INTERVIEW: Freddy Cricien – Madball

Freddy Cricien doesn’t just like hardcore, he lives it. Since he first took to the stage in his adolescent years with hardcore royalty AGNOSTIC FRONT in the late 80s, he’s become an omnipresent figure in the scene, characterised by his straight-talking, cut-through-the-bullshit nature. Now, with the band in their 30th year, the MADBALL frontman spills the beans on For The Cause, another rousing call to arms to join their eight-record-deep discography. It’s politically charged as ever, it’s discontent but optimistic but most importantly, as Tim Armstrong says at the beginning of The Fog, it’s “heavy duty New York hardcore sounds. Who the fuck else could it be but MADBALL“. Quite.

We’re obviously here to talk about MADBALL’s new album For The Cause. Before we get onto any specific songs, I wanted to first ask where the inspiration came for the album’s lyrical narrative?

Freddy: Lyrically, just life man. Things going on around and being a father now. You get a different perspective on things. Participating in life and travelling around too. We’re fortunate enough that we get to travel with the band so we see other cultures and other politics compared to ours. It’s just life man, those things are inspired by a lot to do with my children and concerns about the world they’re coming into. A lot of different stuff. I’m not gonna lie, I have anger issues. I’ve got better with it over the years but with this music especially, it’s important to be pissed-off. I think it should never lose that no matter how you evolve as a band. No matter what different things you try to add different flavours to your band, which I think is also necessary, this is pissed-off music. It’s hardcore music, it should have some level of angst about whatever it is you’re talking about.

As a life-long hardcore fan, how effective a vehicle do you feel music is, especially hardcore, to convey political and societal messages?

Freddy: For me, just being a music lover first and foremost, I think music is essential man. Imagine a world without music, it’s unimaginable. It’s definitely a vehicle for us and we just happen to be a part of this subculture, this hardcore thing. That’s where we came up in. That’s us, you know? But music in general is an important vehicle. For us it’s a life-line really. We could’ve gone a lot of different ways in our lives and having this outlet always grounded us. We obviously had families that grounded us even further but music is important man, just to get the message out, to get the angst out, the outlet aspect of it. People come in to dance and mosh and do whatever. They’re releasing something. It’s vital. This vehicle for us is vital for personal reasons but also to convey whatever we wanna convey, absolutely. And live, just that transfer of energy, it’s key.

There are a couple standout tracks, one of those for me is definitely Evil Ways with ICE T. That’s an amazing feature because he’s always really blunt and really straight-to-the-point with his lyrics and his delivery. It works really well so how was working with him? I feel there must be a very natural kinship between you guys…

Freddy: That’s the thing. Let me preface this by saying we didn’t do it together in a studio unfortunately. Only because we kept missing each other. We were in California and we thought he’d be in the West Coast but he was on the East Coast, and by the time we were leaving the West Coast we had missed each other so he had to go into a spot in New Jersey, New York to make it happen for us but we were glad to do it. So we didn’t work together in that regard like we sat in a room and wrote it, but we chatted a lot, talked on the phone, texted, emailed. The whole thing came about because we met ICE T playing with BODY COUNT in New York and the dude was super cool and super respectful. He had a lot of respect for MADBALL and hardcore. I didn’t realise. He came and knocked on our door and he was like “It’s a pleasure to meet you guys. I just wanted to say I love your band and I have a massive amount of respect for New York hardcore”, like you said – a kinship with hardcore. That left an impression on me because he’s a guy that’s been around the block, he’s not a kid. He’s had a pretty successful career on a few levels and he didn’t have to do that but he made it a point to do it. So when I heard the song (Evil Ways) I knida pictured ICE T‘s voice on. I said “It might be a long shot but maybe not because he has respect for the scene”. So I reached out to him through my friend Jamey Jasta from HATEBREED and he (ICE T) was down. He was all about it. Jamey somehow had his number and he reached out and we just started talking. We got in touch with each other and I said “Hey, I’m gonna send you this song, let me know what you think” and he was like “That song’s fire” so I said “Do you wanna write to it or do you wanna just add something to it” because by that point I had written the whole song. I had a second verse in case it wasn’t gonna go down. I had it on deck but I sent him a version with a muted second verse because I feel a lot of guys wanna write their own stuff. So he wrote his own stuff and I said “Add whatever you want to it”. “Do as much or as little as you want” is what I told him and he did what he did man and it was perfect. It was like an exclamation point on the song because I was a little more vague and he was just himself in that ICE T way. It wasn’t like the we called the head of his label and we had to pay him, it was absolutely not that. He didn’t want any money. He was like “I’ve taken money from people, I’ve done features for other projects. This is for love. This is straight love. I don’t want any money from you”. It was a respect thing and we do feel a kinship because we’re also hip-hop kids at heart so we’re a bit of both and having him, a legendary figure from that world and that culture – it was cool, it was a very natural connection.

