The Beat Surrender

As we’ve said quite a bit recently, rock music is going through something of a cisis at the moment, but a number of bands are determined to put that right and one of those is Failsafe.

While you may not have heard of them outside of rock circles, it may just be a matter of time as they seem destined to kick on over the next twelve months. We managed to catch some time with the band recently to put some questions to them.

You have a new single out at the start of July, what can you tell us about that?

The song is called ‘A Common Goal’ and it’s the second single from our album ‘The Truth Is…’. Its a pretty straight up, fast paced track, compared to some of the others on the album, no messing about!

How do you decide on what gets released as a single, do you do it together as a group, with the label or do the label decide for you?

To be honest it’s a joint decision between us and the label, we all talk about it as a group and decide between ourselves what we’d prefer and then discuss it with the label. Our label is really cool though and we don’t really have to compromise with them, they usually agree with us on what we think so it works well.

Your last video got a lot of attention on MTV, have you got a treat in store for your fans visually this time around?

Yeah we were really pleased with our last video both in looks and how well it was received. This time we decided to go for a slightly different vibe with more animation which is something we were interested in and came across Tim Fox who has done videos for Sikth and Kids in Glass Houses so it look pretty visually exciting.

How important to you as a band are the visual and creative side of things outside of the actual music itself?

I’d say the visual and creative element outside of the band is pretty important to us, especially considering the amount of time we deliberate over it is probably as much as we spend writing music! Conveying an image that fits the music we write can pretty hard as well because we all have our own opinions and we all disagree on things but obviously part of being in a band musically and creatively is compromise so we work it out in the end.

The single is taken from your album The Truth Is how was the reaction to the album upon it’s release?

The reaction to the new record has been great, both live and from people listening at home. The previous album ‘What We Are Today’ demonstrated all our influences in one album, as does the new record, but we feel that ‘The Truth Is’ does so in a more mature, controlled way.

I think fans of the band have definitely noticed this, and understand what we were aiming for with this album; still being fairly complex but channelled a lot better. Overall the reaction to this has been great and we’re just about to hit the road again, so hopefully we’ll get more of the same!

Have you started the process of writing the follow up or will that start after the tour?

Whenever we get home from tour, we load all our gear straight into the practice room and get writing as soon as possible. We learned, after touring the first album to death, that it’s very important to keep the ball rolling when it comes to writing new material. We found it hard to get back into the routine of writing music, which some might call writers block, but this felt more like we’d forgotten how to write songs!

So yeah, we’ve more than started the process, we’re making really good progress with writing another record!

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