Defeater Wages War with Narrative Hardcore

Storytelling and hardcore go hand in hand. There isn't a better medium for a writer to extoll personal pain or heartache than through the great canvas that hardcore provides. Sometimes bands take that for granted, creating a vaccum in inspiration and uniqueness. When a band does use the genre to their strengths and make it malleable, it shines. Few bands have taken as many risks in modern hardcore as Defeater.

Defeater will be remembered for taking real risks. The band could have put out a bunch of records of cool breakdowns and hooky choruses, but they aim higher with each record. Every release adds onto a growing story about a New Jersey family and town surviving after Each record the band has put out has continued the narrative, making characters stranger or more complicated with each song. Their newest record Abandoned which comes out tomorrow August 28 takes a dive in what listeners may expect, focusing on the town's priest as opposed to another member of the segmented family. It's a record that throws them ahead of the curve in heavier music with pointed storytelling. We talked to singer Derek Archambault about the record, his recovery from a hip surgery, and Cormac McCarthy.

NOISEY: How's your hip doing? I remember being worried a while back when you had the surgery, but it seems like you’re doing okay now.
Derek: It went great. The operation was, the doctors that did it do a million of those a year, so I had really skilled hands working with me but the whole process to get their to raise the money after being denied the workman’s comp claim and all that stuff kinda led me to asking for help financially with it. It was the hardest part, I don’t like asking for help from anybody for anything, I don’t know, just asking for the hardcore and punk community to lend a hand was definitely a strange but eyeopening thing for me. Like anybody else, I started really latching onto and appreciating the fact that hardcore and punk were a community when I was a kid, and to see that it still is and it helped get me a much-needed operation was very, very humbling. The surgery was super easy and I was recovered to like 75% after like six weeks, so I’ve been overall just on the up and up. I started touring again in March, I feel really really good and I’m in better shape and way more active then I have been in years and years. It definitely sounds cheesy but it pretty much gave me a new lease on life.

Did you think that you’d hit the PledgeMusic goal?
I don’t know. I had so many mixed emotions about it because I was just so scared about doing it. I knew it was a huge amount of money to ask for, and there’s so many worse things going on in the world than me needing a hip replacement. On a global scale I’m fucking nothing. The way that I was raised I just inherently feel guilty about it, so I have a lot of mixed emotions about it, I guess deep down I was really hoping I’d hit it and if not I’d find a way to raise the money or whatever, but the first day that it went up was really overwhelming and really emotional, there’s so many people donating so quickly and it raised a ridiculous amount of money in the first day, so, that gave me a lot of hope.

It’s a beautiful thing for sure. When you say you’re raised guilty, is that Catholic guilt or just normal guilt?
No, I just, was raised to try to not take anything for granted, definitely not like, I wasn’t raised super-religious or anything. Just raised to not be a dickhead and be thankful for what you have. I guess it’s just something that I’ve always had. Not wanting to put myself in front of the needs of others. Definitely not a Catholic guilt, my grandmother on my dad’s side was very Catholic, I went to church with her a few times. The imagery was forever instilled in me and probably why I’m so fascinated in it and why it ended up in the new record. I went to church every Sunday when I was fairly young, but it wasn’t catholic it was a protestant church, by the time I was like 14-15 going into high school I just stopped going, didn’t need to anymore. My mom realized it just didn’t matter. There’s no saving me and my brother.

One of the things that’s always interested me is I always associate Defeater with such a heavy storytelling element. Were you both into writing and music in high school? What really caught your attention the most?
Writing well definitely came later in life. I’ve tried to write as a kid, like write stories and incorporate what would be fan-fiction now, stories involving Batman and Indiana Jones and shit like that, and it was always awful. I would read back on it a week or two later and I’d just throw it in the trash because I thought it was fuckin’ drivel. Which definitely, lends to later in life when I’m just an insane revisionist. I guess I just didn’t figure out how to write well until I started reading better authors? I read Salinger at a really young age and obviously reading Catcher In The Rye at a certain age does the same thing that it does to everyone else and you relate to it way too much and you see yourself in Holden. I think that was a turning point for me where I felt like I related more to the personal storytelling and more emotive songwriting.

