Music
Interview
The XCERTS: “We’re three individuals with an unwavering belief that we’re going to create something special”
Murray Macleod on the Scots' sixth album, coming face-to-face with grief and maintaining Aberdeen’s noise-rock two decades on
After almost 25 years in the making, Brighton-based rockers The XCERTS have dropped their sixth and most heart-wrenching album to date. It’s true that writing music from the fruits of earth-shattering trauma isn’t exactly new to the three-piece outfit, but there’s something unshakably fragile about i think i want to go home now.
The clue is largely in the name. i think i want to go home now is written from a place of delicate childlike vulnerability as the group together navigates a period of intense uncertainty. It attempts to process the passing of bassist Jordan Smith’s mum, who was a maternal figure to all three members, as well as the father of lead vocalist Murray Macleod’s sudden cancer diagnosis.
“It’s not a cathartic record,” explains Macleod when Ticketmaster catches him between a run of gigs in Edinburgh. “A lot of people might assume it is, but we’re still grieving the loss of Jordan’s mum who was like a second mother to me. There’s no closure to any of it – grief doesn’t care – so we’ve sort of written a record about that.”
It’s a big leap from the group’s last record, 2023’s Learning To Live And Let Go, which experimented with warped and jagged alt rock as the group brashly emerged from the confines of lockdown. But three years can do wonders for the soul. The XCERTS are back with their rediscovered distinctive sound, ready to lay everything bare.
Ahead of joining Twin Atlantic on a UK headline tour this autumn, Macleod guides us through the album’s tumultuous creative process.
i think i want to go home now has culminated in a lot of difficult emotions for the three of you, and reveals a lot of personal pain and trauma that a lot of people would find difficult to share. How did it feel to immortalise that shared grief in the form of this record?
I guess it was as close to therapy as you can get for a band, other than actually having a therapist in the room. I think that’s where the raw urgency comes from – the things we were experiencing happened within a year and a half. My dad was diagnosed with cancer, he got the all clear, and then a couple of months later Jordan’s mum got diagnosed with cancer. Then, during that entire period of going through treatment and being in the hospice, I started to feel my relationship crumbling very slowly; the cracks were there. It was very all-encompassing, so we didn’t have a choice but to write about it.
Now that you’ve had time to process some of the pain you experienced, how do the songs on the album sound to you? What emotions do they trigger?
There are so many mixed emotions. At times it’s really nostalgic and comforting, and then it gets really angry, really sad, but really beautiful. I wanted the songs to reflect life without any kind of Hollywood ending, or without trying to find the light at the end of the tunnel, which I’ve done for the past maybe three records or so. I used to be obsessed with the listener getting to the end of a song and feeling this wave of positivity, but this one’s like, ‘Well, that’s not real life’. We had a two year period of not feeling particularly hopeful, so I just had to be completely honest with myself and document that time.
How did you navigate such profound pain together with your bandmates, Jordan and Tom, who you’ve worked with for over two decades? What’s your relationship with each other like now?
First and foremost, with age you become much more mature. Some people don’t, but we have, so the most important thing was for everybody to show a bit of patience with one another. We’ve been pretty guilty about that in the past because we’ve been together for so long. We flare up like brothers because it really is a dysfunctional family dynamic. But, with this one, the environment was very soft, which is quite interesting because the record’s a lot more angular and angsty and angry. But the room was full of care and love.
I think we had definitely reached a point where we were starting to take one another for granted. On the last album, we just wanted to have fun, and we didn’t get into the nitty gritty of one another’s lives because we were just excited to be in the room again. But this time around it was important for everybody to talk and listen and be wide open with one another. Lyrically, I think there were a few things that I had to run by Jordan, but I don’t think he actually said no to anything.
We’ve always trusted one another. We’ve been a band for 25 years and we’re three individuals with an unwavering belief that we’re going to create something special. There’s never been a conversation about splitting up or taking a hiatus. We’re just trying to turn our dream into a career.
It’s interesting to observe how i think i want to go home now sounds potentially similar to the bratty noise rock of your debut album in 2009, as opposed to the playfulness of the last album. Was that an intentional shift?
We definitely had a conversation harking back to when we were 17 or 18 writing that first record, talking with one another and saying, ‘How did we feel? What was the vibe at that time like for us?’ We looked back to regain a bit of perspective from our younger selves to just write for the sake of writing. I’ve definitely been guilty of chasing a hit song, not that those songs don’t carry any weight, but [this album] was very much coming from a place of purity. We really did revert back to that feeling of childlike vulnerability from when we were 17 and petrified, and it was hard not to think of how that could inspire us now, but with everything we’ve since learned in the craft of songwriting.
Now that you have gained that bit of perspective on yourselves as artists, have you a clearer idea on what your defining sound is?
Somebody else actually pointed this out. They said, ‘When I think of The XCERTS, I think of a quiet moment, and then watching all three of your heads bang in unison for an epic chorus’. It’s funny, because we were watching old footage of us from when we were kids, and the person who said this was completely right. That’s where that ferocity is – when we’re in unison and in sync, and our heads are banging all at the same time. That played a pivotal role in us getting back to being fierce again. Even though we’re older, we still feel incredibly youthful, and this record was very much intended to have that angst and that ferocity and that real kind of visceral, raw feeling about it.
What about maintaining a sense of Scottish and Aberdeen rock within your sound, since that’s where you all come from?
That was definitely spoken about in the room, too. We grew up in that scene, admiring bands like Idlewild and Biffy Clyro. Of course, we eventually started playing in Glasgow, and that’s when we met Twin Atlantic and Fatherson and all these bands doing the same thing but with a different take on it. For some reason, as teenagers, we wanted to ditch that as soon as possible because we were just getting called Biffy Clyro 2.0 all the time, so we rebelled against that very quickly. But we’ve slowly but surely started bringing it back.
I don’t know what the Aberdeen sound is, but I do think it’s as simple as pure emotion. Nobody does the outpouring of human emotion quite like the Scots.
As you’re about to go on tour with fellow Scots Twin Atlantic, you’ll be gearing up to play some of these new songs live, no doubt. How are you feeling about that?
It’s a great comfort to be playing with Twin Atlantic. We don’t get to see them as often as we’d like anymore, but we have so many memories together going back to 2007, so touring with them just feels so comfortable and warm, and just really safe. It’s amazing that we come together and it’s that age-old trope of never having spoken to one another in a year, but it feels like we hadn’t missed a beat. As soon as we see one another, we just pick up from where we left off. That’s such a nice feeling to have on tour, because touring can sometimes feel pretty uncomfortable and a bit jarring. But when you have the safety net of people you have serious history with, it just makes things so easy.
Finally, are there any songs from the record you’re most curious about performing live for the first time?
There’s a song on the record called ‘Breathe in What Was’, which is kind of cool, and sort of shoegaze dream-pop with jangly guitar. I’ve wanted to write a song like that forever, and I’ve just never been able to do it and finally crack the code. So, I’m really looking forward to playing that, and just daydreaming that I’m in the 90s.
