The Xcerts: No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way

There’s something somewhat cliche about artists who’ve spent their entire careers creating original material, foraging away for over a decade in the alt-rock underground, who suddenly find themselves throwing out a four-track covers EP. Yet, in the lost light of a global pandemic that’s kept us all banged up in our bedrooms, we seek solace in the comfort of familiarity of our favourite songs reinterpreted by our favourite artists. For Aberdeen’s premier alt-rock trio THE XCERTS, the arrival of their covers EP So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way, is far more than a simple frolic through their favourite songs but a field experiment they found themselves having fun with as their plans to cut record number five to vinyl were thrown up in the air. 

“As a band it’s been frustrating but the thing we’ve kept in mind is so many bands are, you know, like knee deep in it with releasing a record and not being able to tour and it must be so incredibly difficult for them to be releasing a record into what feels like the abyss at the moment” explains guitarist and vocalist Murray Macleod, for who it’s equally been as frustrating as it has been freeing, adding, “it’s incredibly frustrating that the goalposts keep getting moved for our recording plans but it’s given us a moment to take a breather and keep an eye on the landscape of things in regards to when shows will maybe be back, and when we can start to make some sort of plan around that. It’s a bit of a hit-and-hope scenario, so yeah, it’s been frustrating but it’s allowed us breathing room to think on a wider scale.”

With the world around them as they know it crumbling into pieces, THE XCERTS found solace in the comfort of sound and the company of each other, a luxury they had once taken for granted but one which ultimately lend itself to the fun they found themselves having as Murray suggests “it’s definitely the longest spell we’ve spent away from one another so that was great just to be together sharing the camaraderie and whatnot, and it was also a great chance for us to be creative and it takes the pressure off when you’re not actually having to write the songs, we’re just reinterpreting them, it was super-fun and relaxed and care-free.”

What you’ll find when you tuck into the audible buffet that is So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way is a tale of two halves. The former sees STARSHIP’s We Built This City and THE RAMONES’ I Wanna Be Sedated stripped back to their bare bones, basking in a realm of atmospheric acoustic balladry. The latter meanwhile are imaginative reimaginations and run throughs of AVRIL LAVIGNE’s Complicated (featuring alt-popper HEIGHTS) and THE CURE’s Inbetween Days. 

Whilst they’re all absolute anthems in their own rights, the pandemic that’s taken over our lives cast a whole new perspective over these songs for Murray and his merry men. It was these newfound outlooks on old-time favourites that they wanted to bring to the forefront of their recordings. “The whole point of the songs that we chose, is that their meanings and their narratives have completely changed to fit with the now. We’re all interpreting songs very differently now, and movie meanings and TV show meanings, so that was a big conversation as to why we picked those four songs.”

The eyes truly began to open when Murray began to understand that We Built This City isn’t quite the feel-good eighties anthem he’s grown up singing his heart out to, but something slightly more profound, a little bit sinister, and ultimately something so relatable to where we are now. “I’ve been listening to STARSHIP’s We Built This City for years, like I’ve been screaming that song at the top of my lungs in bars and clubs with friends and at festivals forever. The line that stands out obviously for everyone is ‘we built this city on rock and roll’ and for the longest period of time I just thought it was this eighties dancefloor anthem, which it is, but when I actually read the lyrics and delved into them, it was very eye-opening and it bought on this very profound new meaning with the now and I couldn’t quite believe it, just in regards to everything going on with the live sector of the music industry being treated like fucking shit, I just found it really fascinating.”

Led by a kind of fascination not even curiosity could kill a cat for, THE XCERTS found it increasingly more important to take everything we know and love about these classics and cut it back to truly digest the matters at hand: “it’s funny with a song like We Built This City, the production on that track is so whacky, I can’t begin to imagine the amount of drugs they were on when they recorded that song, it sounds like every idea they had just made it – there was no filter. It was really important for us to strip everything right back, everything the listener knows and loves about those songs, and put the lyrics and the vocals to the forefront just to show that these songs are almost kind of mystic and fortune-telling.”

As much as the songs they’ve covered are mystic and fortune-telling lyrically, so are they too in their impact on the band themselves. As THE XCERTS continue to write their fifth studio album, they’ve found the artists they’ve been reinterpreting inspiring their output in little ways Murray ponders: “funnily enough, every act who we’ve covered on the EP influences the next record which I only clocked today funnily enough, I went for a little walk this morning listening to the EP and I realised there’s genuine moments of STARSHIP, AVRIL, THE RAMONES and THE CURE on our next record, so I think if it’s going to allude to anything is that our next project is kind of wide open in terms of us showing what our band can do and what we want it to sound like.” 

There’s a little bit of a Lost Boys moment lingering in the light of it all, as the band begin to contemplate the shackles that have kept them stuck in the mud for so many years, and how they’ve managed to break free of them all: “We’ve often thought we needed to stay in a lane, and yeah it’s important to have a strong aesthetic and a thread throughout your music and your records but this time round, for us, we keep saying it’s where teenage us and adult us meet. It’s just us doing everything that we love and it’s certainly the most real representation of what our band should sound like for sure.”

This freedom and this fearlessness has been a long time coming and the result of stepping off the rollercoaster of touring they took themselves on in support of 2018’s Hold On To Your Heart and 2019’s companion EP Wildheart Dreaming explains Murray: “I had a bit of an identity crisis in terms of where and what I thought the band should be, because we were putting ourselves in this box. We kind of broke out of that but this entire period has really opened my eyes to the fact that we can do whatever we like in terms of our creativity.” You can almost hear the emotion and the pride erupt in his voice as he adds defiantly. “We’re so fearless now with our creativity and it’s just wide open for us, like the way we’re gonna present ourselves next is the most open and honest representation of our band, by not putting ourselves in a box it’s allowed us to just be really creative and free. It’s a real sense of freedom that we have right now which I think is really important.”

This sense of freedom hasn’t just helped them in enabling their own vision, but also in championing their friends in the industry and challenging both artists and listeners alike to build a symbiotic relationship to see us all through to the light at the end of the tunnel. 

“There’s so many brilliant records that have come out that have disappeared into the ether because of what’s going on and there are still so many smaller bands that are working away and being really productive and they’re all just clambering to get features in publications and on websites. The best thing you can do for a band that you support, whether its mid-level, small or big, is just to scream and shout about them online and post their songs on Instagram stories and retweet them on Twitter, and just big them up basically” Murray suggests strongly, supporting one another is a subject he’s as impassioned about as he is his own band’s music, adding, “I think by doing that, in turn, musicians are definitely gonna feel that love and they should feel the want to make great art in order to please their following. That’s how I see it, it’s kind of like fans and artists should be feeding off of one another, building one another up in that way.”

In many ways, nobody could’ve ever told us life was gonna be this way, but as long as band’s like THE XCERTS continue to fly the flag for both feel-good alt-rock, fortune-telling lyrical wit, and scene-supporting symbioticism, we’ll always have a place to call home as the world around us falls apart. 

So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way is out now via Raygun Records. 

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