AGAINST THE CURRENT // Pop Rock Explosions Everywhere

Pop-punk? Pop-rock? Or just plain pop? Some might recoil at the dreaded “P” word but Poughkeepsie, New York band Against the Current carry the term with pride.

They’ve amassed millions of social media followers, toured their home country and the world time and time again…and they’re only – just now – releasing their first record. Made up of eterna-bros drummer Will Ferri and drummer Dan Gow, vocalist Chrissy Costanza is kind of an interloper…considering how tight Dan and Will are. She explains how a band can find big-time success…and still find time to record their first album.

Hysteria: Against the Current is a good name for your band, because in building your fans and music, you did exactly that. You’ve toured the world over and over, but this new album, In Our Bones, is your first major release.

Chrissy: Basically it was weird. We did things in reverse. We released a couple songs and a couple of EPs along the way, so we could play a set while we toured and have songs to play and things like that. It was weird because we did build up such a following and created a community…like an ATC culture without having this debut album, to have the fundamentals of it. We did our own thing and did it in a really weird interesting way. It also kind of gave us a great opportunity with the record, really have a strong platform of fans to release it to, instead of dropping it out there and hoping for a few people to listen to it in a couple of years.

In The Bones is your first major release, there must have been some nerves?

Not so much nerves, more like nervous excitement. We were really proud of what we had done. We had worked really hard on the record. From every corner of it, even just naming In Our Bones, and picking the artwork. At every decision, we were like, “What are people going to think of this? How is this going to be looked at or picked up? Everything like that. Even so, outside of the music, there’s just so much that goes into releasing and presenting an album to the world.

There’s really more excitement and more anxiousness to finally to get it out.

Dan and Will have been this duo since the third grade (or Grade 3, as we say.) What was it like being a singer, coming into a dynamic in which two guys have known each other since forever?

Because I’m the singer, I’m the front person and I’m kind of someone who is setting the tone for the person looking at the band. When you come into a dynamic that’s already constructed and working and that’s been together for so long, it’s like, “Okay. How am I supposed to be the one presenting this when I’m the newbie here and I don’t really know what’s okay, what’s not okay, what our workflow is,” and that kind of thing yet.

Dan and Will had been in and out of so many bands, they were really malleable in the sense where we re-formed what was “normal.”  We developed our own culture and our own dynamics within the three of us. They didn’t make me feel like it was the two of them and then I was the outsider coming in. It really was immediately the three of us.

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 “There’s just so much that goes into releasing and presenting an album to the world.”

[CHRISSY]

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Then there’s the fact they had huge ambitions right from the start: they always wanted to be the biggest band in the world!

Yeah, for sure. If you’re going to do anything, why not do it the best you can possibly do it? I don’t know if we necessarily want to be the biggest band of all time but we just want to be the biggest band and the best band that we can possibly be. Hopefully, we can do this for the rest of our lives and support ourselves very comfortably from it. Ultimately, that’s the goal. I don’t necessarily need to be selling out like Taylor Swift, doing 65,000 people in an arena tour. By the time I’m 45 years old and I’m playing to 10,000 or 20,000 people, and I’m supporting myself and still releasing albums with the guys, I’ll be a real happy camper.

Talking about “selling out,” it seems like your band is part of this movement of “pop” style bands that are doing pop on their own terms…like Twenty One Pilots for example. It’s pop, but it’s on your terms.

I mean that was goal of from Day 1. It’s, “All right. We know what we want and we know what this band is and what works for us so why are we going to follow someone else’s lesson when we can just do what we feel is right and just go with that?” That’s kind of what our mentality was. I think that’s … Bands like Twenty One Pilots or The 1975, they’re all built up from just bands. It’s not from these major radio pushes or all of this publicity and doing promo and things like that. It’s really bands that can get going and then everything just blows up. You have a lot of people that are like, “Where does this band come from?,” because it’s almost like they got popular too early.

It was I heard someone use the expression about Twenty One Pilots. Before you really heard them on the radio, people would say they’re the biggest band that no one’s ever heard of.  It wasn’t like a household name where you’d say, “Twenty One Pilots,” and people are like, “Yeah. I’ve heard of that band,” like the Taylor Swifts and the Justin Biebers of the world. Yet they were selling out shows to tens of thousands of people but people had no idea who they were, and now obviously they’re massive.

Do you think music fans are just tired of disposable pop stars, they want something with a bit more soul?

Yeah. I mean, people want to see a journey. Which is why out of all the pop stars I know, and I’ve brought her name up at least three times in this interview, but Taylor Swift has arrived at where she is because there really has been a journey with Taylor Swift. Some of the other pop stars, they’ve been around for a while, there hasn’t really necessarily been a journey or a growth. Where as you see Taylor Swift, you saw her from this little sweet country girl develop into this massive pop star and it always felt genuine. That’s why Taylor Swift is the biggest of the big. And that’s why Twenty One Pilots is absolutely massive is because people want something that feels like it came from that person. They want to be able to look back and see the journey and see how they got there, whereas with a lot of these pop stars, you can’t see it because so much of it happens behind the scenes like with the label and PR and things like that.

You can really see how these bands developed over time and that’s what makes it so special and that’s what makes it so connectable.

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In Our Bones is out now through FueledByRamen/Warner Music.