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The Saddest Landscape Will Keep Singing Songs of Hope "Til Our Ears Bleed"

Watch the band's new video for "Til Our Ears Bleed," and read an interview with the band's frontman Andy Maddox.

The Saddest Landscape is an emotive hardcore band that has been going for more than ten years, and they're about to release their best record ever. The upcoming release Darkness Forgives shows what the band has been working towards for all this time. The sounds on the record still carry the energy and excitement found on any of the band's other releases, but now each melody or note is far richer thanks to production by Jay Maas. Every song is bursting with hopeful power, shifting speeds and levels of intensity with ease and expertise. Their musicianship is undeniable, the screams and yells of vocalist Andy Maddox layer perfectly into the rest of the music's storm.

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The song and video we're premiering, "'Til Our Ears Bleed," is a tribute to On The Might Of Princes' late frontman Jason Rosenthal. In the tight and cramped space of a school bus, the band plays while the bus seems to catch fire, growing and growing while the song builds up. It encapsulates what the record is about, continuing to believe in the music and trying to give back to it in every way you can.

Watch the video below, and read our interview with Andy Maddox. Pre-order your copy of Darkness Forgives right here before it comes out October 23.

Noisey: So the band has sort of seen every scene of emo and screamo or whatever one wants to call it. I’ve always been curious, how were you introduced to it in the beginning?
Andy Maddox: Pretty early on it went from growing up listening to more mainstream metal bands, and that lead into more things. I think Fugazi was the biggest band that opened me up to smaller bands. While they were still very respected, they had a wider reach and you could find them in more mainstream stores. I think that lead me to finding Dischord bands which also introduced me to Kill Rock Stars stuff. Like Nation of Ulysses and Jawbox lead to Bikini Kill and Unwound. And zines like Heartattack and Punk Planet led me into more 90s DIY emo bands like Indian Summer and Current, everything that followed off Sunny Day Real Estate through Piebald, Braid, The Get Up Kids. By early 2000 we were starting to play and we had peers of everyone from Orchid to City of Caterpillar, and I think Circle Takes The Square started right around the time we did. Then it seemed to not be as relevant in the early aughts, and then it had some sort of upswing for us in 2008 where there were bands doing it again with the “wave” scene. It’s been weird to watch it not be popular, be popular and not. And to see the different stigmas attached.

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It seems like right around the time you guys took a break, emo became a weird, gross monster that was totally different.
Yeah, I mean we were still playing shows that whole time, but a couple members in the original incarnation couldn’t do it. But yeah, there was nobody it seemed. There was this perception that there just wasn’t anybody doing it. There was a weird association that if you were a screamo band, like everyone denied any association with the emo genre because it had this stigma attached to it, like “do you like Hot Topic too? Are you a mall kid?” And not to insult any of those people either, it’s no longer what it was, the scene wasn’t as fertile, I guess.

Was it okay to call bands “screamo” in the late 90s? Was it a bad word like it kind of became?
I didn’t know so much about the word "screamo," you were just straight up an emo band. Screamo, in my association, was when Thursday put out Full Collapse. It started creeping in, because it was no longer about the indie rock twinkly emo songs, it was like, people wanted to draw lines “no no, this is more aggressive and heartfelt as opposed to just being sad and being introspective.” Then screamo wasn’t enough, and then people started calling it skramz. Skramz was such a silly word, I think we insulted our fan base at one point because that word just sounded dumb.

Yeah. It’s Jeremy from Touche [Amore]’s favorite word ever too.
Yeah, our label Topshelf has a shirt that said “please stop listening to awful fucking music” or something like that. We did a knock off that said “please stop saying Skramz.” And then I think Aaron tried to do a “don’t defend the word skramz” shirt like the “Defend Pop Punk” shirt. So we just got really tired. It just doesn’t even make sense as a word and it isn’t anything I want to be part of. The genre is fine, but the labeling is just weird.

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Was the emo scene in Boston in the late 90s connected to hardcore?
I was more connected to the Western Massachusetts scene, but Boston, I did go out there enough. But like Hydra Head was pretty big at the time so there was overlap. Like, at the time, I was really into Piebald and Braid, and you’d see people that were pretty down with Converge and Cave In at those shows. So it wouldn’t be too odd to see Piebald and then a set from Bane or Bloodlet or American Nightmare. The scenes were pretty intertwined in that sense, but when you got into the more DIY esque bands like if you were into Orchid or Jerome’s Dream in western Mass, there was more of a line in the sand towards things like Hydra head because there were slightly different ethics.

