Boston Manor on battling internal darkness with part one of their double album, Datura
The use of chiaroscuro — essentially the vivid contrast of light and dark — in classic film noir served several purposes. During the heyday of black-and-white movies, it made stars playing gumshoes, femme fatales and tragic losers pop on screen, their features lit up in silver. But it also allowed shadows to eat up space at the edge of each frame, their inky depths suggesting the sort of unknown dangers and lingering threats that fascinate Boston Manor vocalist Henry Cox on the band’s fourth studio record, Datura.
The Blackpool pop-punk outfit’s follow-up to last year’s expansive Desperate Times, Desperate Pleasures EP is the first part of a planned double album that exists in a twilight world of anxiety and rumination, stemming from Cox’s experiences during the pandemic. Boston Manor released their third album, GLUE, in the spring of 2020, with touring very much off the table and Cox’s routine broken into irreconcilable pieces for the foreseeable future. His wife, a key worker, continued her job. Left to its own devices, his mind filled the yawning space with a litany of intrusive thoughts and fears.
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“It’s definitely an internal darkness,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff that came to light in the last 18 months, about me personally, that I really hadn’t dealt with very well. Not from the pandemic — I think that was just me starting to recognize that I needed to change some things. The record’s really about that internal deep dive and realizing that I’m not actually all right, and that I need to do a lot of work on myself.
Cox admits that Boston Manor “play in this shadow world anyway, thematically and aesthetically. It’s this little playground that we’ve built for ourselves.” A double album gave them more space to explore the depths of their creativity. “As I was going to therapy and working through stuff, I realized that I am coming out of this. There’s going to be a happy ending, hopefully, and a conceptual trajectory that runs through both records in that sense.”
In the annals of punk concept records, Datura is more mood piece than American Idiot-style rock opera. Rather than finding narrative pegs to hang the songs from, Cox and his bandmates — guitarists Mike Cunniff and Ash Wilson, bassist Dan Cunniff and drummer Jordan Pugh — are interested in maintaining a heavy, deliberate sense of atmosphere. Chiaroscuro has made plenty of pointless, dangerous gambits seem alluring over the years, and here you might pick out a figure lit by the harsh glare of a phone screen, a bottle they didn’t need to open by their side.
“There was a lot of pressure to use this time productively, but people were having myriad issues, whether that’s loneliness, depression or having to work through the pandemic,” Cox says. “I’m definitely one to beat myself up. I’m quite hard on myself. It’s that frustration of making the same mistake over and over again, and recognizing that you are making a mistake, and then still doing the same thing again.”
Musically, developing Datura’s sense of scope comes down to pacing and stylistic ambiguity. The record is laced with synth-heavy interludes, borrowing a world-building tactic that has long been a core tenet of hip-hop albums, and sequenced to break open and then fade into nothingness with the shape-shifting indie rock of the closer, “Inertia.” Similar heavy lifting must be done lyrically, with the deployment of stark, vivid imagery that has a complex truth at its heart and time to seep beneath the skin.
“I suppose, in a way, it’s a safety net — it distances you; it gives you that little barrier between yourself and the art,” Cox says of the concept-album umbrella. “I’m quite a shy person. I’m not very good at being vulnerable with lyrics. I’ve always written a little bit cryptically, and I think that’s just because I’m scared. But I think with this, I tried to get it as close and as open as possible while toeing that line of the artistic liberties you take with making a concept record.”
Cox’s writing is perhaps his most nuanced and dynamic to date. He presents thoughts that are fully formed enough to stick but leaves question marks hanging in the air for the listener to invest something of themselves into the experience. “These fucking problems keep following me/Maybe I’m the problem, maybe it’s me,” he sings on the anthemic “Foxglove.” It’s a lacerating conclusion to arrive at, but it also sounds like almost everyone you know.
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really connected with anything that was so literal, and so specific to that one person, that you’re more of a fly on the wall to that particular experience,” Cox says. “If you’re going through something and you can attribute your own experiences to what you’re hearing, you connect with the record on a much deeper level.”
Datura pairs this desire to communicate with the sort of musical blunt force that gets the job done in a whole other way. This is a crushing, heavy pop-punk record that mainlines cavernous drums and molasses-thick guitars. Recorded in Brixton, south London, with returning producer Larry Hibbitt — no stranger to this sort of blend as the former guitarist of acclaimed U.K. post-hardcore band Hundred Reasons — it is obvious that the concept bells and whistles haven’t overpowered the band’s straightforward desire to make music that will ignite when a crowd gets hold of it.
“I think that’s always the fine line that we walk: the subtle bits versus the bombastic rock middle eights and big choruses,” Cox says. “We also consider our live experience as a big part of it, sometimes to our detriment. Sometimes we can’t go too far into weird Radiohead world because we think about how that’s going to translate for our audience and for our abilities as performers live.”
Datura’s unwritten second chapter is the wildcard in all this. Thematically, the whole endeavor doesn’t work for Cox if the promise of light breaking through the darkness isn’t there at the end of these seven soul-searching tracks. But, also, it places pressure on part one to chime with people in a way that makes part two something that’s anticipated rather than tolerated or endured. When a dawn chorus fades in during the record’s closing seconds, promising a new day, that’s Boston Manor rolling the dice.
“If, theoretically, this is panned by the fanbase, then they’re probably not going to be rushing out to buy part two,” Cox admits. “But it’s the risk that you take as an artist. I hate that arrogant musician sound bite where they’re like, ‘This is the most insert adjective here record we’ve ever made,’ but it does excite me that we’re still taking risks.”
