SWMRS: "If you're not convinced you're the best, no one else is going to be"

Last year SWMRS opened the Radio 1 Tent at Reading Festival. They’d just released the first song from their as-of-yet-untitled second album and from the moment you heard the whir of ‘Berkeley’s On Fire’, you knew they meant business. Fast forward a year later, and the band got the call from Reading Festival to open the mainstage after someone else dropped out. Like Batman, of course they answered.

We caught them after their set for a glimpse inside their hectic twelve months.

Hello SWMRS. How’s life been since ‘Berkeley’s On Fire’ was unleashed? Cole: It’s been crazy as fuck. We wanted to make our shows bigger. We wanted to connect with people on a deeper level and we wanted to make music that was cutting edge.

Yeah, we’ve seen you a bunch this year and it feels like you’ve got a lot more confident on stage. Max: I mean we look up to bands like The Hives who approach the set like, yes, this is a festival and you bought a ticket to see a lot of bands, but right now this is our show. Cole: If you're not convinced that you're the best band than nobody else is going to be convinced. You know? Max: The greatest part about getting sent to Main Stage is that people are starting to realize that we know how to do our job very well. We may not be massive. Yet. But if you put us in front of people, they're going to freak out. We just opened for Muse in front of 80,000 people and it was insane. We were playing a soccer stadium in Paris and we got the entire floor to crouch and then jump back up again for ‘Lose, Lose, Lose’. They went crazy and most of them had no idea who we are. Hopefully people start to realize that we mean business.