I hear you're a big Cormac McCarthy fan. Blood Meridian kind of ties into this record doesn’t it?
Yeah, it does. It’s weird, I didn’t read Blood Meridian until after Travels was out. The only thing that I had read by McCarthy was All The Pretty Horses, and I felt, at the time, I read it because it was recommended to me by a co-worker. He was in his late 40s, I was in my early 20s, and he was like, “I heard you fuckin’ read this guy, you’d love it.” I can’t remember how he put it, he was like, “It’s about that turn of the century, all that other shit you like!” [laughs] I painstakingly went through it and didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the second time. Blood Meridian was recommended to me by my friend Dan Rose who used to tour with us all the time and played guitar for a brief stint. He had Blood Meridian with him on tour and was talking about it, and I was like, “Oh! McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses!” and he was like, “You’ve never read this!?” And I said no, he and he was like, “it’s basically Travels, what the fuck are you doing, you just ripped this guy off!” [laughs] I read it in a week and just felt so, I guess I feel this way now with everything that I’ve read from him where I’m like, “Jesus Christ, I feel like I’m just stealing from this guy…” The End of The Orchard Keeper is basically the bridge of “The Red, White, and Blues.” And I don’t realize it until way later and I re-read it and I’m like “Fuck, I ripped off Cormac McCarthy again.” But, yeah, I don’t know, I think now, Blood Meridian ends up in a lot more of the stories than other books because I've read it so much.

In a lot of McCarthy’s work, it’s such a weird and beautiful blend of violence and brutality and quiet moments. It’s been a bit since I read it, but I think they come to a hill and everyone takes off their coats, it’s such a small moment, but it’s just presented so well.
There’s some of that in Outer Dark too where the whole basis of the book is incredibly fucked up, but the way that he makes everything personal and the quiet moments of reflection of these characters that are doing awful, awful things makes everything more relatable and more human. I guess what I try to do with every record where I want you to be able to relate to every character and feel empathetic for them and not just, everybody that was a fan of our band or whatever I’m sure had a strong distaste for the fathers character before we put out Letters Home. It gives you a different perspective on why he is the way he is and what happened to him to force him lend a hand into his alcoholism and exactly he’s so tortured. And same thing with this record and what I wanted to get people to think about the relationship between the mother, father, and the priest. To see how on a grander scale how similar the priest and the father are, the circumstances leading them up to the same place with the same woman were so similar but they went two different pathes. They’re both destroyed and held down by their addiction and the reason that they rely on these vices is because of the awful things that they saw in the people that they lost. Both characters are tormented by these things and it affects them in two different ways.

That’s probably the best kind of storytelling. We start with the son's perspective of the dad who becomes a villain, in kind of a weird sad terrible person. Then Letters Home really kind of points out how he came to be and that everyone has flaws and it’s really sort of showing from different perspectives about how they came to be in that way.

That’s my grand idea. I want everyone to pick these records apart and see, everyone is the villain according to the protagonist. They wrote their own story. Everyone is out to get them, or, so and so is the reason why I’m like this and not me. It’s also just my way of ripping off [F. Scott] Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Showing how everybody unknowingly is the reason that everyone’s life is fucked up. Everyone is entangled in this one larger story that they don’t even know that they’re a part of. The relationship between the priest and the mother on this record lends to why the protagonist from Travels is the way he is and why Travels ends the way it did and why the priest was saying “you’re forgiven, but only by me.” It’s definitely a puzzle-piece record where it’s shining a lot of light on lots of gaps of the story. On Letters Home in the second track the father killed the junkie that’s been dealing heroine to his wife and it shows that he killed the wrong man, which is a whole other piece of the story that hopefully I’ll get to tell at some point. I love being able to have these records be a piece to a bigger story and show how everybody’s actions affect everybody else and how it leads everyone up to those critical moments on the record where somebody murders somebody else or just by sheer fate somebody’s life is saved, etc, but down the road they fuck something up or they hurt someone that ends up screwing them over in the end.

