FRANK IERO

IN CREATING BOLD, BRASH, IMPERFECT NEW ALBUM ‘BARRIERS’, FRANK IERO AND HIS BAND THE FUTURE VIOLENTS TURNED HEADS ACROSS THE GLOBE. THIS IS THE STORY OF A YEAR SPENT DOING THINGS ENTIRELY DIFFERENTLY.

- Rob Sayce

You’ve won The Real Alternative award! How does it feel?

“It’s really nice! I’ve never really won anything before, even in past bands… My Chem were looked over for a lot of different things. We won a couple of ‘reader’s choice’ type things in different magazines, but I was never a trophy guy. If I had a trophy cabinet, it would probably have, like, three things in it that my kids gave me on Father’s Day!”

When you look back over the making of ‘Barriers’, when do you remember it first starting to resemble an album, instead of a collection of ideas?

“When does that moment happen, that makes you think, ‘We’re going to do something, and not just talk about it?’ I would say for me, it was around the time that we flew Matt [Armstrong, bass] in, and it was Tucker [Rule, drums] myself and Matt. I had brought ‘Medicine Square Garden’ to the band, and in my head, I had this idea for this grandiose song, something that I’d really wanted to try, but never had before. I wasn’t sure how to really verbalise what needed to be done - people just had to feel it, and they either got it, or they didn’t. The fact that they did get it, and we went into this song with a working structure, it felt like, ‘Oh wait a minute, this is actually working! This is something that I’ve wanted for a while’. That was when I started to get really serious about it, and thinking about who else to bring in. And that’s when Kayleigh [Goldsworthy, keys and vocals] came to mind.”

It’s such a distinctive, raw album sonically, and really hard to categorise too - something of a rarity in 2019. Was it exciting to do something so different, when you could easily have stuck to what was familiar?