"I Was Involved With A Lot Of Drugs And Violence, And I Was Caught Up With The Police"

Australia’s Trophy Eyes are one of pop-punk’s hottest prospects and on the cusp of releasing their third album, The American Dream. But rewind just a few years and their vocalist John Floreani found himself in a far less envious position.

Here, Kerrang! goes in-depth with the frontman, to chat through a troubled youth beset by drug and violence issues, and how a small town in Texas saved him from himself and inspired Trophy Eyes’ best record yet.

Hey, John. What was life like for you before you joined Trophy Eyes?
I grew up in a small town four hours away from Sydney. It was just me, my mum and my siblings. There’s not a lot to do out there, so as I got older I started to get into trouble. My friends and I fell in and out of that conflict, and then I moved to Sydney. I went to university to do I.T., and then Journalism, but dropped-out both times. After that I went to Newcastle, and it was there that I found Trophy Eyes.

What form did that trouble you were getting into take?
I was involved with a lot of drugs and violence, and I was getting caught up with the police. I was an angry teenager and I always found myself in sticky situations. It was the only thing to do out there. It started off as a little bit of fun, as these things normally do, but then you find yourself very involved in a world that’s hard to get out of. There wasn’t a lot going on in my hometown, so you had to make your own fun. I had friends that ended up in some dark places, because they were involved with bad groups of people. Intravenous drugs were involved and things got really sticky, and a lot of that stuff still fucks with me.

Before that darkness began to manifest itself, what was your childhood like?
Well, my mum’s side of the family is Irish, and my dad’s is Italian. My dad’s heritage has had a big influence on me, because I saw a lot of his family, whereas my mum was an only child. That being said, I was very close with my grandfather on my mum’s side – he was my hero. But my sensibilities derive from my Italian heritage, and we’d do stuff like only be able to eat at the kid’s table until we were old enough to eat with the grown-ups. I feel strongly rooted in Italian culture, and I’m proud to have that in my life. It was a nice upbringing to have.

Did you always want to be a musician?
I wanted to be in a band ever since I heard blink-182. I wanted that lifestyle and to be like them. I didn’t know how to write songs or what being in a band meant, but I knew I wanted to do something with music. I chased it down and found it in Newcastle.

What were those early days in Newcastle like for Trophy Eyes?
We got together in early 2014, but I don’t think we played a proper show until the year after. It was just the five of us in a tiny flat, writing and practicing our songs. All I wanted from Trophy Eyes was to play this local venue, The Loft, in Newcastle; it’s a 100-cap room, and that was as far as I’d allowed myself to dream. I never imagined we’d go overseas and do things like Warped Tour. Things got serious when Neck Deep came to Australia for the first time. We had a single out called Hourglass which had picked up a bit of traction over here, and the guy who was putting on the Neck Deep tour heard it and said we could be the openers. We got our debut EP, Everything Goes Away, released really quickly, and shortly after Hopeless Records picked us up and things escalated from there.

Trophy Eyes are often described as a pop-punk band, but it seems that you’ve moved further away from that sound with each release. Have you ever had a problem with the pop-punk label?
I’ve never had a problem with that. Ever since we’ve been a band, no-one’s quite known what to call us genre-wise, so it’s just safe to say we make pop-punk songs. And I guess we used to have pop-punk attributes, so that’s fine, but we’ve never set out to write in the style of pop-punk, hardcore or anything else. Trophy Eyes have always just written whatever we want, especially so with The American Dream – I don’t think there’s much punkiness about this record at all. It’s a shame that some people see us as a pop-punk band who are straying from that scene, because from our perspective, we don’t think we’ve ever really written a pop-punk song. That label is a funny thing, but I definitely don’t think The American Dream is a pop-punk album. And who knows, the next record might be a rap LP – you never know!

Let’s talk about that new album, then. What was your headspace like going in to writing The American Dream?
I moved to Texas to live with my girlfriend, and that’s where the title of the record came from. I’ve always seen the concept of the American Dream as the idea that there’s this place that exists where you can start anew, and where if you work hard you can achieve what you want. I moved away from the shittiness I had going on in Australia and started again. I needed that space to grow up and focus on me. I was feeling good there, and the fresh start was great – it all contributed to me being in a good mental space.

