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Album review: Set It Off – Set It Off
Set It Off’s defiant sixth album finds them not just metamorphosing into their most fluid form ever, but celebrating themselves all over again.
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Set It Off: “This is a love letter to all the bullsh*t you’ve got to go through in this business, and finding yourself stronger for it”
Drained and disenfranchised, Set It Off saw out the end of their last record deal, then opted to roll the dice and go it alone. The gamble paid off immediately, as 2023 single Punching Bag kick-started a bold new era. Combining the pain of lessons learned with the buzz of self-belief, their self-titled sixth album confirms a limitless potential…
- Words:
- Sam Law
- Photos:
- Yulia Shur
Everyone should get punched in the face at least once in their lifetime. Not because they deserve it. Rather, down to the hard fact that it’s only by absorbing the worst that our peers can throw at us that we learn just how resilient we really are. In the decade between their emergence from the Florida underground on 2012 classic Cinematics and the end of a two-album commitment to Fearless Records with 2022’s fifth LP Elsewhere, Set It Off had grown used to soaking up the hits. Rejecting new contract offers to become truly independent for the first time since the beginning of their career, though, the trio were ready to head back into battle on their own terms.
“It’s been a long journey of self-discovery,” smiles frontman Cody Carson, wryly. “I’m a habitual people-pleaser. For the longest time, I would look out for everyone else’s happiness before my own. Sometimes that goes fine. Sometimes it gets taken advantage of. It can be in your personal life. It can be about being in a band. Sometimes it’s even just fans constantly wanting things from you. On reflection, I realised I take this abuse and I’m sick of it. I’m done dealing with the bullshit.”
Pouring that frustration into their first single as an independent act – 2023’s aptly-titled Punching Bag – would be a turning point. Not just a shackles-off meld of trademark flamboyant alternative rock with a harder-edged metal influence, it also marked a fiery attitude-adjustment: Cody’s pointed cries of ‘Go fuck yourself!’ confirming it feels good to punch back.
“It does!” he laughs. “And I think that’s healthy. People don’t bottle-up joy. When you’re happy and it comes right out, it’s socially acceptable. But if you melt down at a fuckin’ McDonald’s you look like a crazy person. Luckily, I have this avenue to get it out, and I double-down live. That’s why our most recent shows are my favourite that we’ve ever played. It’s been a very cathartic experience.”
Emboldened by the fan response, singles that followed found Cody dredging the darkest depths of his psyche: Parasite, Fake Ass Friends, Creating Monsters. Unlike the break-up songs of old, the outspilling that would culminate in Set It Off’s self-titled sixth album was less about severing romantic ties than shedding a whole way of life. The singer refuses to “give anyone publicity” by going into detail, but profound abandonments like being dropped by management and booking agents over single short phone-calls in the space of one night clearly cut deep.
“I’ve never viewed this as a break-up album,” Cody says, “but if a song like Rotten comes out of me, I’ve got to be hurt pretty bad. The day that we wrote PATHOLOGICAL, I found out that someone had betrayed me in a fairly significant way. I felt foolish. Then that turned to rage and it just spilled out of me. You make relationships with people along the way where you’re supposed to be looking out for each other. Sometimes, those people switch up and you don’t see it coming. It hits you like a left hook. You go from completely trusting each other to the opposite.”
But being defined by this negativity was never an option. After all, that’s how you let the bloodsuckers win.
“It’s all fuel for the fire,” smiles drummer Maxx Danziger. “We always joke about how fans really love Cody when he’s at his angriest. As is true for every entertainment industry, in music, almost everyone you meet is out for themselves. A lot of them will step on your neck to get ahead. For so long we would let people bulldoze us because we didn’t want to ruffle any feathers; we didn’t want to hurt any feelings; we didn’t want to get a bad reputation. This album is about not letting anyone walk over us anymore. It might sound negative but, really, it’s a reclamation of power.”
