INTERVIEW: Tobias Young – Our Hollow, Our Home

Losing a close family member is never an easy time, but for Tobias Young of Southampton upstarts OUR HOLLOW, OUR HOME, the death of his father from lung cancer became the catalyst for his finest work to date and the band’s unbelievable sophomore album, In Moment // In Memory. Distorted Sound spoke to the man himself recently about the record, how it all came together and why, for all their success, they’re firmly keeping both feet on the ground.

Tobias, thank you so much for the taking the time to talk to us today. To begin with, I read that you started writing In Moment // In Memory at the beginning of last year, before OUR HOLLOW, OUR HOME even released debut record Hartsick. Is this true?

Tobias: In a manner of speaking, yeah! I write in a rather unconventional method where I can’t really explain the process and I can’t really remember how songs come about, but all of a sudden there’s a song there in front of me [laughs]! Most of Hartsick was actually written quite early on, some even around the time of Redefine (the band’s first EP) so I had a lot of scratch track ideas from then that we’d had for a while that I’d held on to so we could potentially use them later down the line, but I guess the first completed song for In Moment//In Memory , which was Disconnect surfaced in August of last year. I’m really bad with dates but it was sometime around then! [laughs]

We’ll go with that then! Before your father’s illness, did you have an idea at all of where the album was going to go creatively?

Tobias: I’ve been asked this question a couple of times, actually: my answer is that it would have gone probably very differently. He told us he was ill around Christmas of 2016 and up until that point, with Hartsick ready to go the following year, I’d given myself around six months before we really needed to get the wheels in motion to follow it up.  I think that, had the world dealt its cards in a different manner, we would have ended up with something akin to Hartsick 2.0 than what we have with In Moment // In Memory.

And your father’s illness, for a bit of context to readers – when you found out, was it already at a terminal stage or did that develop a little further down the line?

Tobias: Looking back, I think he knew he wasn’t going to recover from it from the get go. My father was a very brave man; when I was twelve years old he was attacked coming out of a pub in Southampton and beaten to within an inch of his life with a baseball bat. He was told he’d never walk, talk or drive again and he managed to do all three and was basically as back to normal as he could have been. He was okay with the diagnosis though: he’d had a good life and he wanted to make sure everything was in place.

I think he’d known a little while when he told us as well because he’d suffered what had originally been perceived as a stroke, but was actually a by-product of the lung cancer itself and I imagine he’d put them together and worked it out. He went through both chemotherapy and radiotherapy and there were some days where it looked like everything was working and others where it wasn’t, but I think he knew and it’s not that he didn’t want to tell anyone, but he wasn’t one to show a lot of emotions – he used humour to display it. The mainstay is that he knew he wasn’t going to get better and, in hindsight, I think I knew as well.

And from your point of view, I guess he didn’t want to fully reveal the extent of it because he didn’t want to upset or worry anybody and just get on with it?

Tobias: Yeah, I think that’s very much it. It’s the old saying of nobody wanting to address the elephant in the room, but at the same time being very much aware of it, if that makes sense.

Completely. Considering the fact that OUR HOLLOW, OUR HOME had quite a bit of success with Hartsick as well, surely going from that sort of high to that sort of low must have been quite difficult?

Tobias: I mean, I’ve suffered like a lot of people with depression and quite heavy bouts of it when I was in my teens as well. For me, In Moment // In Memory was the way I got through the grief process. My father died two days before we were due to go on a three week European tour and on the way there I scoped a template for the album – title, concept, song names, and where Disconnect was going to go. I remember after the second show we were sat in a French café following our soundcheck, I sat the rest of the guys down and said “this is kinda what I want to do with the second album, what do you think?” and they said “this is what you have to do, we’re 100% behind you and we love the concept”.

Even at that stage where it was very difficult to find anything positive in the situation, in order to honour my father I knew I had to put out something that finished with a positive message. Yeah, the new album is sad and pretty heavy, but it’s open and honest and if anyone takes anything away from it, I don’t want it to be “oh my God, I’m sad, I’m listening to sad songs”, I want it to be “you’re going to go through grief, whether it’s a relationship breakdown, a friend moving away or losing a parent, but there are plenty of people willing to talk to you and you will get out of it”. I want it to be a positive message from something that wasn’t positive at all.

Yeah, and particularly at the end of the album when it enters the ‘acceptance’ section, you can feel a light at the end of the tunnel in the tone of the music, but throughout the whole thing the rollercoaster of emotions is very much there. Did you push yourself to write even better this time around as well?

Tobias: Oh I’m always pushing myself. I’ve never gone into anything half-hearted, I want each song to be the best I can possible make it. We don’t write songs to fit a mould, we write songs that come naturally to us and amalgamate our favourite bands. We don’t break the boundaries of what we do, we just try to do it to the best of our abilities. But I suppose that I knew this album was going to be for my dad from the moment he passed away. Music has always been an outlet for me in my difficult times – I remember going to see FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND at Joiners in Southampton at the age of 12 or 13 and that was my release, so I thought “well if I can give that back through my experiences to the next generation then brilliant”.

Again, alluding to the elephant in the room analogy: with depression, especially in young men, there’s always been that ‘man up’ tone and I hate it. If you need to speak to someone, if you’re struggling, we’re all human, you know? No-one’s better than anyone else, we can all offer a hand out and I’m an advocate for doing so. So from that point of view I knew the album had to be good and as far as I’m concerned it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but it was written for as much for me as it was for a band who are trying to grow. If, at the end of the day, the band had split up before we’d released the record it would have been a cathartic experience regardless because without it I wouldn’t have got through it.

