The age-old adage “good things come to those who wait” couldn’t be truer for Blackpool’s own Boston Manor.
Off the back of their highly-anticipated second LP Welcome to the Neighbourhood, the five-piece will spend the rest of 2018 jumping from continent to continent, landing firmly on Aussie soil for the first time this summer.
“We have a lot of friends in Australia and everyone talks about Melbourne’s coffee,” vocalist Henry Cox says. “So, we will have to have a cup while we’re hanging out.
“Blackpool, where we live, is right next to the sea but I’m sure you have much nicer beaches in Australia.”
Cox says some of the bleaker moments on Welcome to the Neighbourhood were inspired by their hometown. “It’s become really dilapidated in some parts of the city – there are drugs and the unemployment rate goes to 40 percent in winter. It can be pretty, but it’s still not a nice place in summer. It can be truly post-apocalyptic at times, but we’ve grown up around it so we’re kind of used to it.”
The darker themes in the lyrics are beautifully complemented by the band’s ever-evolving influences. “In terms of musical inspiration for this record, we were in a totally different place. We were listening to a lot of ‘90s alternative rock,” Cox says. “A lot of Deftones, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.
“We also listened to a fair bit of blues and rockier stuff like Queens of the Stone Age, but when it comes to the electronic and industrial stuff we are all into Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy and Pitchshifter. We love the more obscure electronic and heavy bands from the early ‘90s and late ‘80s.”
Following on from the success of their debut album Be Nothing, Boston Manor found their voice on Welcome to the Neighbourhood. “Without sounding arrogant, we knew we were making something that we were really excited about and it was definitely a much bigger project than the last record. We basically wrote the album twice. We wrote the first incarnation of the record and it wasn’t really what we wanted, so we scrapped almost the whole thing a couple of months before we went into the studio,” he says.
“We thought if we’re going to do this let’s be fearless and throw caution to the wind. We were dipping our toes in, but we wanted to take the plunge and go the whole hog with it. It was a really exciting time.”
Despite the undeniable influence of all things British on this record, Welcome to the Neighbourhood was produced and recorded across the pond in New Jersey, with Mike Sapone (Taking Back Sunday, Mayday Parade, Public Enemy) at the helm. “We recorded it in this weird little town called Lake Hopatcong in northern New Jersey.
“It’s a tiny place,” Cox explains. “There’s a deli across the street, one gas station and a bar, and that’s all they have in the whole town. It’s very remote and we were there in January so literally two weeks out of the month we were snowed in and we couldn’t leave the studio, but it was great because there were definitely no distractions and it fit the bleak sound of the record pretty well. We went there because it’s a studio that Mike works out of a lot. It had all the things we needed, and they were really accommodating.”
“We did post-production in October and it was still kind of sunny and warm, and we’d get up at six in the morning and go kayaking on the lake – but when we came back to finish the album the whole lake was frozen over. It was totally different – it was an experience for sure.”
From the frozen lakes of the US to the sunny east coast of Australia, Boston Manor wrap up their world tour at Good Things Festival in December. “We are buzzing. None of us have ever been to Australia before. I’m not going to lie – there’s some definite touristy shit that we’re going to do like hold a Koala and shit,” Cox laughs.
