In The Studio: The Bouncing Souls

EXPECT IT: June 12 (TBA)

Once a band hits a milestone such as their 20th anniversary, it becomes progressively easier for the group to continue on as shells of their former selves. Many acts go through the motions and cash huge festival checks while either releasing rehashed music which harkens back to the glory days—or, perhaps more boldly, releasing no new material at all. For the Bouncing Souls, however, twenty years simply meant it was time for the band to recalibrate their approach to songwriting, releasing music, touring, everything—hell, they don’t even close every show with “True Believers” anymore.

“Because we’ve done it so many ways—we did it through our teens, we did it through our twenties, we grew up, became an established band, got producers involved and went down that road a few different ways and learned a lot from it—with this record, we were really specific,” says frontman Greg Attonito from the Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado, where the Souls are wrapping up their ninth full-length with producer Bill Stevenson.

After a successful run of limited-edition vinyl singles in 2010 that eventually comprised their last full-length, Ghosts On The Boardwalk, the Souls returned to a more direct format for this record, which is tentatively due out June 12 via a to-be-determined label. (When asked if the album would be released on the band’s own Chunksaah Records, Attonito admitted that it’s “not completely confirmed yet. Most likely, but we might have another label [involved] as well. I can’t say that for sure right now.”) It was their first time working with punk super-producer Stevenson at his famed studio, the same place where bands recorded some of the most seminal punk records of the new millennium. (Rise Against’s Endgame, Comeback Kid’s Wake The Dead and A Wilhelm Scream’s Ruiner are among the dozens of albums with Stevenson’s fingerprints all over them.)

Working with Stevenson was a long time in the making, according to Attonito—and after recording Ghosts as well as 2006’s The Gold Record with Ted Hutt, the Souls were looking for a change of environment to reinvigorate the recording process. “We’ve known Bill for such a long time and always thought it would be fun,” he says. “We’re all Black Flag fans and Descendents fans, and we love Bill. All of a sudden, it just seemed obvious. We didn’t want to record in our home studio, and we were looking to do something different. When we finally said that to Bill, he was like, ‘It’s been too long. Why did it take you so long to come here?’”

The band wasted little time out west, banging out ten songs in as many days, all of which will make the album. “They have an amazing system here set up with Bill, Jason [Livermore, engineer] and all the guys that work here,” Attonito says. “We went really intense. Everyone tracks—you’ve got guitar tracking in one place, bass and vocals in another place and editing—all at the same time, so it’s just a really cool system where you get a lot of man hours in a short amount of time because things are going on in different places. We got an amazing-sounding record in just ten days.”

That energy and urgency translated to the finished product, which sounds as if it’ll be the most direct material the Bouncing Souls have cut to tape in several years, with no curveballs, cover songs or B-sides. “We were like, ‘Okay, we want to get in a room together and take the spirit out of what we did years ago and what we’ve learned and try to get inspired with that energy into it and make a punk record,’” Attonito continues. “So for our style, a Bouncing Souls punk record, we told Bill about it and he was just stoked as hell. He said ‘Let’s bang out ten songs and just put the energy into it. Make it spontaneous and just get it down like we used to without tinkering and getting deeply into songwriting.’”

The Souls plan on taking the new material to the road in 2012, with extensive touring planned in both the United States as well as abroad. “In the spring we’re going to go to Europe and then the record’s coming to come out,” says Attonito. “Then the record’s going to come out and we’re going to do a few record release shows in the New York area. Then we’ll do some club touring in America over the summer—probably a couple weeks here and there to break it up. For the fall, there are rough ideas right now and we’ll have to start firming those up in the next couple weeks.”

“I think we found a really good balance,” he goes on. “It’s only from our experience of what we’ve learned over all these years and getting our heads out of it and putting our hearts into it every step of the way. That’s always the drive. In the times that we didn’t put all our energy completely into each song, we found we were always, in the end, disappointed. Having been through that—those ups and downs—we focused on putting our complete energy and hearts into each song. We know that is the motivation and it pays off; it’s awesome.” alt