BROADSIDE FACES LIFE’S UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ON MONUMENTAL NEW ALBUM ‘NOWHERE, AT LAST’ — INTERVIEW
BY AMBER BINTLIFF
From old bones to Hotel Bleu, Broadside has undeniably spent the last decade pushing the boundaries of the modern pop-rock scene. Their highly-anticipated fifth album, Nowhere, At Last, is a powerful collection of songs that embraces identity, growth and reflection in a constantly moving world. The record is shaped by a darker, more introspective mindset that navigates the space between searching for life’s meaning and accepting you might never find it.
Across its 12 intense tracks, Nowhere, At Last presents itself as Broadside’s most mature and thought-out project to date. Each song moves the story forward as they uncover another layer of pushing past the eerie discomfort of uncertainty and insecurity. The band makes life’s impending doom seem a little less scary with an elevated take on their signature pop-rock flair.
Broadside’s guitarist, Domenic Reid, sat down with Televised Magazine AHEAD OF THE ALBUM’S RELEASE to look beyond the surface of Nowhere, At Lastand dig deep into what IT means to them as a band.
Your highly anticipated fifth album, Nowhere, At Last, finally drops on April 10th. Congratulations! I know you guys have been working on this album for quite some time, so how does it feel now that it's almost time to let the entire project out into the world?
It feels good and cool. I was just talking to somebody about an hour ago about this because we finally started receiving all of the physical vinyl this past week. It’s cool because this is the first record that we've put out where we have the vinyl before release.
We have been working on it for a while, so it kind of feels a little unreal actually. I've been listening to the finished record for a year now and we started writing the songs two years ago. Some of the songs on the record we wrote while we were writing for our previous record [Hotel Bleu]. So some of these songs I'm just like, oh my God, it's five years in the making and I can't believe that people are about to finally hear them.
Speaking of the album, it heavily pulls inspiration from the iconic sci-fi TV series, The Twilight Zone. Was this an idea or concept that you guys had your heart set on going into making the album or was this something that evolved later in the process?
It’s something that evolved. We actually started writing an album in 2023 with no theme, no idea and we were having a tough time. We wrote maybe eight songs and ended up scrapping almost all of them. Our singer, [Oliver Baxxter], and I were talking and we were like maybe it would be easier for us to get into the writing mindset if we had a direction that we wanted to go.
We just started talking about where we felt we were at in our personal lives within the band. Him and I are really into sci-fi and older movies and shows and stuff and we started talking about Twilight Zone. It just evolved from there. We started rewatching some of the old episodes and we're like, “This would be such a cool idea to write a song based around the theme or the lesson of this episode.”
Also our last record, Hotel Bleu, was so colorful, even to the point where on stage I was wearing green, ollie was wearing blue and Pat [diaz] was wearing orange. We want to go back to wearing just black and white so it all converged in a really cool way and it just made sense for us.
Even with the album cover and then all the music, everything is just so cohesive and cool. It's really fun to see that side of you guys, like you said, after such a colorful and vibrant era. To dive a little bit more into that, how would you describe the meaning behind Nowhere, At Last to anyone who's curious to go deeper than its surface?
The cool thing is when we were kicking around album title ideas, we came up with the idea of Nowhere, At Last. I'll speak for myself because I think that each of us, we all have the same general idea, but it varies slightly depending on which of the four of us you ask. The idea that I'm coming from with the title Nowhere, At Last is THAT we've been a band for quite some time. I've been in this band for eight years. The first release was 10 years ago and we've all been musicians in bands for 16, 17 years of touring.
It's one of those things where the goalpost for a musician, if you're like most of us, is always moving further and further. When I was younger and I started playing local shows, I was like, “Oh my God, it'd be so cool to go on tour.” Then I started touring and it'd be so cool to sign to a record label. Now I've signed my fourth record deal and oh my gosh, I'd love to go on tour in Europe, Japan and Australia, and it just keeps going and going.
The constant motion of the goalposts metaphorically being moved further and further away from you. It, in my case, takes away sometimes from the experience of being in a band and really how cool it is and how much we have accomplished within this band–within any avenue that we've taken creatively.
I think the idea of Nowhere, At Last is that maybe there is no metaphorical end. There is no goal line. You are constantly in this state of motion and the acceptance of being nowhere is where you're supposed to be. Taking a moment to look around and realize how cool everything is and how much you've accomplished and giving yourself that peace of mind.
I'm still trying to figure out how to really put it into words, but even for example, we just did our first tour ever in Australia. We felt such a sense of gratitude that although it took us 10 years to get to a point where we could tour in Australia, we just were really excited and grateful to be there, if that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say that's a very well articulated answer. It's really cool to get your perspective and see how each of you view it. Now, this album is also your first full-length release with Thriller Records. What has working with the label throughout the duration of this album cycle been like so far for you guys?
