Death of Youth started life as a bedroom project for vocalist Rob David. Ever since starting out in 2018, he’s used the project to chronicle his emotional state on a variety of topics, both personal, social, and political. After a slight hiatus, Death of Youth became a fully realised project with the additions of Joe Arnold (guitar), Carlos Zelaya (bass) and William Page (drums).
Last year, they headed to London’s Rogue Studios to record what would become their debut album, ‘Nothing Is The Same Anymore’. With a raw sound rooted in emotional post-hardcore and screamo, the album’s nine tracks prove to be equally cathartic and ruminative as David and company ruminate on subjects such as transgender rights, male attitudes towards violence against women, emotional abuse, and bigotry within the hardcore scene. Tracks such as ‘Rumination’ and ‘The Inverse of Patriotism’ thrive with a sense of urgency. Whereas ‘Bystander’ pulls back with a John F. Kennedy spoken word sample before Page’s battering drums take over. Later, ‘Castle Rock’ has echoes of Touché Amoré with ringing guitars.
Throughout ‘Nothing Is The Same Anymore,’ Death of Youth demonstrates a dynamic brand of screamo with shifting tempos and tones. It’s paired with a defiant narrative that is equally cleansing.
Following its recent release, Death of Youth‘s vocalist and lyricist, Rob David, talked in detail about ‘Nothing Is The Same Anymore’ track-by-track.
Desensitised
Even though this is the first song on the album, it ended up being the last one written. I’d always envisioned the opening track to have a similar vibe to ‘First Flowers by Terrible Love’ and ‘Stand By Me For The Millionth Time’ by Funeral for a Friend, but I was struggling to come up with something that wasn’t overly derivative of either song, so I put the idea on the back burner.
Once the rest of the album was written, I felt that the songs that we had didn’t have a clear opening song. Then, when messing around on the guitar, I came across the opening chord, and the rest of the song ended up writing itself from that point. Lyrically, it was inspired by the conversations following the Sarah Everard murder in 2021, but the lyrics themselves are more about the attitudes men have towards violence against women, mainly the types who shout “not all men” at the top of their lungs whenever these types of conversations happen. It’s a call for us men to take more accountability if we want to stamp out these vile behaviours. Joe (Arnold), our guitar player, added some really cool, almost shoegaze-like guitar tones into the mix for this one!
Rumination
This was one of the first songs written for the album – it’s quite a short and sweet one. I did go back and forth for a while on whether or not it should be longer before eventually coming to the conclusion that the song felt complete. It’s definitely got the vibe of bands like La Dispute and Defeater, but it also kind of reminds me of Hot Water Music in places.
This is one of the more personal songs on the album – much like the title suggests, it’s a song about still ruminating on a past relationship and wondering what might have been if circumstances had been different. Whilst it primarily dwells on this side of things, it ends with acknowledging that the relationship was a positive one in spite of the outcome and hoping the other person is doing okay.
Fix Your Heart Or Die
Trans rights is something that means a lot to all of us in Death of Youth – we all have friends and family members who are part of the trans community, so we feel it’s important to stand by them and fight for their rights whilst others campaign to erase those rights. The lyrics to this one are very much about that – it tackles governments using the trans community as a scapegoat to distract from their own failings, as well as how absurd it is that we should be having to debate whether or not someone has the right to exist in a way that’s authentic to themselves and questioning why some people feel that bigotry should be written off as a “difference of opinion”.
Musically, it’s a melting pot of melodic hardcore and Midwest emo – the verse in particular is what I feel Texas Is The Reason would have sounded like if they leaned a tiny bit more into their hardcore side. This was probably the song that came alive the most when we recorded it in the studio. We’d always intended to have it as one of the singles, but hearing it back in the studio after we’d fully tracked it was one of those truly special moments where it became clear that it needed to be the first single rather than the second, which we initially had planned. It’s also fitting that the first song we released from the album was the first song written for it!
Bystander
This one was one of the hardest songs to write. For a good while, the intro and the part afterwards were the only parts of the song that stuck around. There were attempts to finish it, but a lot of it wasn’t sticking. Eventually, it came together which made it that much more satisfying once it was finished! This is another song which feels like multiple influences coming together – the intro has a very 90’s Screamo vibe, then some sections remind me of Boysetsfire, and the interlude has a kind of Thursday vibe to it, which is cool. This is a song about how people feel they can switch off from politics for various reasons – it’s a song born out of the frustration of not understanding how people could see the way things are in our current late-stage capitalism hellscape and not feel the need for something better.
