From Under Concrete Kings Interview

All three of us were members of our most recent prior project, City of Homes.

Years ago a former bandmate who I’ve not spoken to since came up with it while we were trying to name a project. I liked it so much, I vowed to use it if I ever had a project I had control over.

It’s technically accurate in the sense that we do heavy AF breakdowns with the most monstrous death metal vocals we can pull off, so we don’t really mind. It also stands to reason that most folks who are fans of deathcore have received us well, so even though it’s not truly what we are, we don’t mind so much... especially considering we don’t really know what we actually are anyway!

There isn’t a big three. We let all of our influences and whims get their piece of this record. The goal was and continues to be doing whatever we want musically. Having fun with it, and ignoring the trappings of genre-specifics is rule number one... The only rule, really.

We’ve actually just released our fourth video with Will Hall behind the lens, and we’ve got one more coming soon. Will has been spectacular to work with because we’ve been friends and colleagues for years and he’s just as fluidic as we are. Josh and I get all these crazy ideas for the videos, be it lighting schemes, props, gags, scripted scenes.... Will rolls with it all and is extremely successful in helping us to bring our ideas to life.

They’re both excellent platforms for teasing new content, building awareness, and giving a sense of involvement to fans, but the benefits per se aren’t really important to us. We’re creators. Teaming up with our friends and colleagues in our area to create new things and producing content that aims to be on par in quality to the high standards of the industry and the highest of our peers is the reward unto itself.

We’ll likely never release a whole LP. We prefer and plan to release smaller batches of audio more often with more supplementary and release-specific content.

We already are. Most projects never make it out of the bedroom or garage. Most new bands do lots of talk, lots of plotting, and then fail to follow through or get anything done. Homie don’t play that. Success to us is having our ideas see the light of day. We’re already enjoying great success with that, and with breakneck speed compared to other outfits in our scene... even the ones with label and management support.

We’ve already had tremendous success with this release schedule and it’s only been 7 weeks. Our YouTube channel has gotten almost 100,000 views since the first release on 1/31. Those numbers are still growing and we’ve still got more content coming. All of our expectations have been met and tremendously exceeded.

We were underway in lining up some runs for the Summer months, but with everything going on with COVID-19, the progress has been slow.

For the first time ever, I personally get out of this exactly what I put in. No giving extra to make up for others giving less. Now the extra actually translates to extra at the bottom line. It’s a wonderful feeling working with this very small crew and realizing that nothing is impossible. What seemed so huge and complex before in other projects is so easy now, it’s comical. Imagine my surprise when I learned you can move mountains when there’s no-one on your back weighing you down.