ANIIMALIA: Welcome To The Villain Era
Close your eyes. It’s 2020. COVID-19 strikes, shutting down the world. You start a band with your mates to pass the time. Fast forward two years and you’ve won a record deal with Marshall Records, opened a stage at Download Festival, and released an EP recorded by super producer Romesh Dodagona [BRING ME THE HORIZON, MOTÖRHEAD]. Fast forward another two years and it’s time to make your next move in this music industry game of chess – so what’s it going to be? “Going from a debut EP into a secondary EP, it’s quite daunting, because you’re expected to make all these advancements, and people really want to see what you’re going to do next,” says Kira Beckett, vocalist of ANIIMALIA, a band who’ve been through that exact ordeal.
“We’re just taking in as much as we can about the industry because we’ve really not been in it that long. We’re all still quite young, so we’re by no means trying to just jump in and say ‘oh, we won the deal, now we know everything about the industry’, it’s not like that at all.”
With Carousel, the follow-up to 2022’s debut EP Pressure Points out in the world, Kira, bassist Max Reynolds, drummer Ben Gasan, and guitarist Kieran Boobyer have distilled four years of fumbling their way through the music industry maze into their very own bottle of Felix Felicis. For a band still trying on different sounds for size, they’re laying bangers like they’re hens in season. It’s all down to the lessons they’ve learnt.
“We wanted to do something a bit different, we wanted to do something a little bit darker, and a bit more synth oriented, but we still have this sound that we consider ANIIMALIA at this stage,” says Kira, who believes learning the ropes of all the little things like social media that comes with being a musician has fed into their music. “I’m not someone who posts much on my personal social media, so navigating that as a band, you basically want to be a product, but an authentic product, so you want to show people ‘this is my music, hopefully you’ll enjoy it’. It’s like you sign up to be a social media manager as well as being in a band.”
Before they even wrote a note of Carousel’s four tracks – Who’s Gonna Stop Me, Hurt Me Back, Puppeteer, and Doom – ANIIMALIA were thinking about the bigger picture. Inspired by bands “like BRING ME THE HORIZON and SLEEP TOKEN who have this huge overarching presence, this genre-bending element to the music that shows you don’t have to conform to one thing”, they were banking on bringing out songs that’d shine on the arena-sized stages those bands play on, not the club shows they’re currently selling.
“You have to be over-optimistic and think, ‘what if tomorrow I get offered an incredible tour across the whole of the UK in the biggest venues?’, so how can we make these songs massive? How can we make these songs comparable to bigger artists on the scene?” Says Kira, who speaks with the confidence of a paparazzi-primed, media-trained popstar who’s been through several album cycles, not two EPs and some singles, yet is still modest and humble. “We’re not quite there yet, we’re still working on our sound, we’re still trying to develop ANIIMALIA because we don’t 100% know what the end product of ANIIMALIA is yet.”
Whether they themselves know it or not, Carousel sounds like a band who were born to fly the flag for alternative music. Opener Who’s Gonna Stop Me storms out the gate like a bull in a china shop, causing a right ruckus and “chimes in with crazy drums and Kieran’s whammy, which is our drummer and guitarist summed up”. It’s not just a scene-setter, it’s a mission statement. “It was really important that we dove straight in so people weren’t getting their hopes up about the EP or ANIIMALIA being something that it isn’t, we’re very full-on and hard hitting and a lot of our songs have been quite angry, or thought-provoking.”
Thought-provoking is one way of putting Carousel’s lyrical journey. It’s a four-pronged dissection of human nature in the modern world, speared on by social media’s TAYLOR SWIFT-driven obsession with eras. “There’s a lot of discussion around different mindsets, they’re often called eras or glow-ups or transformations, and one that came up was the villain era, where you start caring more about yourself than anyone else, and you go out and make outrageous decisions, and for a lot of people that would stop you worrying about how you’re perceived,” explains Kira, a little like a Pepe Silvia meme unfolding before your eyes, corkboard and all. “I started thinking about what would happen if you began to live that era for the rest of your life, and how bad that can become, especially if you’ve got the fuel of traumatic and negative experiences in your past, I feel like it can really push you over the edge of something completely insane.”
Kira might have found herself falling down a rabbit hole like Alice finding her way to wonderland, but the trip was certainly not wasted, lending itself to the tracklisting of the album, and how it toys with concepts. There’s a loose thread for you to follow throughout Carousel, bookended by Who’s Gonna Stop Me and the murky underworld of Doom.
“Doom is when you start to think that everything in your life has gone wrong, you start to think that because of some bad decisions you’ve made, you might as well just give up,” declares Kira, who is giving food for thought rather than full-on explanations. “From the first song being all about confidence, it shows that arrogance and forgetting to care about other people, and forgetting to watch out for your own decisions can really turn into a horrific downfall.”
As much as social media has helped spur on Carousel’s lyrical labyrinth, it’s also tied up in the band’s own experiences as they explore the industry they’ve found themselves in. In fact, it’s become the heart-on-their-sleeve mission statement that lives on beyond the four tracks they’ve laid out for listeners. It’s what they hope sticks in their fans minds too, long after the music stops playing.
“I think it’s really important for people to know that you have to put yourself out there immediately and state exactly what you are, otherwise you have people taking advantage of you, and as a young band, that’s something we wanted to get out there is that we know we’re still experimenting, we know we’re very young, but at the same time, we know exactly who we are, and if you think that you can insult us or try and make us feel a certain way with words that aren’t constructive, then we’re not going to take it.”
Carousel is out now via Marshall Records.
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