths.

“How the fuck can this person do this to young kids and have such a strong stance on something so fucking horrible? Everyone’s entitled to believe what they want, but when it comes to dictating who someone loves, I think that is absolutely disgusting, especially when it’s consensual. So, on ‘Molotov’, I took a stance of letting people love who they love. Fuck you if you’re trying to corrupt people to join your religion just for the sake of it, to make them scared of doing anything wrong in your eyes.”

Protest songs are important in pop culture, though the risk can outweigh the reward. But is that something Stand Atlantic really care about?

“At the end of the day, I know I’m not a fucking political figure,” Bonnie explains. “I can’t really go out there and be like ‘Boris Johnson sucks, and so does Donald Trump’ – I’m not going to do that; I will leave it to people who are way more educated on that subject.

Songs like ‘Bloodclot’ and ‘Molotov’ may have been born with ease, but pulling ‘F.E.A.R.’ together wasn’t a walk in the park. Looking back, writing sessions blur into one, and certain songs almost hit the cutting room floor.

Better yet, there were times Stand Atlantic couldn’t agree on single sections of songs. Like policies in parliament, they spent days, weeks, even months deliberating over them. It was as if they were in a tug of war, having to learn to work together before songs got lifted from the rubbish pile to the recycling.

While ‘Hair Out’ and ‘Dumb’ needed some Stand Atlantic love, others were crash test dummies that took trial and error to get right. Take the edgy electro-rock meets pop-punk pomp of ‘Switchblade’, a song that nearly sent them spiralling into insanity.

In many ways, the difficulties they dealt with were channelled into the album title and its accompanying artwork. When your world is covered in flames and burning down all around you, why not let everyone feel that?

“I wanted to create an image of hell, but then I was like ‘well, that’ll be a bit too serious’, so I thought, ‘let’s put the devil in his pyjamas’,” laughs Bonnie, who ended up taking to social media to bring her vision of madness to life.

That same attitude transcended over to the title. It was a phrase Bonnie had been toying with for some time. Only, she wasn’t sure whether it was a song or something more.

“It’s weird, because every album we’ve done, I’ve had the title before the songs are written, which is either stupid or genius. But on this one, I didn’t think of it for the album. I just kept trying to put it in songs. I tried eight different songs, and I was like, ‘this sucks’ every time, so I forgot about it.

On reflection, ‘F.E.A.R.’ is the album that cost Stand Atlantic so much on every level. It exhausted them mentally, physically, and spiritually. But it’s also the album that’ll catapult them further towards the forefront of alternative music’s future. And it’s one they can look back on with immense pride at having made it past the perils it put them through.