Fresh Start Fever

Brash, brilliant and bursting with new ideas, waterparks have created their best album yet. Awsten Knight talks us through the long, winding story of ‘fandom’.

- Andy Biddulph

It’s always so much more interesting when people are... people, right? This is true in real life, and it’s true in music and art, too. Beige, vanilla, non-specific metaphor is all well and good up to a point, but what is that point?

Think about the bands you love, the songs you connect with, the lyrics you scrawl across notebooks and etch into your skin forever. It’s never the vague platitudes that stick with you, the people who music means everything to. It’s always the fucking gut-wrenching, ugly stuff.

In his band’s cover feature a few months back, Awsten Knight explained the process of dumping the album he’d been making - ‘Friendly Reminder’ - for something almost entirely new, and entirely authentic to the person he is right now.

Something that, for want of a better turn of phrase, explained exactly what the fuck was up.

Having been through a breakup from the person he thought he’d end up spending his life with, his band’s third album, which was very nearly in the books, was coloured by grief and anger and resentment towards one person and one situation.

It was good, sure, but not true to who he is right now. So they scrapped it.

Out went songs like the uber-bitter ‘Play’, and in came the likes of ‘High Definition’, which Awsten says is, “My favourite song I’ve ever made.” Out went seething lyrics, and in came lines that weren’t just more relevant to him in 2019 instead of 2017, but meant a hell of a lot more too.