Awesome! Thriller is cool. This is our third label and all brought great things and had things that we wish were a little bit different, but Thriller is cool. They're a young, hungry team of people. They got some shit to prove and they're proving it every day.
They have such a big team for a newer label and they all know what they're doing and have good ideas. They're very hands-on, but they're also very respectful of our ideas. It's awesome. If I have a question about something, I follow most of them on Instagram. I can DM them and I'm like, “Hey, what does this email mean?”
We just were in St. Louis filming some stuff that's gonna be coming out on YouTube at some point. They sent our product manager, this guy named Colin, to be with us for the week and he was awesome. It was just so cool. We never get to spend time like that with people from our previous labels so it was nice.
To get more into the roll out for Nowhere, At Last, this album's been prioritizing a lot of single releases, with exactly half of the album currently out now since “I Think They Know” was released last spring. Are there any specific reasons you guys decided to choose this route? I know a lot of people have their opinions on single-heavy roll outs so what was the thought process behind doing it this way compared to just two or three and then waiting for the album to come out?
That's one thing that was a big push by Thriller. They're very of the new age of music and social media mindset where you have to keep audiences engaged. Traditionally, maybe we put out two songs before the album and then the third single comes out the day it releases or the day before. But they're like, no you have to release a song basically every two months in order to gain attention and traction and stuff like that.
It's our first time doing it like that. We have been seeing some good results. Although, it is a little bit of a bummer because now people are like, “Well, I already have heard half the album, so am I gonna buy this album for six more songs?” Thankfully people seem to like most of the singles so it's been good. What do you think about it? Not even for us specifically, but just in general.
I'm in this weird in-between where I don't understand why people are so angry about it. Some people are really against it and I don't think it's that deep. I don't mind it because, again, it's more content in a way because you're releasing music videos, lyric videos, whatever. You're getting more than just the typical two or three songs. It's not horrible, it's just different.
Yeah, I agree. It's definitely interesting. It plays a lot into streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music and stuff. They want artists to literally release music basically every month or every two months to keep them in the new releases playlists, which are huge.
I don't know all the inside baseball, but a band like Sleep Token who's been around for quite some time. It's not like they were a new band. They've been around for years and years, and then their fourth album, they're like, “We're going to put out two songs a month for three months.” Then that got them in every single playlist and they went from literally having a few hundred thousand monthly listeners to being the biggest band in the entire world because of that really strategic release plan.
That's kind of just the new norm. It's a grind now for sure.
To speak on the six singles that are out, how do you think these singles have contributed to the overall perception of Nowhere, At Last so far? Do you think that will change once the rest of the album is released?
Yes, it will change a little bit, but overall, I think they represent the album in a cool way. It's not a new sound for us, but it's a step in a different direction. If you listen to our songs, even from the last record like “Cruel” or “What Have I Done?” They have a little bit more of an upbeat, heavy-pop sound. It's just pop music, but with heavier guitars and still has that big vocal chorus and hook.
It's not something that's necessarily new for us, but with Hotel Bleu, we thought maybe that people wanted to hear a little bit more pop music from us. Then we realized that actually maybe they don't and they want to hear the music that we truly wanted to make, which is a little bit more rock-forward. We definitely stepped in that direction and I think that these singles show that.
We have a song on the record that is called “Dead Roses” that we wrote for our last record and it just didn't make it because it wasn't done. We didn't have it quite figured out. You could even say it sounds like our album, Into the Raging Sea. It could have fit on that. It could have fit on Hotel Bleu. It definitely fits on this record.
The last song on the album’s called, “Is This It?” I wrote a majority of the instrumental when I wrote the song that opens our album Into the Raging Seacalled “The Raging Sea.” I wrote those two songs together. They're basically two sides of the same coin.
I think that the singles have done a good job at showing [we’re] trying something a little bit different, a little bit darker than the last record. If that groovy, heavy riff music is not necessarily for you for broadside, you'll definitely like the other stuff because it sounds a lot more like what you’ve come to expect from us.
I LOVE The fun facts about the last track because that's one of my favorite records, so I'm very excited about it.
Get your tissue box ready.
Oh God, okay! I'm so glad you went in that direction for that answer because my next question is this record, from what we've heard so far, is very much the sound that you guys have established over the last decade, but it still feels completely new. How did you guys navigate showing off that artistic evolution while keeping those core elements of Broadside’s musical identity?
We say this every time we're writing a song. If the song instrumentally is starting to be like, “Would we do this? Does this sound like us?”, it comes down to two things. One, we're the ones writing it so yes, it does sound like us. Two, Ollie's voice is Broadside so anything he sings over is going to sound like Broadside because he is the best singer that I know. He's my favorite singer of any band that I know and he has such a unique voice. So really at the end of the day, if he's singing over it, it's going to feel like us.
As far as continuing forward and making sure that stuff feels like we're stepping forward, but it still sounds like us, it's just him. If it's something that we like while we're writing it, we just expect [that] if we think this is cool, people who listen to Broadside will also think this is cool because they've trusted us so much thus far.
