“We wrote something we wanted to hear and we wanted to do. After you do that, and you’re happy that, putting it out there is quite nerve wracking, especially with the differences between this record and the last record. You never know what people are going to think,” says Graham. “People are strange.”
He says for the band, the sound on the record evolved naturally—they never said “let’s do something different.”
“You’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” says Graham. “If you don’t change, people will criticize you. If you do change, people will criticize you. But I don’t see it as a big change for us. You can still tell it’s one hundred percent a Twilight Sad record, I think, and that’s the most important thing. We needed to experiment, to move on from the first and second record. I’m really kind of proud of what we’ve done with the record, and I’m really blown away by the response.”
It’s been interesting to follow critics trying to pinpoint the sound of the album—throwing reference points like Depeche Mode, Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails and Kraftwerk at the wall to see what sticks. Most are valid, to some extent, but the sheer range suggests that perhaps in the end it’s a record that doesn’t sound exactly like anything else.
“I’ve heard some strange ones. I saw one the other day, I can’t quite remember what it was, but I was like ‘we sound nothing like that,’” Graham says. “The Spice Girls or something like that.”
The Twilight Sad perform Wednesday, March 7, at the Blank Club in San Jose, ticket info here.