Are the school shootings and everything else that’s detailed in that song something you particularly wanted to talk about now that you’re a father?

Freddy: No, it’s always bothered me. But just seeing the escalation of it, it’s just crazy, it’s happening so frequently now. When I was growing up, that didn’t happen like that, it was very rare – school shootings and random violence like that, especially here in the States. It’s the frequency and the fact that it happened really near us. I was like “What the F man, what’s going on?” People are losing their minds, the world’s getting turned upside down. People’s compassion for life – for another human life, that compassion is dwindling. It’s pretty crazy. That inspired me to write that song absolutely because that school shooting, I happened to be in Florida when it happened and it wasn’t very far from where I was staying. I was like “What the hell?” and now there’s been another since then, or two, I don’t know. It’s pretty wild, but obviously being a father shines a natural light on it. It’s insane, it’s kids. If you’re running around in the street, you know the consequences. If you’re a soldier and you sign up for it and you go out to fight a war, don’t cry about it, you signed up for it. It comes with the territory. I’m not being insensitive, I’m just being straight-up. When I was a kid running around the street and I got stabbed a couple of times, I had it coming, I was running around the streets like an asshole. You gotta know what you’re getting into, but when it comes to that kind of violence, it’s like an unsuspecting child is walking through the hallway and some asshole comes in and shoots him, nobody can justify that. There’s no religion, no nothing. No gangsta in the world would justify that. Nobody likes that. That’s no good, it’s a no-go.

That track does a really good job of being really blunt about that, I think it’s definitely a stand-out song.

Freddy: Thanks man. I like that one too, we’re actually doing a video for that one later in the year.

Going back to what you were saying about being hip-hop at heart and you’re relationship with ICE T, I wanted to talk about the relationship between hip-hop and hardcore because on the album, there’s a couple of tracks where you slip into hip-hop grooves. How well do you feel those two worlds complement each other musically and lyrically?

Freddy: I can’t speak for everybody because hardcore is so divided. You have the people who are rooted in punk rock and you have guys like me who are hardcore kids who love hip-hop as well. Some come from metal too. Me, I came straight from hardcore and got into all the heavier stuff later like punk and metal. Anyway, we’re hip-hop kids, we’re from that generation that grew up with hip-hop. The older generation is more rooted in punk, we’re more rooted in just hardcore and we also have influences from hip-hop culture. I mean if you listen to MADBALL, there’s always been a dose of that in us but we never wanted to be like a rap-hardcore band or rap-rock, not that there’s anything wrong with that but that’s not the approach we were going for, ever. I think with us it was more a subconscious way of writing. There’s a certain swagger with how we write riffs and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we listen to rhythmic stuff. Same with me. My cadence comes across as hip-hop sometimes because it just so happened I listened to a lot of hip-hop when I was growing up. We could have made MADBALL way more rap-rock if we wanted to but that was never the approach. We just wanted to be a hardcore band but have a certain swagger that no-one else had. I think that’s just what it is, it’s just the evolution of that when you hear on certain songs from this record like Damaged Goods or whatever. It’s totally like I’m rhyming, but I’m like yelling-rhyming. It’s not rap-rock, it’s not hip-hop, it’s us. It’s just how we do it. I’ve done it, looking back on a few records, I have a certain cadence and in some songs in comes out more than others. Sometimes I don’t have it at all. It’s just part of my writing style. Hip-hop culture had a big impression on me at a young age. As much as I was a hardcore kid and I loved that, I also loved pumas and break-dancing and all that stuff. Every hardcore kid doesn’t have that background, you’ve got a lot of kids that come from metal or punk or this and that. That’s the unique thing about hardcore – that you’ve got a lot of people with different backgrounds but you have a faction that are hip-hop kids. So we’ve always been those kids and it still comes out in our music. It’s nothing new, we were one of the older bands that had that vibe going.

Another stand-out track is Rev-Up where you’re talking about people educating themselves and finding the truth by their own means. Is that the key thing you want people to take away from this album?

