A Will Away: Stewing Thoughts

Five years can feel like a lifetime. A lot can happen in half a decade. You can go to university and get a degree, you can fall in love and settle down, or you can be a band battling a global pandemic. For A WILL AWAY, they’ve released an album, changed record labels, toured the world, dropped an EP, toured some more, and battled through a pandemic. As they release Stew, their third album and first in five years, how do they feel?

“When you put it like that, it’s so terrifying,” laughs vocalist and rhythm guitarist Matt Carlson, who’s in an overly talkative mood from across the pond in Connecticut. “Honestly, it’s hard to put into words how we all feel. With the pandemic, we ended up getting to this LP a little later than we anticipated, it’s something we’ve had in the works for years at this point, but we’ve had to sit and wait and hold out for the opportune moment to put it out.”

Ah yes, COVID-19 strikes again. With Stew half-written when the world shut down way back in March 2020, the band found themselves with far more time on their hands then they’d planned. Ultimately, they found more time to reflect on their actions as human beings, which fuels Stew’s existential undertones. But where did that come from?

“It was a mix of emotions, and a mix of experiences. We went from riding this really positive high to a state of complete and utter uncertainty,” Matt reflects, his thoughts feeling as apt now as they were when he experienced them. Uncertainty, it seems, drove them personally and professionally, for better or for worse.

“There was this grave uncertainty over what was going to happen, whether or not we’d be able to get a contract together to do the record, whether we’d be allowed back into a studio to do it, and obviously all of the personal challenges of living in isolation, of figuring things out financially – we were transitioning into this work from home scenario, and some of us ended up on unemployment. We were going through this ebb and flow, this up and down of it where you don’t really know when or how the thing you’re working on is gonna come to fruition.”

Like many artists, A WILL AWAY were stuck wondering when, if ever, they could be a proper band together. It was a tightrope they were balancing on, and they found themselves learning a lot about adversity. “I think that uncertainty either galvanises you to push through the difficulty or it manifests in a state of complete and utter defeat, and I think we experienced both ends of that spectrum,” Matt suggests, owing so much of Stew seeing the light of day to them learning to push on. “There’s the old saying ‘adversity breeds creativity’ and I think that very much, like for creative people during idle time, your brain goes into a default state of ‘I don’t feel fantastic’ so I had to manifest that in some creative way.”

The result of that creativity is Stew. It’s the most ambitious album A WILL AWAY have made yet, pulling together strains of pop-punk, indie-rock and emo for a unique blend of retrospective existentialism. In many ways, to stew is to sit in a great state of anxiety, so you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s what ties it all together.

“We knew we were calling the LP Stew pretty much as soon as we finished [2020 EP] Soup, it was this inside joke amongst all of us, because Stew is the thing that takes longer to make, it takes longer to sit and gestate and marinate and turn into the thing that it is,” Matt laughs, talking a mile a minute but always finding time to giggle at their hidden meanings. Of course, there is some truth to this idea of being in a right stew. In fact, it’s what the album’s about deep down.

“I like to think of it as not necessarily a double entendre, but a word deliberately set with many meanings. It’s meant to speak to sitting and stewing with your thoughts and your feelings and ideas, and it speaks narratively to the central theme of the record, which is that the sum of all of your experiences and interactions take on a new meaning once they’ve had time to sit and marinate together.”

Nevertheless, there’s a through line that connects every release since 2015’s Bliss. Breadcrumbs to be followed, thought patterns to try out. From album titles to artwork, A WILL AWAY are walking you down a garden path, as Matt explains. “We want people to understand that you’re returning to a familiar place, we’re continuing a narrative we started a long time ago.”

“The way we use narrative to connect different points in time isn’t so dissimilar to the way people interact with their own subconscious, and their own personal narratives. We want you to think about the sum of your experiences, and how you handled those experiences, how you thought about them and your personality. It’s about how you present yourself to the world, because I don’t think we ever escape who we are as a result of the sum of our experiences.”

So, five years can feel like a lifetime. But on Stew, A WILL AWAY offer you an olive branch to your own personal therapy session. If you’re searching for meaning in your life, you might as well start here.

Stew is out now via Rude Records.

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