Check out Hawthorne Heights' new video for lead single Constant Dread.
Hawthorne Heights have announced that their eighth album, the cheerily-titled The Rain Just Follows Me, will be released in September, and released the first song, the equally-cheery Constant Dread, featuring Counterparts singer Brendan Murphy.
The follow-up to 2018’s Bad Frequencies sees frontman TJ Woodruff going to lonely places, not because of the pandemic, but the distance between himself and his family while on tour.
“The most unbelievable part of this story is that this entire album was written and recorded before the pandemic,” he says. “All of this darkness and turmoil is basically a summation of the coldest and loneliest nights I’ve tried to reconcile for the past 17 years.”
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It was remembering a better time that the frontman found the lyrical inspiration for Constant Dread. It was also where the idea to get Brendan on board came from.
“When writing, I tend to dig through memories, both good and bad,” he explains. “In Constant Dread, I was searching through one of my favourite tour memories: Warped Tour 2017, in the tour bus village. One of our favourite hardcore bands, Counterparts, was hosting karaoke. As I was standing there, Brendan hit play on Niki FM, and then threw me the microphone, and as I was singing my own song to a jury of my peers, I realized that I need to loosen up - this should be fun, not agony. When I thought about that moment, while laying bed in the throes of the terror-filled gaze of the moonlight, I knew we needed to put Brendan in this song. And I’m so glad he said yes, because absolutely crushes it.”
On the record as a whole, TJ says that he wants to help people realise they’re not alone in whatever they’re feeling.
“We want to create the best songs that are accurate depictions of our lives and connect to other people through our songs,” he says. “I hope this record helps people understand that others out there are thinking like them – and thinking about them. Everyone gets poured on in life; we just want to provide an umbrella.”
The Rain Just Follows Me is out on September 10 via Pure Noise.