Freddy: Yeah, I mean it’s not a bad message. It can be applied to a lot of different things so if that’s what you take away from it, sure. We actually just dropped a video for Rev-Up today, that’s one of my favourites. That was a fun one to do for us, that’s one of my personal favourites if I had to pick a couple. That would be at the top of the list for sure, it just has this certain vibe to it that I dig. The message is like I’m speaking to the youth but I’m also speaking to a young version of myself. I’m also speaking to my kids you know? All that stuff. It’s about being yourself and thinking for yourself and utilising technology to your benefit but don’t get lost in it where you don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy world. It’s getting harder because these days there are a lot of distractions and people are getting smarter in a way. I don’t think that people are getting stupid-er. I think the access to knowledge is more available so people are getting smarter in a sense. But, are they utilising that in the best way? Or are they just sitting there on Instagram? I’m speaking more to our type of people, the rebellious types. The people that think outside of the box that might approach something from this angle over here instead of the common angle. Definitely that’s a message that’s throughout the record, sure. It can be representative of the record, absolutely. One of many ways. Beware, because there’s a lot of bullshit! Do it for yourselves, do something, change it up man because there’s a lot of shitty things out there. Shitty politics and shitty things going on in the world so maybe the next generation can come in and continue to bring that awareness. That’s the kind of revolution I’m talking about. People are like “Are you talking about people taking up arms and shit?” No, I’m not talking about people taking up arms and going and shooting people. I’m talking about flipping that switch in your mind and inspiring other people. That’s the kind of revolution I’m talking about.

Musically speaking, For The Cause is another MADBALL album that “stays the course”. It sounds like a MADBALL album in the same way that an AC/DC album or a SLAYER album sounds like them. When writing new music, what draws you to this? Is it a case of working well live? Or a product of influences? Or just what feels good and natural?

Freddy: It’s just what feels good and natural. I mean obviously we were never self-conscious about what’s gonna be good live. Maybe we’re a little bit more conscious of that now because we are a band that plays live a lot. That’s how we survive – playing live. Our records don’t go platinum, it would be nice but you know what I’m saying. We make money playing live and that’s how we sustain ourselves and our families and that’s how we keep the band going. So, obviously the music has to feel good playing live, but we use to write just to write and not think about that. Now maybe we think about that a little more but really, to be quite honest with you, it just has to feel right to us. The music has to feel right and the message has to feel right. There’s songs that you think might do great live and you play them a bunch of times and they don’t go off so you’ve just gotta switch it up. Then there’s songs that you think wouldn’t work live and they totally work so it’s really hard to say. It’s really hard to factor that into it. I think the album definitely sounds like us but I also think it’s very diverse in our discography. I would say it’s probably the most diverse but I’m happy to also hear that it sounds like us because I don’t want it to be too far removed from us because it’s us you know.

Tell you what, Rev-Up is going to be badass live…

Freddy: That’s gonna be fun. We’ve done it already twice so we’re excited to get more comfortable doing it because really we’ve only done it a couple of times. We’re still in the beginning phase of sinking into it, but we’re gonna enjoy doing that one live for sure.

Am I right in saying it’s been thirty years exactly now for the band?

Freddy: I guess so, yeah man. It doesn’t feel like that to me because when we started it was 88 and we dropped our first 7″. That was just a fun thing where we took all these old AGNOSTIC FRONT songs and re-vamped them and I sang on them. It was just this fun thing that we did and we called it MADBALL. Then another 7″ and so on. So if you count all that, the band’s been in existence for thirty years. It doesn’t feel that way, it makes me feel old when I hear myself say that but I don’t feel old. It’s just crazy! I gotta remember that I started the band when I was a little boy, it’s not like I started the band when I was twenty. But yeah man, it’s been a fascinating ride thus far. I think it’s not even hit its highest points yet.

Yeah, I wanted to end by talking about how it feels to be at this stage in your career with your bandmates, some of whom have been around for ages now still consistently putting out music.

Freddy: It feels good. This album is a perfect example. It’s getting really well received, everyone’s saying how it’s MADBALL but it’s fresh. That feels good. You don’t wanna hear “It’s MADBALL but its… MADBALL“. That sounds stale and you wanna hear that you’re still relevant and you wanna feel that and you wanna know that. The fact that not only are we still relevant but that we’re getting invited to play shows that we’ve never played and all these other things makes us feel like all that hard work over the years is somehow paying off. It’s like anything man, you gotta go to school… well we’re dropouts! But as an example, you go to high school, then you go to college, then you go to secondary college and then you get that job that you’ve been trying to study and work hard to get or whatever. Maybe you don’t get that job and you get a different one. The point is, all those years that we put in, that’s our training ground. That’s been our experience, that’s where we make our bones. Now we’re at the point where we feel a little bit more comfortable in our shoes. Hopefully things continue to go well. That’s all we can hope for.

For The Cause is set for release on June 15th via Nuclear Blast Records.

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