With their new EP, ‘Can’t Forget’, York quintet Feed Them To The Forest aim “to go for broke” as their debut outing embraces the influence of turn of the Millennium Long Island punk rock with introspective lyrics and a definite British tongue. Over the course of its five songs, FTTTF lyrical touches on anger, jealousy, denial, misery, acceptance and hope. Delivered with melodic angst, ‘Can’t Forget’ thrives with urgency as weaving dual vocal interplay alongside driving hooks.
Feed Them To The Forest‘s contemporary brand of emo rock isn’t too be ignored and ahead of its release next Monday, we’ve teamed up with the band to premiere ‘Can’t Forget’ in its entirety.
On top of that, we spoke to vocalist Elliot Partridge and guitarist/vocalist Martin Wainwright about the five songs that make up ‘Can’t Forget’.
Lie with the Dogs
Elliot: This was an interesting one for me, as Martin brought it to me as a pretty complete demo – from then it has had the basic structure and chorus, and we built the verse lyrics around that.
Martin: I’d been sitting on the chorus for the song for a while, but nothing was quite clicking to go with it. I actually ended up stumbling across the verse riff whilst working on a completely different song and realised it suited the chorus perfectly.
Elliot: Once Martin and I had fleshed it out, we took it to the band. Lee added these Springsteen-y lead parts into the choruses, which I immediately fell in love with, and we took it into the studio.
Martin: I really like the contrast between the verses and the choruses, the minor and major key parts bounce off one another and it gives it a really cool dynamic. The video shoot we did for this track was crazy fun too.
Elliot: The song itself is about taking stock of your behaviour, accepting that you have to own your decisions, and how you can build as many walls as you like to hide from your problems, but it’s never going to fix anything if the real issue is actually yourself.
Golden Age Thinking
Martin: I think this one might actually be my favourite track from the EP. I love how the song slowly builds to a crescendo. Elliot had the verses pretty much finished but the choruses underwent some rhythmic changes from the original demo. There are lots of harmonies and back and forth vocals and I really think that helps flesh it all out.
Elliot: I love the dynamic of this song, it jumps around quite a lot but never loses focus or momentum. Plus, it has a super fuzzed out, dirty bridge section which comes out of nowhere, so that’s always a treat. Lyrically, it’s about trying to escape desperation, freeing yourself from the negativity you’ve surrounded yourself with, and how uplifting it can be to take back control of who you want to be, and where you wanted to be headed.
Apology is Policy
Elliot: I’m almost certain that this is the first song we worked on for the EP.
Martin: Yeah, definitely the first new track to be written. The bones of the song had been floating around for a while but Elliot and me went through several versions of the chorus before we finished it.
Elliot: We’d just put out our previous two singles and I’d been working on a few new ideas. I had the verses, both musically and lyrically, but just couldn’t seem to lock down the chorus. I remember playing a super loose acoustic version for Martin and, after a bit of playing around with it, he came back with an absolute monster of a hook. I really like the lyric “Those who laugh the loudest make me the sickest” from the second verse, it’s got a real vitriolic feel and bite to it. Mike’s got some really nice bass parts in this song too, it really drives the song and gives a very cool rhythmic pace to the whole thing.
Speculative Grief
Martin: This is probably one of the more experimental tracks on the record. Elliot had a few parts already written when he brought it to the table, but the process to refine the song into its finished form took some time and it went through quite a few iterations.
Elliot: It was one of the most collaborative tracks for certain. I had the first verse guitar riff written and not much else. We could tell that there was huge potential in there so we just jammed various ideas and structures to see what worked. we probably ran through four or five different versions by the time it came to sound how it does today.
Martin: It’s got a lot of different parts and ideas going on, and it was a real challenge to make it all fit cohesively. I think the hard work paid off though. We’d been discussing having our friend JJ, from The Bastard Sons, come in and do a guest vocal on the EP and it became apparent pretty quickly that this was the perfect track for him to get involved with.
Elliot: I love how the bridge section really steps up a gear, so bringing JJ in really helped push it into having a more raw and chaotic vibe. I think this track is the most literal and personal track on the EP – it’s about feelings of shame and anxiety surrounding mental health issues, and how you sometimes feel as though you have to tick certain boxes and justify yourself just to be taken seriously. It’s a pretty bleak song, to be honest, but it turns that makes it one of my favourites to play live as it’s always very intense and cathartic.
We Used To Make Mixtapes
Martin: Elliot came to us with pretty much the whole song written and we only made some very minor tweaks as a band before it was ready to record. There’s a discord in the chorus, which I really enjoy as we get to sing a slightly strange harmony over it.
Elliot: It’s a song about evaluating who you are, and what’s important to you. The longer you hold onto an unchangeable past, the harder it becomes to let go, and if you keep living like that for too long it can consume you. The track has some of my favourite lyrics we’ve ever written and I love the dynamic shift between the verses and choruses. I’ve been trying to write a song that has two separate lead vocals going on concurrently for a while, and we managed that in the middle 8 of this one, so I was very happy with the end result!
Martin: We really wanted to push the song towards the end, with bigger and bigger guitars and harmonies so that was super fun to record.
Elliot: The EP title actually comes from a line in this song – “They say you can’t forget what you believe”. Going back over the songs, we realised that ‘Can’t Forget’ also appears, in a different context, in the chorus of ‘Lie With The Dogs’ so it felt fitting to bookend the record with those two tracks, it just tied the whole EP together perfectly for us.
‘Can’t Forget’ EP by Feed Them To The Forest is released on 7th May.
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