The Inverse of Patriotism
First set of lyrics written for the album – these lyrics came from me feeling jaded with the UK in light of things such as Brexit and some of the responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. The saddest part about the song is how little things have changed since then, both in the UK and globally, which is why the initial lyrics I wrote went unchanged by the time we eventually recorded the song four years after the lyrics were written.
This is probably the most straight-up hardcore song on the album, harkening back to bands like American Nightmare and Modern Life Is War. Our co-producer Rob Parnell suggested repeating the chorus/breakdown part one more time at the end of the song when we were demoing the song – a perfect suggestion, as I now cannot imagine the song without going back to it!
Invertebrate
This song was one I originally wrote for Joe, Will, and my first band that we never ended up doing anything with. In hindsight, it was essentially a prototype Death of Youth song as it was drawing from the same influences that I had later on when I started this project, which is why it felt fitting to eventually revive it and give the song a fresh coat of paint for this album.
The main things I changed were cutting out a repeated verse/chorus to make the song a bit more streamlined. I wrote a new outro, as the original outro I’d written didn’t really fit the vibe of the rest of the song. When we were tracking lead guitar lines, Joe started playing the lead line for one of our old band’s songs over the top, and it strangely fit really well, which is why we kept it in as a little Easter egg for the handful of people who remember that band!
I wrote the lyrics to this one about emotional abuse and the effect that it has on its victims, whilst also calling out the cowardice of those who inflict it on others to hide their own lack of self-worth.
Performance Art
Sometimes writing songs can be somewhat of a journey, and what you envision the song being when you start writing it ends up completely different by the time you’ve finished it! When I first sat down to write this song, I wanted something with a similar vibe to ‘Pave Paradise’ by Have Heart. That’s still somewhat present at the start of the song, but then by the end of the song it morphs into a slightly black metal-tinged Touché Amoré song!
This is a song about bigotry and right-wing attitudes creeping into heavy music spaces – this is something that has always perplexed me personally, as I’ve known these scenes (at least punk and hardcore) to be predominantly left-leaning and a rejection of everything the right-wing seems to stand for! The song outright calls that out, especially at the end when it spells it out as clear as the night what we’re all about.
Castle Rock
When I originally wrote the intro, I thought it sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure if it was right for Death of Youth. However, I recorded it onto my voice note app regardless and then remembered it years later. I fleshed it out a little more and experimented with adding some extra notes in and playing the single notes as full chords to see how it sounded. The finished song makes for a nice respite from the more in-your-face aggression before leading into the final track.
A few months before I started writing lyrics, I found out through the grapevine that one of my high school friends had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. The song covers my complicated feelings surrounding this, and the finished track ended up reminding me of one of my favourite films – Rob Reiner’s ‘Stand By Me’. As the film tackles similar themes of losing innocence and reflecting on childhood friendships, it felt fitting that the song’s title would be a reference to the movie, and I felt Castle Rock (the fictitious town in which the film is set) had a somewhat mysterious vibe to it.
Nothing Is The Same Anymore
This is easily my favourite song on the album, and quite possibly my favourite song to play live. It was one of the earliest songs written for the album, and I was particularly influenced by the band Vales when I was writing it. Originally, I thought it would be a decent track two, but upon completion, it felt like a great closing track. This was also one of the first songs from the album we added to our live set, and something about playing it live just feels so cathartic.
The lyrics are kind of a part two to ‘Rumination’ – this is a song about healing from grief and loss, but not a complete resolution. It’s more about looking back at how far you’ve come, accepting where you’re currently at, and acknowledging that you’ll be okay even though you still have a way to go before the weight fully lightens.
‘Nothing Is The Same Anymore’ by Death of Youth is available now on Engineer Records (UK), Cat’s Claw Records (UK – Cassette Tape Only), Sell The Heart Records (US), Remorse Records (France), Dancing Rabbit Records (Germany), Vina Records (Italy), and Pasidaryk Pats Records (Lithuania).
March
6th The Pipeline, Brighton with Splitting Gums and Clouded
7th Pur Pulse, Eastbourne with Loose Endz and Burn Brighter
8th The Grand Burstin Hotel, Folkestone with Rosary and Inertia Point
April
11th Piehouse Co-Op, London
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