“It’s about the importance of leaning into those experiences and growing out of them,” agrees Cody. “Having people tell us they believe in us and then call up to say that, actually, they don’t is a difficult thing to go through. But good lord is it a fast track to learning how to grow up and face your real-world problems. Failure is so necessary. Being hurt is so necessary. You need these things to happen for you to grow and succeed – in any industry. Otherwise, how do you learn? So, yes, we have these nicks and cuts, but I’m proud of them. This is a love letter to all the bullshit that you’ve got to go through in this business, and finding yourself stronger for it all on the other side…”
Understanding how lost Set It Off were was the first step to finding themselves again. Slam Dunk 2022 was a turning point. The May bank holiday festival of pop-punk and alternative had always been a happy hunting ground. But off the back of the brightly hued Elsewhere, as the boys stepped out with neon-splashed hair and their loudest Hawaiian shirts praying for a packed crowd and raucous response, what they received were fans thin on the ground and a limp atmosphere.
“We finished our set, then I went back to the van and cried,” Cody remembers. “I was like, ‘What’s going on? We’re trying so hard and it’s just not clicking.’ We all felt it. But then we had a conversation about how the live show really could be better and how we were going to fix it.”
Flash back to the beginnings of the band. Built off the success of Cody’s YouTube channel – at a time when ‘going viral’ was still to become A Thing – the singer dropped out of studies in classical clarinet at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and invested his college fund in breaking out. Energy was everything back then. Not just a catchy name, their moniker was a mission statement. Recapturing that old fire via the wisdom of today would be key to climbing back up the mountain.
“When you’re younger, every problem seems like the end of the world,” Cody ruminates on the nervy naivete of the past. “Every little thing seems like a finite ending. The difference is anything that comes at us now is just a new problem that we’re going to face, fix and get better. Because we’ve overcome so much already. If I were to sit down with my 15- or 19-year-old self, I’d tell them to be patient. It will come. It’s gonna hurt a lot along the way. But you’ve got to see it through.”
Initially that meant taking things one song at a time. Rejecting what Maxx calls “the label blueprint” of three or four singles timed carefully in the lead-up to an album, Cody would duck into the studio to crank things out with trusted producer Jon Lundin at every opportunity. Guitarist Zach DeWall remembers “not knowing if we were putting out an EP, an album, or just songs”, but also being knocked for six out on a hike hearing the demo for Punching Bag.
“We just wanted to have fun again,” reasons Maxx. “When we started thinking about the times we were having the most fun, they really were those early days when we were playing heavier music.”
Caught up in the buzz as Punching Bag became their first breakout rock radio hit, it was six months before the bigger picture revealed itself. Although Cody loved how standalone releases allowed fans to give each song the attention it deserved, he was coming to realise that this music “lived under the same roof”. Part of that was the purging of recent upset. Even more so was establishing their harder-edged approach, extending from the rap-rock onslaught on which the record opens to the more brooding aesthetic of the players themselves.
“I grew up listening to nu-metal,” the frontman says. “I was a huge fan. We toyed with merging that into this band in 2012 but never fully [integrated] it. Here, we wanted to bring it back and turn it up to 11. I love poppy songwriting – the Max Martin approach to melody and R&B vocals – but I told Jon that I wanted some drop-tune guitars, too. We’ve added a lot of things to our toolbelt over the years, so it’s nice to be able to actually use them. Lots of artists get stuck being told with, ‘You’re this,’ or, ‘You’re that.’ We don’t have those limitations. If we want to write a song, we write it!”
Or re-write it, as chance has it. One of the most ear-catching cuts on the album is Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing [REBORN]: a harder, heavier version of platinum 2014 sleeper hit with The Academy Is… singer William Beckett. Cody explains that this version is what they’d intended all along.
“Fans might not know, but the original concept behind our second album Duality was the duality of anger and happiness, manifested as 50 per cent heaviness and 50 per cent pop. Wolf… was first demoed in drop-A. Eventually the project got poppier and poppier to the point where it no longer fit, so we had to re-record it with jazz guitars. Our booking agents talked about us doing a 10-year anniversary tour for the album, but we want to look forward, not back. At the same time, we wanted to give some flowers to a song which did so much for us, despite never being a single.”
Not just a celebration, it’s a matter of giving that old standard enough teeth to hold its own onstage alongside the big hitters of this album. Rotten, for instance, evokes the slamming brutality of peak Slipknot, Fake Ass Friends has the free-flowing attack of Avenged Sevenfold, and even the relatively lightweight What’s In It For Me seethes with sassy menace.
