“I literally just got off stage in the middle of nowhere,” says Sleeping with Sirens guitarist Jack Fowler, calling into Guitar World from a tour stop...
“I literally just got off stage in the middle of nowhere,” says Sleeping with Sirens guitarist Jack Fowler, calling into Guitar World from a tour stop in Austria. “We were in some dirty, sweaty room with our buddies Pierce the Veil and Issues. It was nutty—the most punk rock show we’ve played in a long time.”
Back when they released their 2010 debut, With Ears to See and Eyes to Hear, Sleeping with Sirens certainly had a lot of punk spirit running through their veins—and their music.
Over the course of their next three full-lengths, however, the band—which also includes singer Kellin Quinn, co-guitarist Nick Martin, bassist Justin Hills and drummer Gabe Barham—revealed themselves to be in a possession of a heightened, and incredibly sharp, melodic sensibility, and developed into a unit that was able to bring the post-hardcore fury one minute and deliver a beautifully crafted, hooky pop-rocker the next.
Their new and fifth full-length, Gossip, continues this evolution, resulting in their most melodic and compositionally mature record yet.
“I think we’re playing to our strengths on this one,” Fowler says. As for the sound of the music, he continues, “it’s not hard rock, it’s not emo rock, it’s just a straight-up rock and roll record. We wanted to really make something that was electric and timeless, while at the same time breaking some barriers.”
Some of those broken barriers, as it turns out, had to do with guitars. “There are certain songs on the record where I’d sit in a room with [producer] David Bendeth and he’d be like, ‘Hey, at the end of this song let’s just turn on every pedal and go for it,’ ” Fowler recalls. “So all the weird noises and stuff you hear on the record, in