What were you trying to escape from?
What I’d made of myself. If you do enough arsehole-ish things, you get seen as an arsehole, you know? You can’t take that behaviour back. I stopped speaking to a lot of my friends and family, and the things I’d done as a kid and the shit I’d pulled caught up with me. I had a bad reputation. There are places in Australia that hold some pretty heavy memories about those times. It was a poisonous environment and I was indulging in self-destructive behaviour; I’d wake up, get belted, pass out and start the next day the exact same way. My life just started to fly by, and I’d wake up in the mornings and think, ‘Wow, I’m an arsehole. I don’t speak to my friends anymore. This shit has gotten out of control.’ I needed to clean myself up and move away so that that shit wasn’t following me. Texas was where I went.

What subjects are you addressing on The American Dream?
There’s a lot of reflection on past moments in my life. There’s a song in there called Something Bigger Than This, and it’s about how one day I walked outside my house and the train had stopped on the tracks right there. I later found out that a kid had jumped in front of it and got totally obliterated. I went to the store for some bread later on, and it got me thinking about how what was on my mind was that I needed to go buy some food, but for the person who’d died, all they could think was, ‘My life is over – I need to go and jump in front of a train today.’ That really stuck with me, and it’s a moment that keeps popping back into my head. Memories like that drive The American Dream; it’s largely reflective accounts of things I’ve found important or that’ve changed me.

The lead-single, You Can Count On Me, has some particularly barbed lyrics. What’s that one about?
It’s not necessarily a retaliation song – that seems petty to say – but it’s something I wrote when I was thinking about the things people say about bands. We’ve always been fine with criticism of our band – it’s a part of the job, and your opinions on what you like and what you don’t are part of what makes you an individual – but so often I’ll see people say stuff like, ‘I hope you die because you didn’t write this kind of song,’ or they’ll attack your physical appearance and say things about your family. It’s shocking, and You Can Count On Me is me humanising the things that bands do, and showing everyone that we’re just five idiots who got together and wrote some songs in the hope that a few people would like them. We never intended to upset anybody with our music. It’s about that, and it’s creating a distance between us and those people, because that way of thinking is such a strange concept to me. Thinking that a band owes you something just because you bought a ticket to their show doesn’t make sense. You Can Count On Me is a reminder that we’re just normal people writing music, and if you feel like you have to tell a band, ‘Fuck you – I hope you die,’ there’s probably something wrong with the way you’re approaching things.

Given the openness with which you approach songs like that, are you ever fearful of exposing your more vulnerable or confrontational thoughts within your lyrics?
I just want to write music that means something to me. I remember when we first got together and started writing, we all thought, ‘What are we gonna write lyrics about?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to scream about what I had for breakfast. I need to find something that’s real and honest; something that I can believe in.’ I don’t know much about politics, which meant I couldn’t be preachy about that, so I decided to start looking back at my own life for things I could write honestly and emotionally about. People often ask how I can go over my past and write about it, and honestly, I don’t really know how it happens – I just do it. The first time I got that question was after a show. Some kid came up to me and he was like, ‘Hey, are you alright?!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine!’ He was going on about how I said these certain things in our songs and it was making him wonder if I was okay, and hearing that made me understand why people might’ve thought there was some shit going on with me. But I’ve never really felt the strain of writing about my feelings and emotions too hard. It’s stuff I probably wouldn’t just go up to someone and talk about, but it’s easier to write it in songs, because you’re not telling it to any one individual. I’ve always thought of lyrics as a story, anyway.

Finally, what do you hope people take away from The American Dream?
When I wrote it, I was influenced by very real surroundings. The interludes – A Cotton Candy Sky and A Symphony Of Crickets – are both about real things that happen and real moments that I’ve lived. So, I hope that when people hear the album, they get an authentic feeling, whatever that may be. Whether it’s happiness, sadness or a memory, I just hope they feel something real and experience it. That’s what I want The American Dream to do for the listener.

Words: Jake Richardson
Photos: Jay Wennington

Trophy Eyes' new album The American Dream is released on Hopeless records on August 3. The band play Reading & Leeds Festivals later this month.