Returning to Slam Dunk Festival in 2024, the picture had already changed beyond recognition: the GoPro Stage bouncing not just for those songs’ gnarlier snap but musicians who’d gotten back their bite.
“It’s been so good to have that high-power again,” Zach says, “just to reinject the passion.”
“Plus,” Maxx grins, “it’s been great to see some mosh-pits!”
Travelling between shows in Portland, Maine and Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, last Halloween was a rare free night for Set It Off. Finding themselves near the deep, dark woods of Lee, New Hampshire, the opportunity to visit legendarily creepy gathering Haunted Overload, with its 50ft monsters, hundreds of jack-o’-lanterns and movie-quality sets, was too much to pass up. But with their tour bus parked and no Ubers available, it turned out the only ‘affordable’ option to get out there was to order a stretch limo.
“Zach was so pissed,” Cody laughs. “He’s going, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this!’ as we look like insane [wannabe] rock stars turning up to a Halloween event. It was great, though: spooky as hell!”
Adventures like that aren’t exactly representative of the day-to-day of life of the newly self-sufficient Set It Off, but they are emblematic of a willingness to be the masters of their own destinies – no matter how wild or unexpected the outcomes. Forging on without a record label mightn’t seem like much these days, but it truly changed the game. “When you’re starting out as a band, the pathway seems clear: go on tour, get popular, get signed to a label,” explains Maxx. “As we’ve grown, evolved and thought about the future, it’s boiled down to the question of, ‘What are these labels doing for us that we can’t do for ourselves?’ Going it alone was a whirlwind of emotion: excitement and fear. The safety net was gone. If something went wrong, it was on us. At the same time, if something went right it was all our own.”
“It’s about the nature of the beast rather than any individual person,” Cody stresses. “When you’re part of that bigger machine and there’s an issue, there would be a lot of finger-pointing but not a lot of getting to the bottom of things where you could resolve it and make sure that it didn’t happen again. Being independent now feels like reaping the rewards of being independent at the beginning of our careers, where we would flyer all day and for every CD sold we’d get a dollar to be able to eat. There are a lot more text messages and emails now, but also a rag-tag team of people who are working their asses off because they’re hungry. Because of that, we’re in a position to set a standard of excellence for ourselves, then move the goalposts further every time we come back.”
On record, that purpose speaks for itself, from its overarching vision to individual moments – like the ‘She was a bad egg!’ sample on Rotten that Cody had to nail himself, because they couldn’t clear the clip from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Onstage sees an even bigger escalation, from the band setting up their own Why Worry Fest to investing in extravagant video production and voiceovers for their upcoming headline tour, which will reveal the full narrative behind the new record’s cover art: a metaphorical extension of their own feelings of being trapped under ice.
“Headlining festivals is the ultimate goal,” Cody says. “I know how good our songs are. I know how good our show is. But we still have to climb the ladder to earn it, so we’re just going to keep going. I think about how good it’s been to play the shows we already have [like selling out London’s 1,500-cap Electric Ballroom, twice] and how amazing that will feel on a bigger scale. I can’t wait to do Wembley, and I know that we will one day. You have to believe, and I really do!”
“Hopefully it goes great,” Maxx nods in agreement. “But if we start hitting roadblocks, we’ll knock them down.”
Not just the arrival of an excellent self-titled album, this is the beginning proper of a whole self-titled era for Set it Off, founded on reliance and built on belief. It’s a new start of sorts for Cody, Zach and Maxx, a line in the sand separating the upstarts they were and the superstars they look set to become. It’s also a culmination of all their efforts up to this point and a doubling-down on the crackling electricity and inexhaustible imagination that set them on this path so long ago.
“We didn’t name ourselves Set It Off by accident,” Cody winks as our time comes to an end. “When we first started, would rehearse by jumping on trampolines with guitars in our backyard. And our mission statement has always stayed the same: put out the best music we can, put on the best show we can, and have fun doing it. Here, we’re doing it all on our own again. We are the biggest we’ve ever been. Now is the happiest we’ve ever been. And it feels like the most us that we’ve ever been. This is Set It Off…”
Set It Off return to the UK to play Download Festival on Saturday, June 13. This interview originally appeared in the limited-edition SIO x Kerrang! zine.
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