Daughters: Playing to the Beat of Their Own Drum

“We are always progressively taking a step further and further away from where we were when we first started Daughters”

Since coming out of their hiatus in 2013, Daughters have played by no one else’s rules but their own. With the release of their record, ‘You Won’t Get What You Want,’ last October, the output almost acted as a statement of intent as to what was going to happen with the next phase of the band. This was still Daughters, but coming to music with a new approach and one which comes with no preconceptions no bravado and no bullshit.

Having returned to the UK with a run of sold out shows, Already Heard caught up with vocalist Alexis Marshall ahead of the bands set at ArcTanGent, to see where Daughters are as a band a year on from the release of their fourth record. For the vocalist there is no real introspective look into the band’s music, they just want to put out music they feel passionate about and not follow a cookie-cutter mould.

“We are always progressively taking a step further and further away from where we were when we first started Daughters,” Marshall explains. “In the earlier days, it would be safe to say that if you were a fan of The Locust, you’d probably like Daughters, and even with ‘Hell Songs,’ we wanted to move away from that but we got the ‘oh they sound a bit more like Blood Brothers now’ so we have always wanted to evolve our sound.

“For me, we have always reinvented ourselves with every record, it is just more focused this time around because it is our first record in such a long time.”

It is this type of open boundary approach to music which Marshall thinks should be more wildly accepted in the alternative world, in a bid to create communities of groups who think the same. And the vocalists said there is no inward reflection on the band, once their music is out into the world, they are proud of it and fully support it. He added: “We try not to get caught up and reading about ourselves.

“What we can take advantage of is the opportunities and the attention that world of mouth or press brings to us, and we have been enjoying that a lot in the last year and it has put us in a situation where we can play all these incredible festivals around Europe.

“That being said, of course we are going to be working on a new Daughters record and it will be a culmination of all our influences, and it will be a record that we love. People may hate it, they may love it but it will still be a Daughters records.”

But Marshall does admit that this latest output from Daughters may be the most widely accessible form a consumer point of view, and consequently has put them in situations they didn’t think they ever would be. “On this run, we’ve been on we played Brutal Assault, which was full of death metal bands,” Marshall continues. “Then we played Off Festival in Poland where we were playing along the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Suede. Which don’t get me wrong that is an incredible thing to say, but we were thinking why the hell we were there. But people came to watch us and enjoyed our set and that’s what matters.”

It is this new way of thinking and approach to the bands music which Marshall believes has put them in a position where they aren’t pigeonholed and that is the way he wants to keep things. With the likes of Daughters, Lingua Ignota, The Body and Full of Hell pushing genre boundaries and showing a more collective way of approaching music, the Daughters frontman said this is the way music should be consumed and approached.

“Why would you want to play on a bill where all the bands sound the same, just with their choruses and chord progressions in a different sequence?” he suggests. “Rather than be surrounded by bands that all sound the same. We want to exist outside these walls.

“At the moment, our peer group is always looking at more than just putting out a record and touring that. And that is how we are looking to approach things with Daughters. I want to like bands where people are creating something unique and are not a clone of what the band that played before them were.

“That is what we want to create with Daughters, you don’t need to dress a certain way or own a certain Black Flag record, you just need to enjoy the music.”

As on the nose as it is, Daughters are not about offering up what their fans want. they refuse to be pigeonholed and it appears they will continue to carve their own path and forge their future.