I think I read that both of your grandparents were in WW2.
Yeah, my dad’s dad was in the 101st Airborne, and my mother’s dad was the youngest so he wasn’t allowed to go overseas, but he was a mechanic back home. He tried and tried and tried to go overseas. It just doesn’t work, he just couldn’t pass the physical, he was asthmatic and like, had flat feet and fucked up teeth and he was the youngest one. And then my great-uncle Jerry was shot down over France and died. So, my dad’s dad was overseas and luckily didn’t have to jump into Normandy because he split his knee open in a training jump two weeks beforehand, which is just dumb sheer luck. He was in a hospital when they jumped, and a week later he got shipped into France and then went into Belgium by tank. With a broken kneecap, which is insane to me that they would still send people out there, but he could walk on it. I didn’t know about this until last year, when I took my grandfather out to lunch. Afterwards he just started talking to me about the war which he never really does. That’s where the story on the new record comes from, the second song, what the fuck is the line, “Me and Sullivan behind the line, we gathered,” that’s a story from my grandfather. The guy that replaced him was his friend Sullivan, and Sullivan went to Normandy instead of him.

When they met back up after he got out of the hospital, they were back to go find, they had the masks and they set up camp somewhere like some abandoned factory or something like that, he said it was dusk, they went out to go find people like a mile off the road, to see if they wanted to have a mass in the chapel, and when they came back the whole place was blown out and they felt like they had been kind of saved in a way, but my grandfather was never super-religious because his wife, my grandmother wasn’t catholic, but my grampy never really showed any interest in that. …But I think to him it was just…. That’s what war is. A series of bad circumstance and dumb luck. So that’s real. It blew me away when he was telling me that. So little pieces of my both my grandfathers, and my moms dad losing his brother, that is uh, the basis for the emotional connection to my father’s brother in Letters Home, that’s from him, but not to get too personal, but he was never the same once he got news of his brother passing…

I mean, how can you?
Definitely, I don’t know what I would do if I lost my brother. But yeah, that’s where that comes from. That deep emotional connection and the PTSD from it and where it led him emotionally into addiction. Not bad-mouthing my grandfather in anyway, but it just changed him, then a lot of the other stuff about being enlisted and the stories there are from my dad’s dad. Some of them are straight up fiction, but there’s some stuff that he told me when I was younger.

In your head, is the story complete? Do you have an ending and everything planned out?
Sort of. I constantly struggle with where I want the ending to be, but I do have more offshoots of the story in my head and other pieces that I would like to tell. But over the last three years there’s been a lot of quiet tinkering in my brain where I’ll think of something and just not tell anyone about it, all the weird twists and puzzle-pieces I didn’t tell my band that I was gonna do, I didn’t tell them that until they already started recording the record that the priest was gonna be the father of the kid from Travels and how he became and how he ended up becoming a priest and where his doubt came from and things like that. We have the overarching idea like, “Hey we should make this record about the priest!” But I save all the little details and twists and turns in the story until I’m in the throes of writing the record and just try to figure out how to piece them all together, and I don’t know, in my head there’s a definitive ending, but I want to keep throwing as many curveballs out to people as possible. Everyone was expecting for this record to be about the mother, and I don’t want to give people what they want. [laughs] Or what they think they’re gonna get.

The story will totally have a happy ending, right?
No, it definitely does not have a happy ending.

Oh man. [laughs]
Yeah, things do not end well. [laughs] The kids that kinda see the story just at face value and they’re just really interested in where the characters are gonna go next are really interesting to me because they’re usually not emotionally tied to it, and then the other half is people who are so tied to these characters and they relate so deeply, it’s weird. Certain demographics of people relate to different records more and more, so many people are so attached to Empty Days and Sleepless Nights, and they’re like, “I can listen to such and such record all day long! If I’m having a bad day it makes me feel so much better!” And that is just mind-blowing to me. Like, how the fuck does that make you feel better? Like, three people die in that record, what are you talking about? But it’s really flattering and humbling that people are so attached emotionally to our music and to our band. I guess that’s what it’s all about anyways, that’s what got me invested in punk and hardcore as a kid that I felt like I related to all these bands and felt like they were sleeping directly to me because of all the stuff that we talked about earlier, just opening up your eyes and everything being so new and exciting and feeling like you’re part of a bigger picture and a greater community of people that are just like you, a bunch of fucking weirdos.

Pick up your copy of Abandoned right here.

John Hill grew up in a closet of military antiques. Follow him on Twitter at @JohnxHill