“The only way to win this game is not to play”: Stray From The Path open up on surprise new album Clockworked

Stray From The Path are done with getting caught up in other people’s games. On the highest level, that’s about rejecting the machinations of modern society designed to bend us to the wills of the rich and powerful, while simultaneously desensitising us to the fact that it’s happening. Too often nowadays we find ourselves ‘getting clockworked’. That might be by the hamster-wheel struggle to stay afloat. It could be down to the cycle of addiction, intended to distract but engineered for self-defeat. Most alarmingly, it’s the result of endless media reminders that scenes of societal outrage and political farce we would’ve once considered impossible have somehow become entirely commonplace, robbing away our will to give a shit.

On a personal and professional note for Stray, it’s more about releasing their music with the same sense of slap-in-the-face immediacy and excitement that comes with listening to it. Fans turning up at Slam Dunk last weekend knew that new material was in the works. Some of it had been teased at shows in London at the start of the year. Advance single Kubrick Stare showcased unhinged new levels of intensity. Even still, seeing posters announcing that a whole record would be out in under seven days felt like a stirring adrenaline shot even before they hit the stage. And then they chucked vinyl copies into the mosh-pit, with a stack more up for sale on the merch desk.

Over two decades since they first raised their voices in anger, guitarist Tom Williams hints that this is about reconnecting to their early years as fans while waging war on modern complacency. 2022’s epic Euthanasia was a definitive statement. Recorded with vocalist Andrew ‘Drew York’ Dijorio, bassist Anthony Altamura and drummer Craig Reynolds, Clockworked feels like a reset, cranking the flames higher than ever before. And for fans to find out about it without months of online lead-in and pre-order shilling should ensure its 10 tracks hit just as viciously as they should…

Was it always your attention to catch fans off guard with this surprise?
“Basically, I wanted to tap into the feeling I had when I would get records as a kid. Like, when Deftones’ White Pony came out, I saw the Change (In The House Of Flies) video on TV, then I went to the store and bought it. That doesn’t really happen anymore. Normally nowadays you announce the record and put out one song, then maybe a month later you’ll put out another song, then eventually the album comes out. It’s annoying. I play videogames, so when I saw the trailer for the remaster of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater and the release date was like a year later, it pissed me off. But I watch TV shows, too, and when I found out that the whole new season of Squid Game would be out in like two weeks I was all like, ‘Let’s go!’
“I work in management for other bands, including Counterparts, who did something similar recently with their Heaven Let Them Die EP. Theirs was completely secret, though. We didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t ship it to stores. We didn’t even upload it to Spotify until 48 hours before to avoid leaks. Stray haven’t been quite so secretive. People have known that one day they will wake up and a record will be there. I just find the idea that someone could find out about it, then go down to their record store and actually buy it an hour later so exciting. If someone told me Rage Against The Machine had a new record in stores now, I’d finish this interview and immediately go to seek it out.”

It saves too much of a release being spoiled before people get their hands on it, too…
“Exactly. Often by the time an album comes out, fans will already have heard 30, 40 or even 50 per cent of the record. If I had gotten to see half the movie of There Will Be Blood in fits and bursts and then three months later I finally got to see the ending, it would still have been cool, but it wouldn’t hit in the same way as experiencing the whole thing in one sitting!”

You signed with SharpTone was the start of this cycle. How receptive were they to your plan?
“We handed in the record and asked how quickly they could have it in stores. They said ‘May 30’. So we told them that’s when we wanted it to come out. They have been really supportive, really great. But they were also like, ‘What about the pre-orders?’ But who cares? More people will buy an album if they know they can get it in three days. More people will buy it if they can go to their record store and get it in three hours. No-one gives a fuck about first-week numbers anymore, anyway. People care more about finding the record at your merch desk for the first time and buying it right then. I clearly remember asking them, ‘Why do people pre-order records?’ and being met with a minute of silence. No-one likes to be out of their comfort zone. Even if you’re managing a football team, when you’ve got a 19-year-old rookie and a 32-year-old veteran, you’ll generally pick the veteran because it’s the safer option. It’s what people know. But whatever, I still think that people would find these songs.”

So, what exactly is getting clockworked?
“It’s about when you fall into ‘their’ plans. If you look at the album cover, it’s a game of tic-tac-toe where there’s the blank square and both X and O are primed to win, But you don’t know whose turn it is next. You don’t know what is being represented. The image actually comes from the ’80s movie War Games where there is this AI supercomputer that takes command of nuclear weapons. Eventually the hero manages to outwit it by getting it to play tic-tac-toe against itself. It just draws game after game after game. Then it breaks and stops the launch. At the end of the movie, the computer says, ‘The only winning move is not to play.’ That game it gets caught up in represents the one that ‘they’ want us to play. And we’re all playing it. That’s getting clockworked!”

