Neck Deep: Ride Your Own Wave

“Just taking every day as it comes and grateful to just be doing what we’re doing regardless, so even if that’s the last show we ever fucking play, we’ll be supper happy,” smiles Seb Barlow, somewhere between Nashville and Orlando as Wrexham’s finest NECK DEEP take on America, before hitting their Ally Pally headliner in March.

“I just want to write songs and play shows regardless of arenas or fucking 300-cap venues; if we can keep doing this until we’re old and grey and we can’t do it anymore, I’ll be stoked regardless of what venues we’re in,” he reflects, not as phased by taking on the royal rumble of British alternative music, where winners at Ally Pally always main event arenas like its WrestleMania.

“Doing Ally Pally is great for us, and it’s an image thing, but the backend of that is it’s good for booking agents, and it’s good for press, and it’s good for the messy machine that comes with the music industry,” sighs Seb, who just a week removed from releasing their self-titled fifth album is feeling free from the industry hamster wheel.

It might be because self-titled sees NECK DEEP pull a u-turn on 2020’s indie-leaning All Distortions Are Intentional, choosing to nosedive headfirst into their pop-punk roots. It might be due to the band forgoing producers and collaborators, and self-producing the whole thing in their own warehouse back home in Wrexham. And it might just be because they’ve stopped listening to the suits.

“Every record before this we’ve been pretty, I don’t want to say pressured, because we’ve been involved too, but there’s always a focus to get a Top 10 record, or sell a certain amount, and it’s been nice this time to not give a shit about that,” he beams, bringing it all back to why self-titled even exists in the first place. “It’s been about making sure our fans enjoy the record rather than proving we’ve topped the charts or done Ally Pally.”

All Distortions Are Intentional split opinion amongst their fans like Marmite does toast aficionados. An indie-leaning concept album set in a fictional world inspired by the realisation of random people living a life as complex as your own with their own ambitions was always going to grind the gears of the pop-punk faithful, but it was a record that had to be birthed in order for self-titled to see the light of day.

“After Life’s Not Out To Get You, we couldn’t have done just another pop punk record. We didn’t want to compete with ourselves, so with The Peace And The Panic, I think there was a little bit of a ADAI blend in there, and when ADAI came around, we didn’t want to write another pop-punk record just yet; we needed to write that record, we needed to get it out of our system.”

“We needed to do what we wanted to do. We weren’t thinking so much about what people want and that’s always a fine line with bands, trying to find a balance between feeling personally creatively fulfilled whilst also keeping in mind who we are and why people like us,” admits Seb, as it’s clear its not lost on him the impact that record had, despite the irony of how it’s aged with the fanbase like a fine wine. “But now it’s ironic that I read comments and everyone’s like ‘ADAI is my favourite album’, it’s like fucking hell, that wasn’t the tone three years ago!”

Like Seb says, All Distortions Are Intentional dropped way back when and between global pandemics, lineup changes, and the world tearing itself apart, they’ve gone back to basics for album number five. But it wasn’t easy, it’s been chipped away at like an angel in the marble for the past few years. It even started life out in LA.

“We had a bit of a debacle with it, like we went to a producer in LA initially and we spent four, five, six weeks out there and we just scrapped the whole thing because it wasn’t going the way we want to,” he declares, admitting that this time NECK DEEP as a band – completed by vocalist and brother Ben Barlow, drummer Matt Powles, and guitarists Matt West and Sam Bowden – had “a very clear vision in our head of what we wanted to do and how we want it to sound so didn’t go exactly as planned. So we scrapped that. And then we just started it again ourselves, but that made it even more special. I think that’s a big party of we we called it the self-titled record, because it’s very us, like it’s built by us from the ground up.”

Following the sage advice of BLINK-182 and GREEN DAY producer Jerry Finn – who said to always remember your audience, and remember who you are – Seb, as the sole producer of every second of self-titled, steered the band back home, and started the record from scratch with a single vision in mind.

“When people try too hard, you can tell they’re trying too hard to be something or to shoehorn something in, like it’s not genuine, so I think the vision was to just be the best version of ourselves and know what we’re good at and what people like; honestly, it was easy,” he says, despite finding LA “kind of disheartening”.

Once they got working again, easy was an understatement. Whether it’s Oregon, which became the bull-in-a-china-shop of an opener Dumbstruck Dumbfuck, feeling “like something special, like the vibe of that instrumentally was the essence of what we wanted to capture on this record” to the self-titled era BLINK-182 vibing This Is All My Fault, which Seb and Ben “first worked on that one in 2014 or 2015, like it’s been floating around for a long time and it felt right to go back to the vault and listen to things with fresh ears and fresh experience”.

And then there’s the anthemic summer sing-along-in-waiting It Won’t Be Like This Forever, which was like pissing in the wind – literally. “Sam was playing some chords and Ben was literally having a piss, and had his dick in his hand in the next room, and literally sung the chorus from the bathroom, and we were like ‘what the fuck? What, how, why?’,” he beams.

For Seb, NECK DEEP are all a band of brothers, yet it’s clear that the dynamic between him and Ben is one only siblings can share. It’s the reason songs like They May Not Mean To (But They Do) made it over the line, despite being one of the record’s most difficult to dish up. Written by Ben, the originally-titled Parents explores complicated relationships with parents, which made for interesting listening for Seb.

“We always talk about deep shit, not that your parents fucking you up is that deep, but like just discussing life and who we are and why we’re the way we are,” shares Seb, clearly touched by the closeness they share, and for being able to reassure his brother on being honest. “Ben was super nervous for my mum to hear that one, and I’m close to my mum and I didn’t think she’d mind and the day the record came out she texted me and she was like, ‘tell Ben, don’t worry it’s fine, I’m not stressing about it’.”

Self-titled is an album that’s full of details from the Barlow brother’s ghosts of past, present, and future, yet is universally relatable too. It covers all the usual pop-punk hallmarks like love, loss, betrayal and mental health, wrapped up in hooks so sickly sweet and catchy you might as well call it candy floss and eat the lot. But ultimately, it’s just about being five down to earth lads from North Wales.

“Ben is very conscious of connecting with people and humanising ourselves with people, because this was never supposed to happen, like NECK DEEP as it is now was never the plan, it was always just fun between friends,” smirks Seb, before adding that “the ethos I was trying to keep is we’re the same as everyone else, we’re losers, we’re nothing special, we’re just people; everyone’s lives are just as important, and everyone’s boring, everyone goes through heartbreak, everyone has a hard time with their family, and I like to keep that thread always with NECK DEEP.”

Like self-titled swinging the pendulum back to their pop-punk glory days, the conversation swings back around to Ally Pally and the fact they’re just a gig away from making the jump to arenas full-time. Ultimately, it’s here Seb finds the true meaning of this cycle, and shows just how humble NECK DEEP are these days.

“This has been such a crazy ride, we’re just five idiots from North Wales who never expected any of this to happen, like it never really sinks in what it is that we’re doing. Every musician wants to play to more people, and have more people hear their music, and connect with more people, so even if we never gained another fan after today, the fucking army that we do have is still pretty surreal.”

Neck Deep is out now via Hopeless Records.

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