How so?
Like, playing DIY shows being the reason you play music versus the “we’re going to be a band and make this a career and live off it.” There was weird associations, like “You have embroidered shirts and hooded sweatshirts, we screen our stuff in the basement and sell them in $5.” And I’m not bringing up their bands specifically, it was just like, “Oh your band has a guarantee? I don’t want any part of setting up the show for you.” So it was kind of the same thing, and frankly a lot of that has gone away. I remember people getting upset like, you could buy a Promise Ring CD in Borders and then they’re no longer punk. It’s like, Promise Ring is now the enemy because you can buy their CD in a bookstore? It was a bizarre time. At the time I seemed to understand it more than looking back now.

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It seems like now the goal is “let’s play everything we can.”
The internet changed all that, the playing field got altered as soon as kids stopped paying for music. There’s no focus anymore on like “who's your distributor? Oh you're with Caroline? That has Sony affiliations!” And that became a dirty thing you didn’t want to be associated with. Now it’s like, “You’re buying a record? Great! Support that.”

When did you start using screams in music?
Pretty early on. I think initially I was in pop punk-type bands, sort of Lifetime esque things. We had a singer and I was sort of the guy in the background that would kind of scream the vocals, and that kind of started it. And from there I sort of needed to get a little more passionate about what I was saying. I couldn’t sing it pretty enough and have it work so I just screamed it. At some point, even basic things like Nirvana made screaming seem okay in a band. Granted, it was hyper-melodic and a different thing, it’s still okay to be done. You can have loud guitars and get really fucking angsty and out there, you want to feel it more.

Was it exciting to scream in the beginning? Did you feel like you were exorcising something with it?
It was, it was more exciting, I think, once it was in a live environment because you could feel the kids screaming back and it was a give and take. That’s when I felt a little more out of it. I don’t want to say it was like a “healing thing” or whatever, but you could scream it and you could feel part of it and not so alone, because theoretically everyone has the ability to scream and feel part of this. It felt more communal in that sort of sense.

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Do you like playing shows more than recording?
No, I like them both a lot, I’d release an album a month if I could. But when a show’s working and the kids are into it, it’s one of the greatest feelings out there. We still have nights where it’s hit or miss and “will kids come? Who cares.” But when it’s on, it’s on.

I think the best feeling is following a band and seeing them in a small space, no one knowing their words to a bigger venue and the room knowing every word, like you guys or Touche.
Yeah it is. I think we might’ve played Touche’s first New York show, and that was the first time we saw them. Seeing them live, I was immediately a fan. Jeremy is one of the greatest frontmen of this genre, he just commands attention and it’s just natural for him. Seeing that in a room, and feeling the energy when they do a song like “Honest Sleep” or something, it’s like that’s exactly what I want out of this genre. It’s great, and I see immediately.

Are you ever not writing music? Because TSL has so many releases.
I’m pretty much always writing. We can’t tour a lot because of the jobs and stuff, but we can still get together and we’ll write. We’re still doing something and we still have something to say, and it still means something to us.

Do you think the direction of your emotion and what you aim towards more changes as time goes on?
You kind of keep doing it. I think you learn how to focus it in different ways. In the beginning, it would just be I’d have this emotion I’d want to get out in a song, and you’d almost kind of put it on top of the song in a way. It’s been more incorporated to the writing of the song and more concentrated and less desperate and all over the place.

What do you think occupied what you were writing about for this record?
I think it was realizing I didn’t always have the right answers and it’s okay to admit that, and it’s okay to let yourself forgive that and let some of the heavy baggage in life to go. There’s hope and you can be content and learn how to grow more. It’s like that constant struggle to kind of move beyond that and find a path to do so.

Taking it back to emo as a whole, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people kind of make the cliche that it’s all about being sad or whatever when really the most resonant thing I think is always the growth of being a person and dealing with things in your life.
Yeah. I always think there’s a strong underlying current of hope in these lyrics, they’re not bleak and about giving up. That was always important to me, to show this positive light. There’s also this weird association like you said, that every song has to be about girls or relationships. It’s not that none of them are, but it’s not always “I’m sad, here’s my broken heart.” There’s more going on in that. You’re going through life which is this ever-evolving thing, and putting your passion into the song. If you get older, people experience everything from life and death to day to day satisfaction of where they are. And it’s like how to get through it, and we’re all relating to it in different ways. Some stuff you just need to work through, and that’s what we’re all doing. These emotions and topics aren’t unique to us, we just happen to be in a band and they’re pretty universal things.

Pre-order your copy of Darkness Forgives right here.

John Hill will name his first child Skramz Hill. Follow him on Twitter - @JohnXHill