What do you think is the most different about this era compared to previous eras of Broadside?
It's all black and white. This one feels like it was written from a different perspective. I don't really know how to answer this actually because it just feels like a more mature record overall. Comparing it to our last record, I felt like that one was the most mature record that we had written up to that point, but these are three years apart now.
We've done so much, all four of us now, but the three of us who have been in it for the longest are all married now. We've experienced so much life, even in the last few years, and we're a little tired. We're getting a little old so we wrote a lot of it from that perspective.
It feels different from any other era just because of where the perspective was coming from. Also, even Hotel Bleu where everything was like, oh, we're in a hotel and we're bouncing around everywhere. The music videos all took place inside hotels to some degree and that was the whole idea. We haven't ever had an album image where we straight up were like, oh, by the way, we're really dorky and we like aliens and robots and old sci-fi stuff and we're now gonna tell you that.
I was designing some merch and it's just got a big alien UFO situation and I was like, I could have never done this for us even a few years ago. I'm personally really excited about that aspect.
What is one thing you want people to take away from their first listen of Nowhere, At Last?
“Damn, this band rocks and they're so sure of themselves even though it seems like maybe they're not sure of themselves throughout the record as far as the lyrical content.” No, but for real, I hope that people take away some good emotions. Whether it’s introspective, whether it is like, oh, I'm in love or everything sucks right now, but I still have XYZ in my life that I'm grateful for.
I think that something like that would be cool, but damn, it would be really awesome if people were like, “You know what? Broadside is the greatest band and that's what I'm taking away from this. I'm going to tell a lot of other people so that they can get more popular.” That's what I want them to take away.
Hell yeah! Do you have a favorite track on the record or one that you're most excited for people to hear?
I do think that my favorite track on this record, I brought it up earlier, is this song called “Dead Roses.” It might be not only my favorite track on this record, it might be my favorite song from Broadside. When we got the final mixes back, I was listening and I just could not believe that this is my band. This is crazy.
I don't want to give too much away, but there's just so much to it that I was just really impressed by us [and] Andrew Wade, who produced the record. I can't believe we did this. I'm really excited for people to hear that song.
I'm really excited for people to hear the title track. It's the second track on the album, it's called “Nowhere, At Last.” That's another song where I feel like every time I'm listening to it, I’m like, “This is a cool song.” I'm not gonna sit here and be like, it's the best song ever, it's going to win Grammys, it's going to be nominated for APMAs if they even still do those, but I just think it's a really cool song. It's a song that I am stoked that we wrote and finished in saw through.
You've also got a busy spring/summer coming up–between shows supporting the Maine in the U.S. and your own co-headliner with Hands Like Houses in Europe to Slam dunk and Vans Warped Tour. What are you most looking forward to about getting back on the road for these upcoming shows, especially after the album comes out?
Honestly, playing for people. Also not even just opening for the Maine, but getting to watch the Maine for five nights. We've been submitting for all their tours. We got to play one show with them in 2023, it was just us and them. It was a free show in Austin, Texas and we got to meet them. I was like, you don't understand. We will open for you for free, please, please let us. When the offer finally came through to do these five shows, we were like we will literally do anything to make this happen so we're excited for that.
As far as getting back on the road, honestly, I just love the guys. Ollie, Pat and Tay [Ewart] genuinely are three of the people that I'm closest to in my life. Pat and I have played in multiple bands together. We've known each other for 16 years. I've known Ollie for 10. I've known Tay for a good four or five years now. I'm just excited to spend time with them. We took some time off last year from touring extensively because we had been touring 9 months out of the year and we wanted a little bit of a breather. We're excited to get back into the routine and show everybody some new music.
When people leave a Broadside show, what is one thing you want them to take away from that experience?
That they had a good time connecting with everybody there. I think that the coolest thing about Broadside is that although we do have some songs that really are feel-good, jumping around songs, I do think that we have some songs that are a little bit more introspective. Hopefully people can take them and feel seen, heard and not alone, but also connected to other people.
I just hope that when people come to the shows, they're leaving feeling better than when they arrived. It's tough out there these days. Everything's expensive, you can't go to Thanksgiving without arguing with a family member, work is hard. I think that the cool thing about concerts in general is that they're an awesome place to hopefully be around like-minded people and let loose and forget about everything else.
Anything else you'd like to share before we finish up?
We have five shows starting in a couple weeks with The Maine supporting our new album, Nowhere, At Last. Then the co-headlining shows across Europe, going to places in Europe that we've literally never been to before. We actually just announced that we're also playing three headline shows in the UK–Birmingham, Manchester and London–around Slam Dunk the week after. It's our first time headlining in the UK since 2018. Those shows were fun and I'm hoping that these ones are even better. And then first time doing Warped Tour since 2018. Looking forward to that in November as well. So big year for Broadside. Hopefully.
