Ahead of their hotly-anticipated debut album motionblur, we head backstage at one of Split Chain’s umpteen shows this summer to discover the darkness behind the music, and how they’ve found themselves as one of the most talked-about bands of the year…
Tom Davies reckons that if Split Chain had started five years ago, “We would have fucked it up.”
Asked to describe the Tom of back then, he hits back with “a big alcohol guy”. Loved getting pissed. For a time, on any day with a Y in it, you’d have found the bassist out on the lash somewhere around Bristol. When COVID came in and the pubs closed, he’d just graze booze at home, day in day out, almost constantly. When the pubs reopened, he was an even better drinker from all the practice. And so it went.
“It got to the point where I was skipping meals and shit. I'd finish work and just go straight to the pub and spend all my money on alcohol. I had friends who worked in pubs, so I would get cheap drinks, sometimes free drinks, and just be able to drink all the time. It was easy.”
And this was life, ticking along functionally enough, albeit on a fuzzy, hungover, dry-mouthed road. The realisation that this perhaps wasn’t the best way to carry on came one day at work when he broke down and started crying on the phone to a customer.
“I thought, ‘Maybe that’s enough…’”
Tom put down the pint glass in 2022. Hanging out with his mate Bert Martinez-Cowles – who Tom credits for “helping me through all that, great friend that he is” – in a moment of boredom the pair decided to pick up guitars and have a crack at writing a song that sounded like Pennsylvania post-hardcore outfit Superheaven. Just for something to do and to keep out of the pub.
Seventy-two hours shy of the band’s second birthday, counted from playing their first-ever gig, Tom and singer Bert – an immediately likeable pair with broad Brizzle accents and an endearing Jay and Silent Bob stoner-skater demeanour – are telling this to Kerrang! from a dressing room at Download. Their second year on the bounce at Donington is just one banner date in a calendar that’s featured a summer of shows with, variously, A Day To Remember, Knocked Loose, Amira Elfeky, doing Slam Dunk, doing 2000trees, going to America for a headline tour, having already been there once already, opening for post-hardcore legends Thursday and Silverstein...
So we’re being unambiguous: Split Chain – Bert and Tom, guitarists Jake Reid and Oli Bowles, and drummer Aaron Black – are one of the hottest and best new bands in Britain. This Friday, their debut record, the much-anticipated and thoroughly brilliant motionblur, will finally arrive on U.S. punk powerhouse Epitaph Records, where the band can now count Architects, Parkway Drive and Rancid among their coworkers.
“Even the title, motionblur, is kind of a reference to how mad everything’s been since we started,” laughs Bert of Split Chain’s lightning fast, ahem, chain reaction of events. “We started just to write some songs and play some shows in Bristol. We booked our first show ourselves, and for some reason thought we should start with a headline show – and it sold out! Then we started getting festival offers. I was like, ‘How the fuck is this happening?’”
This comes up a lot from both of them. As they tell you the story, you can understand why. Example: they were in a Wetherspoons in Liverpool while on tour when the email came through from Epitaph. As much as anything else, with no expertise or connections in showbiz, Bert remembers his thoughts being, quite innocently: “What does this mean?”
Tom had never even played a show before Split Chain. Bert had, in an old band, “but we did nothing”. Any ambitions had been, however far-fetched, in skateboarding, where the pair had fostered the usual teen dreams of going pro. The band had been a similar thing.
“We thought we’d just be playing shows in Bristol,” says Bert. “The last song [recorded for] the album, who am i?, is us just going, ‘Why us?’ It’s about imposter syndrome. Even in the studio, as we were struggling to finish it, it highlighted all that. ‘Why is this great stuff happening to us? We’re nobody!’”
A ’90s alt.metal soaked work of post-hardcore, with the odd tang of something Type O Negative-ish, motionblur rules. In its foundations you can hear bits of Thursday, Helmet, Deftones and Rival Schools, all big, chorus-pedal chords and swirly, dreamy heaviness, but with a songwriting nous that makes Split Chain their own band.
It’s also an album that finds Split Chain seizing the opportunity they’ve found themselves with, and writing from the heart. There’s an open-endedness, they admit, but its an album full of emotional grit. When asked, they both call it a coming-of-age story, good and bad.
“It’s essentially chucking out everything that we went through growing up as teenagers, where we are now, all the bullshit,” adds Bert. “I've always said that life is not easy and never will be. This album is a depiction of all that shit. It's very normal to go through shit, you’ve just got to live through the shit bits, because they’re always gonna happen.”
“The lyrics draw from real-life experiences, from all of us, but they're still left open to interpretation, so people can apply their own meaning to it,” says Tom. “I think that's what helps people resonate with the lyrics. There’s a vagueness, but it's coming from our authentic selves.”
“For me, there’s a lot of family shit in there from when I was growing up,” says Bert. “Spit was Tom's song, which is pretty dark. Headway was Oli’s song, Jake and Aaron was greyintheblue. who am i? was the central one for all of us, all going, ‘This is exactly how we're feeling right now.’
“We're not making up stories. We’re fucking five guys writing some rock music, and going, ‘Here's a bunch of shit that we’ve all been through, and this is our side of it.”
By the time you hear motionblur, Split Chain will already have two years of running at an incredible rate under their belts. And this pace will only increase. As ever, when you ask them how they’re feeling about it all, you’re met with slightly stunned disbelief, wondering if this is all okay, that fate got the right guys.
“We’re just going with it,” laughs Bert. “We can’t sit and calculate anything, because it’s all just happening. We know that we spent four weeks in the studio making the best record we could.”
“It's kind of crazy how much life has turned around,” adds Tom. “I quit alcohol and started the band, end everything’s been amazing. I’ve still got bad habits. I still chain vapes and smoke cigarettes like a loser, but it's nice to feel that positivity has come out of it all.”
And how would the you of five years ago reacted to all this?
“We would have been doing silly shit, getting in trouble and just ruining it for ourselves,” he laughs. “All of this stuff is the universe going, ‘You’re good lads for stopping your shit. This is your reward.’”
motionblur is released on July 11 via Epitaph.
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