Kubrick Stare was a hell of an intense first single. The idea of the ‘Kubrick stare’ has become cinematic shorthand for a character becoming unhinged. Is that how you’re feeling right now?
“It’s about how you see this crazy shit on the internet that really should be the craziest thing you’ve seen in your entire life... But you saw something crazy yesterday. And you know you’ll see something crazy tomorrow. That’s a prime example of getting clockworked. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s that you get used to it, you become numb to it, and you need to survive. It’s about desensitising people to insane shit. Which is why there are so many people who don’t give a fuck about Palestine or homelessness or other folk losing their jobs right now. So many people are getting destroyed, and everyone's lives are so hard, that it becomes difficult to feel invested.”

The second track Fuck Them All To Hell is a vitriolic rager, even by SFTP standards…
“That song was originally supposed to come out on election day 2024. It’s a big regret that it didn’t. The chorus is, ‘The only way I’m writing your name is on a headstone’ – as in rather than a ballot. The title is referring to everyone in politics. We’d written it while Joe Biden was still in office and it was literally the day after recording that he pulled out and Kamala Harris stepped in. We’re not Kamala fans, but her Vice Presidential pick was Tim Walz. Walz had some progressive policies and was a relatively left-leaning pick. At the time, we had to ask if we wanted to direct that song at him. If that guy had a chance to do anything that might’ve made a positive difference, the song would’ve felt wrong. But then everything happened. It was a disaster. We wish we’d released it!”

Eight years on from Goodnight Alt-Right, how dispiriting is it to see things playing out like this?
“It does feel like a lost cause, long gone. Partly it’s because fewer people voted last time, which was a result of the Democrats shitting on Bernie Sanders. Twice. Everyone was excited, but when they bumped him for Hillary Clinton, then Joe Biden, it took the wind out of a lot of people’s sails. But it’s still crazy to see some of what’s happening. I watched this clip from the Piers Morgan show where this woman called a five-year-old black child at a playground a racial slur on video. And people donated like a million dollars to her. Morgan straight-out asked the woman, ‘Are you racist?’ And she said ‘Yes!’ I’m blown away by something new every day. But at the same time, I guess that I’m not. The answer is a button that wipes everyone out, including me. We just need to start over.”

Can’t Help Myself takes a different perspective, reckoning on personal demons in hard times…
“The title is a play on words. You can’t help but indulge these things, but you also can’t find the help you need. Those topics are just as important as anything else we’ve talked about. I don’t want to speak too much about a song that’s very much from Drew’s perspective, but he and I have known each other since sixth grade – age 12 or 13 – and he’s always struggled. Smoking cigarettes at school. Struggling with alcohol. Struggling with drugs. Struggling with prescription drugs supposed to help him get off those other things. And it’s not just him. I’ve lost plenty of other people to addiction. I lost one of my cousins last year, so many people I grew up with. Everyone struggles from some sort of addiction. I’ve never touched a drug in my life, but I’ve struggled with food and my weight. Drew has been working hard and he’s been sober for a long time. His newfound interests in things like Muay Thai are helping with that. It’s very much his story to tell.”

Stylistically, there seems to be a lot of old-school nu-metal and rap-rock influence going on. Was there an intentional effort to reconnect to those sounds?
“We wrote the music for this record in seven days. We turned up to the studio with nothing and had the record down instrumentally within a week. Between me and Craig, we tend to click very quickly, but this time we were hammering out multiple songs a day. We just cooked. I’m actually not even that much of a nu-metal fan, but I am a big Wes Borland fan, and the title-track is very Wes Borland. We had a working title for Kubrick Stare as Powerman 5001. Shot-Caller is very Diamond Eyes-era Deftones. At the same time, there was no plan or preordained ‘sound’ for the album. We weren’t rushing, but we did blast through. I recorded all the guitars for the album within 24 hours. [Producer] Will Putney and his assistant told me that was a studio record!”

There’s even an old-school hidden track after about a minute of silence at the end of the closer, A Life In Four Chapters. Was that another throwback to your teenage years as a fan?
“We were up in the middle of the night going out of our minds at one point talking about bands, and it came out that I’ve never really listened to Primus. So Will, Craig and Nick started showing me their music and we decided to write our own ‘Primus song’ at 3am. We listened back the next morning, like, ‘What the fuck were we doing?!’ The section that’s on the album as a secret track was a segment of that ‘Primus song’ that also reminded us of Calculating Infinity-era Dillinger Escape Plan. I loved secret tracks like Glassjaw had on Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Silence. It feels strange that so many of the kids coming into this genre don’t even know what they are. But they’re cool. Having someone stumble across that piece of music is exactly what we want.”

Looking into an uncertain future, what would it take for this album to feel like a success?
“Politically, it feels like we’ve been shouting into the void for a few years now. But there are still a lot of things that we’re very proud of. Musically, I love it. And it’s so cool to be able to present it to people in the way that we have. At the end of the year, no matter what happens, it will be hard not to feel triumphant. We’re doing our thing, our way, and that’s all that matters. Sometimes people do shit for stupid reasons – trying to ‘get big’ or ‘make music for TikTok’ – and as much as I’m not trying to glorify us as ‘saviours’, we are writing about things that matter to us and are true to our experience. I hope that other people care about that. I hope they love it as much as we do…”

Clockworked is out now via Sharptone. Listen to Stray From The Path on Kerrang! In Conversation.

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