No matter what you’re going through, life will continue regardless. The clock will keep ticking, the planet will keep spinning, and your heart will keep beating. So, you have two options. You can sit in the situations you’ve just got your head around, try and make even more sense of them and risk coming out the other end none the wiser. Or you can shake it off, pick up the pieces and use them to carve out the path you want the future to hold. Nothing is wrong with the former, but the real reward is in the latter. And we’re all going to die anyway, so why wait around?
These are the sort of sentiments that Mouth Culture have put into action over the last six months. In releasing their EP’ Mishaps of My Mid Twenties’ in November last year, a scream into the ether in reaction to growing older and figuring out how all this works, they clearly struck a deep chord with a generation going through the same motions, racking up well over a million streams. Then, in hitting the road to meet those who had found such solace in their words, from touring with Teenage Wrist, supporting The Blackout and While She Sleeps and making their mark at Download, 2000 trees and Truck Festival to taking over the UK on their own headline tour, they’ve seen their musings on modern life spread even further. A shared exorcism of the bullshit that we all go through without realising it and a marker for what putting your all into your passion can produce.
Though rather than letting the feelings they injected into those songs linger in the air too long, they’ve utilised the things they are experiencing in the here and now to inspire their next moves. When things are going positively, you’re going to feel positive, and that is obviously going to affect the music you want to make. So why would you force yourself to stay sad?
“‘Mishaps of My Mid Twenties’ came out of such a negative corner,” vocalist Jack Voss admits. “But once you’ve had the chance to tour something like that and seen people fucking screaming it back at you, something clicks. So, when it came to ideas of what to do next, it was like, ‘I don’t want to write a chorus like that anymore. I want it to be like this.”
“Everything we were doing was infused with that live energy,” bassist Todd Groome adds. “When we were writing, we were picturing how it would feel to play it live. And having so much excitement and positivity around us brought us to a place where we wanted to showcase everything good about what was finally happening for us.”
The result of that is ‘Whatever The Weather’, as instant a reaction to a change in perspective you are likely to ever hear. Where ‘Mishaps of My Mid Twenties’ served as a response to the life changes the band were going through at a pivotal point in their personal development – the harsh realities, the growing pains, the adult responsibilities – ‘Whatever The Weather’ is a response to getting a handle on all of those things and thriving despite them. Once again using the band as a vessel for unbridled expression as much as a means of making sense of the world, this new era and batch of songs is born from feeling comfortable in your skin as both a human and a performer.
Taking everything that felt good in the past, combining it with the elements of now that are making the hairs on their neck stand up, and forcing them together as a means of making the future shine even brighter, it’s the most significant statement the trio have ever put their name to.
Musically, the trio dial even deeper into a sound that is quintessentially them. Where before they would just nod towards their heroes, they have now fully plunged themselves into embodying the things that made them fall in love with music in the first place. Their admiration of British rock is pinned proudly to their sleeves, with the cheekiness of Lower Than Atlantis and arena-ready acclaim of You Me At Six thriving within the folds of these songs, but there’s so much more to uncover. There are flickers of nu-metal aggression, bubblegum pop glitter and indie rock earnestness, all tied together by an attitude and exuberance that only they can deliver. With such a varied and volatile selection of sounds, there is no stone to be left unturned, and the thrill that comes with such exploration is something the band will never let fade into the background.
“We want to try everything,” Todd smiles. “You don’t know if something might work until you’ve tried it, so now is the perfect time in our journey to test it out. I see this band as a means of bringing together every sub-culture. If you can do that with something you have written, that is the power of music at its core. If you can find yourself in that, you can find yourself in anything, and we want Mouth Culture to be something you can find yourself in.”
And lyrically, it is a realisation of the power you have when you just let things take their course. Every day that we are blessed with in this world is an opportunity to do something amazing, even if that is just remembering that there is light behind the dark. And by taking the freewheeling joy that comes with living like today is all we have and combining it with the grin-inducing grit of not taking anyone’s nonsense along the way, the result is a stream of consciousness that feels as refreshing as it is thoughtful. By finding out what the adrenaline produced by being completely themselves tastes like, it has opened new emotion door for the band, one they don’t want to close.
“The titles of these two EPs we have done are very self-defining,” Todd explains. “With ‘Mishaps…’, it was about these things that we all go through and are just a part of life. ‘Whatever The Weather’ is more about dealing with that stuff and making it positive. In remembering that these things we do are a part of life allows you to understand that you can cope with them and overcome them, no matter what.”
With such a spring in their step, and with ‘Whatever The Weather’ still only being the tip of the iceberg in what is to come, there is absolutely no stopping Mouth Culture right now. They are fully dialled in, firing on all cylinders and showing why they are one of the most exciting exports that the UK currently has at its disposal. Though more than anything, this is a pivotal moment in the band’s development away from the stage as much as it is on it. With an understanding of what it means to approach life with an open mind and heart, not letting the weight of adulthood get them down and taking each challenge presented to them by the scruff of the neck, this is what growing up is all about. And with the world at their feet, Jack, Todd and Mason are ready to show everyone once again what they are made of.
“We have all grown up so much in the last year, and we’ve jumped even more into the things that we love,” Jack smiles. “Now, we want every pair of eyes possible on us as we look towards what is next. We want to do something brave, but something that is still very much Mouth Culture. More importantly, we want to do something that when we step away and look at the positives and negatives of what we’ve been through, we can be proud in saying, ‘We did that’.”
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