Completely, that makes total sense. In terms of the rest of the record, did you take any different approaches in terms of recording?

Tobias: I knew that it was going to be heavier so that each stage of grief was conveyed in the way I wanted it to be, so we went out and got seven-string guitar off the bat and that developed the sound to have a lower range for the heavier sections and higher range for the lead section but the main thing I did was listen to a lot of film soundtracks; I really wanted the orchestral presence on the record. It’s present on Hartsick as well but I wanted it to have more of a prominence this time around, and writing all of that and dividing it into horn sections, string sections etc. took longer than writing the rest of the record, but I feel it makes for a more interesting listen. We’re going to release an instrumental version of In Moment // In Memory a little bit later down the line because it’s got a lot more layers to it and I hope it comes across slightly more intelligent because that’s how I feel about it. But I wouldn’t want to have gone and put out Hartsick 2.0, which would have been the easy option, I wanted to make sure we drove the band forward and evolved into something else. As it happens, life threw out this deck of cards and this is where we are now.

Yeah, I’m sure a lot of people can appreciate that. Why release it on your own as opposed to through a label?

Tobias: Same reason as Hartsick, we sent that out to a load of labels and had some really generous offers from labels of all sizes, but at the end of the day we figured that, if Hartsick is going to be the only album that we do, why not see what we can do off our own backs? We don’t like to adhere to anyone and whilst, you know, we may have jumped up the ladder by signing to one of these labels, we like to be in control of our own destiny, and I think one thing to take away from this is that the music industry, as it always has been, is ever evolving and with the use of Spotify and sites like Distrokid who help you put your own music out onto these platforms, there’s less requirement for the label.

As such, when it came to In Moment // In Memory, we did the label shop again and we received a number of generous offers again from a lot more people this time around. Like I say to anyone who takes the time to listen to us, we are so grateful for it – anyone who takes an interest is mind-blowing because we’re just five guys who like playing generic metalcore basically, [laughs]! So we looked at it again and thought in terms of giving up a percentage of our music for financial backing, but we don’t need the financial backing because the band became self-sufficient off the back of Hartsick. I don’t like to talk figures so I won’t, but we sold so many copies that we don’t need the backing from a label anymore, so it was a case of “if we keep control of it, we can choose when to put singles out, we choose what merch we print and everything else”. I’d rather be in the driving seat than sat behind someone telling us where we’re going, if that makes sense? We’re of the opinion that if it falls flat on its face under our own efforts, at least we can say we’ve tried, as opposed to handing over the keys and go “hopefully we all end up in the same place”.

Exactly. From your point of view as well, becoming self-sufficient in an environment where so many bands can’t and break up because they just can’t afford to keep going, you must feel pretty lucky to have that on your side?

Tobias: Well, we always try and make sure that we never take anything we’ve got for granted. Yeah, we work very hard but at the end of the day, if we don’t have people like our manager, our amazing publicist and the fans who stream our songs, pick up a t-shirt at the shows and post out on social media about what we’re doing, we would not be able to do this. We’re still a long way off from having made it and sailing off into the sunset on a career of music, we all still have to work the day jobs, but gone are the days where we have to go “we want to shoot a music video, cough up £400” or “we want to print a hundred t-shirts, find £50”. We put it on the band card now and we are fortunate to have companies who are on board with what we’re doing like Schecter and Line 6. But without the fans and those people who support us, we couldn’t do it. So yeah, we are lucky, but we definitely wouldn’t take it for granted – it could all stop straight away, you know what I mean?

Exactly, it’s very important to keep your feet on the ground! So at the end of the month OUR HOLLOW, OUR HOME will go out on a very short tour: you have your Hollow-een show and then you’re opening for GLAMOUR OF THE KILL on a few shows around the UK and Europe. It’s one thing to write and record songs like this but it’s another to play them live. How are you feeling about playing them live to everyone, given the weight and the meaning?

Tobias: Well we’ve been playing Speak of Sorrow and In Moment for the last couple of months and they’ve been going down well live. I largely disconnect from the songs when we play them live, Loanshark from Hartsick, for example, was written about one of our close friends whose father passed away and I had to face playing that song first in our set two days after I lost mine to several hundred people, so I switch off onstage as that’s how I get through it. But we’ve been rehearsing the songs for Hollow-een and there’s about five album songs in the set and then on the GLAMOUR tour we’ll play a couple of new ones as well. They’re really fun to play, everyone in the practice room really enjoys doing so and they’re some of our favourites already, but it really sucks having to take out old songs! We sit there thinking “well people really like this song, but we can’t play this song and that song, and we only have 40 minutes so what songs can we play off the first record while still pushing the new one? So for the GLAMOUR OF THE KILL run we’ll play a combo run and when it comes to the album tour which will be announced in the next couple of weeks for the start of 2019 we’ll focus on a good headline set which comprises the best of both. It’ll be a barrel of laughs though, our shows are always a lot of fun! [laughs]

And I’m sure, when it comes round, that’s exactly what they’ll be again. Toby, thank you very much for talking to me today.

Tobias: Thank you for talking to me as well man, and thanks for all the support over the last eighteen months!

In Moment // In Memory is out now via //Hollow Music. 

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