Confronting the truth can be difficult, but for You Me At Six’s Josh Franceschi, it was the spark that lit their brilliant new album, and a return to reclaim their roots.

Words: Jack Press.
Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.

When all the lockdowns were lifted, we took life for a joyride, flocking to festival fields, taking back the dancefloors, and putting local boozers back on the map. Some of us are still racing down life’s highway at 100 miles per hour; others hit a bump in the road. You Me At Six’s Josh Franceschi set his car on fire and drove it off a cliff.

“It was Christmas Eve, I had a big night the night before, and I spent the whole day just being violently ill to the point where I had what I can only describe as a panic attack. This was that ‘oh, no, I’m gonna die’ shit,” Josh reflects as he strolls down the Brighton seafront avoiding all the seagulls on a Tuesday lunchtime.

With the car pulled over and his girlfriend “completely petrified”, Josh saw his life flash before his eyes. The Number 1 albums and sell-out shows didn’t matter; this was “the catalyst for me to recognise when I’m about to self-destruct. This was the final warning, or I was going to completely fall apart.”

So, he got sober for six months, which allowed him to “completely integrate a level of discipline and routine into my life which I hadn’t had before.” It helped him clear the clouds on his past self, visualise what he wanted to do, and manifest who he needed to be. “It was pretty integral to having a mindset which was really clear and healthy.”

Putting booze on the backburner meant Josh was “the healthiest I’ve felt mentally for a very long time,” he explains, having “only allowed drinking to come back into my life for highlight moments, like celebrating something.” In fact, now he’s not “in the pub five times a week getting shitfaced,” he could crack on with making his band’s next move.

Staring the stone-cold truth in the face, writing the songs that have become the eighth You Me At Six album, ‘Truth Decay’, was like staring down the barrel of a gun as it goes off. Following up on your first Number 1 album in seven years isn’t simple, but sobriety sure helped figure out the bare bones of it all.

With his ticker back in top shape and his mind honed, writing retreats in the Cornish countryside and recording sessions in the Santorini sun saw Josh, bassist Matt Barnes, drummer Dan Flint, and guitarists Chris Miller and Max Helyer take on complex topics such as mental health, negative cycles of behaviour, and toxic masculinity.

“I didn’t have the intent of wrestling my demons; I didn’t sit down one day and have this premeditated thought of going to write about how fucked up we were and how, on a human level, we should’ve done better for one another, and how I wish I was a better friend or a better son or a better partner or a better brother.

These creative realisations, these emotional epiphanies that seep through ‘Truth Decay’’s sights and sounds weren’t just from going sober. With tenth-anniversary shows under their belts for breakthrough ‘Sinners Never Sleep’, they saw themselves time-hopping back to that and the albums that bookended it – 2010’s ‘Hold Me Down’ and 2014’s ‘Cavalier Youth’.

“When we sat down to make this record, we were coming off the back of making ‘Suckapunch’, which is such a creative car crash of different sounds and different bands within the same record. We don’t really feel like You Me At Six on that record has an identity, like who is this band?

Reclaiming what was once theirs felt like a sign of the times. With the likes of Blink-182, My Chemical Romance and Paramore returning, You Me At Six were down for it; they wanted in on the action. While there’s “been a bunch of artists that have done the emo, pop-rock, pop-punk sound and positioned it in the mainstream consciousness again,” that’s made it all feel like “a really important time for this genre,” says Josh. ‘Truth Decay’ offers something new to the conversation.

With a mission statement set in stone and the gauntlet thrown down, You Me At Six spent weeks away in Santorini with returning producer Dan Austin. When they weren’t “writing, singing, hiking, swimming”, they were stripping it all back to the band’s glory days. “On the last record, we really pursued this genre-bending thing – I want to do dance music, I want to do RnB, I want to do metal, I want to do punk, and I want to do this. We were trying to please everyone’s appetite, and it became disjointed at times; I don’t know where tomorrow’s going to take us.

By recognising their missteps, reclaiming their identity, and riding down memory lane, You Me At Six opened themselves back up to the things they’d lost sight of. On album number eight, it was time to stop aiming for targets and just shoot for fun.

“It’s difficult being on your eighth album and hitting a moving target every time; it’s difficult to land it exactly the way you want to. I think the best songwriting we’ve ever done has been instinctive, almost kneejerk songwriting, and I think that’s what ‘Truth Decay really is.

If they weren’t heading for breaking point, they were certainly banging their heads against invisible walls. ‘Suckapunch’ might’ve sent them back into the public eye and back into arenas, but ‘Truth Decay’ reverses the curse, Josh explains. “It’s like we’re simplifying everything; that’s why we’ve reversed the type with the kind of music we’re making. Sonically, it’s stuff that we know and therefore facilitates a more honest interpretation of the band.”

When you take a trip down a rabbit hole like memory lane, you run every risk as a band of retracing your steps like you’re treading water. ‘Truth Decay’ was born out of knocking on the door of those fears and facing them headfirst. “In its simplest form, this is us not overcomplicating it. So, doing stuff to keep it interesting for ourselves, and to contemporise what could sound like an old sound for the band. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward, and that’s what we’ve ended up doing on this record: going back to move forward.”

If they’re going backwards musically, lyrically, ‘Truth Decay’ thrusts them forward. Starting by asking themselves questions like, “What is real? What isn’t? Who is genuine?”, they got caught up in the world’s problems like a conspiracy theorist does the dark web.

“I do think we’re living in a period of history where we’ve lost touch with what’s important in more ways than one. Social media has made us absent-minded, hellbent on validation from people and algorithms, and stuff that completely takes away the heart of something like music, truthfully.

Sending themselves spiralling, You Me At Six found symbolism in the concept of ‘Truth Decay’ as a title. “It’s referring to the variations of something being true or not depending on how you’re digesting it or which side of the table you’re sitting on because everybody supposedly speaks their truth, right?

If ‘Truth Decay’ is the theme, the songs within it are the essay. Take the windows-down, shotgun-riding anthem ‘A Smile To Make You Weak(er) At The Knees’, for example. As Josh sings, “I got friends on the internet, they surf their fears but never get wet, they wanna make it whatever that means, living ain’t easy, it ain’t easy”, they’re pulling the wool from social media obsessed eyes.

Without sounding “like a bit of spiritual young Jedi”, Josh’s move to the seaside of Brighton was what saved him from overdosing on screen time. “Living by the seaside is a healthy reminder that everything that feels so massive when you see something like the ocean, you realise how small it is.”

In many ways, the rising tide of the ocean and its crashing waves are symbolic of ‘Truth Decay’. Some of its most beautiful sounding tracks (‘Mixed Emotions’, ‘A Love Letter To Those Who Feel Lost’) are some of its heaviest. After 18 years of being in a band, this is an album that reflects life’s changing seasons as you blossom and grow.

“You get to certain moments in your life where things start to change to what you hold dear and what holds serious weight to your thoughts, and your actions change,” Josh enthuses, proud of the personal growth that ‘Truth Decay’ finds its roots in.

Songs like ‘No Future’ are the sound of a band accepting change in their own house of flies. You Me At Six have had their fair share of flack over the years, but they’re becoming better human beings, and they hope others can learn that too. ‘Who Needs Revenge When I’ve Got Ellen Rae’ is a watershed moment for Josh, a life-altering song for a life-changing songwriter.

Without doing a Craig David and literally singing about walking away, ‘Truth Decay’ is You Me At Six acknowledging their past to protect their present and prevent the same problems from occurring in the future. It’s the self-love and self-development we could all use right now, and for Josh and the band, it’s course-correcting You Me At Six’s evolution.