Music, Style & Culture

You Me At Six - Sinners Never Sleep

Josh, Matt, Chris, Dan and Max talk us through 'Sinners Never Sleep', one track at a time.

As you may have noticed, in the new issue of DIY (Autumn - out now) there's an interview with You Me At Six. Near the bottom of said interview, it references a track by track of their new album 'Sinners Never Sleep' - well, here it is. Josh, Matt, Chris, Dan and Max talk us through the release one track at a time. You can also hear the boys talking about the record all this week on DIY Radio - the first instalments of which will be during Curtain Call (tonight, 5pm) and Stuck Between Stations (tonight, 6pm).

Loverboy
Josh: This song was the first song we wrote for the album, pretty much. We knew as soon as wrote it, with the whole gang vocal-chanting at the beginning, that we wanted that to start off the record. Matt [Barnes]'s bassline is pretty much what the whole song sits around.
Matt: We were just jamming and Josh said, “Play that again.” [laughs] I played it again, and again, and wrote a song around it. Hey presto! That's how we write: we don't really have a strict writing regime. Literally, every song that we've written has been different. Sometimes, someone will write a lot for it; sometimes, everyone will write tiny little bits and everything comes together. That's just how that one came together, really.

Jaws On The Floor
Chris: The drums are good in it.
Dan: Yeah, I played the drums in it. [laughter] I wrote all the drums.
Max: Did you mix your own drums?
Dan: I mixed my own drums in the whole album. This was the first song that we had mixed for the album actually, so when we were finishing everything off, this was one of the first songs that we ever heard mixed and mastered. So it's one of those tracks that we've heard a lot lately I think!
Josh: I was just going to add that I think it's probably the most summer, good vibe feeling song that we've got on the record. Because of the guitar lines and the verse, it sounds really bright from the word go. It just sounds like a really bright, summery kind of song that I feel you'd listen to in the summer.
Dan: Not English summer though.
Josh: No, obviously not, because it's rubbish, England.

Bite My Tongue
Josh: The next track is a song called 'Bite My Tongue', which is conveniently also the name of our documentary that comes with the deluxe edition, which you can buy from HMV if you feel inclined to do so, for around £15.99. I advise you do, because stealing music is wrongand you will go to hell for it. Anyway! 'Bite My Tongue' is probably one of the rockiest songs we've ever written. I don't know if this is just me, but it's probably one of my favourite songs just because I really like the energy and I like how raw it sounds at parts, but also, it just sounds pissed off the whole time. Even instrumentally, it sounds quite aggressive. Then, we've got Olie Sykes [of Bring Me The Horizon] on the middle-eight, which really helps to capture that aggression.
Dan: I think it's going to be a really fun song to play live as well, so I'm looking forward to that.

This Is The First Thing
Dan: This song will forever remind us of casinos. And it was one of the first songs that we demoed for the album back when we were writing 'Loverboy', so we've had this one for a while as well.

No One Does It Better
Dan: Rhythmically, this quite a fun song for me and Matt to play because it's quite different to the things we've done before.
Josh: Lyrically – just to add – this song is actually a story: the opening line is 'I woke up this morning with a grudge the size of a short story', and then, I go on to tell the short story. It's very short.
Dan: It's about three and a half minutes long.
Josh: It's a three and a half minute long story!
Matt: That's what we should've called it. We should've called it 'The Three and a Half Minute Long Story'.
Chris: Just a little tale that ended sour, was that it? [laughs]
Josh: No, that's another song I think. Oh, it is! But then, the end of the song, the last lyric is basically me saying, now you've heard the story. So, 'No One Does It Better' is basically just a story.
Matt: Listen to it at bedtime!

Little Death
Josh: The next song is called 'Little Death'. Funny story about this song, we wanted to call the album 'Little Death' but our label and our management wouldn't let us because it actually means 'orgasm' in French, and they weren't into that. Then, our producer Garth Richardson actually said that when we said that title, it made him think of his daughter, who's only fourteen, being abducted and killed and we didn't really think that was good, if that's what parents thought about it.
Max: It was one of the first songs we wrote.
Dan: We've said that about all of them so far.
Max: But it wasn't actually going to go on the CD.
Dan: We'd forgotten about it.
Max: So, at the last minute, we were like, “Wait, what's going on with this song?” So, that's another little story about the song.
Matt: So many stories!
Max: We love stories. This album is a story, pretty much.

Crash
Max: The next song is called 'Crash', and I'd say this was probably the slowest song on the CD by far. It shows a different side of our band. We got to mess around with some strings on this song, which we've never really had the opportunity to do before
Josh: Yeah, to add to what Max was saying about the strings, we got this guy to arrange strings for the song and it was the guy who did Alice Cooper, right?
Max: And he was taught by the guy who did the strings for Pink Floyd on 'The Wall'.
Josh: But yeah, 'Crash' is probably going to be the 'Fireworks' of this record I think. The song that people will be able to relate to most when it comes down to relationships and that kind of stuff. It's quite a soppy, ballad-y kind of song, but it seems to be quite popular amongst everyone who has heard it so far. It's quite long as well, so don't get too bored.
Max: Not the longest though.
Josh: Not the longest, no. We saved the longest 'til last.

Reckless
Josh: The next song is 'Reckless'. Okay, funny little thing about this song is that originally, it was called 'Don't Hold Your Breath', but, Nicole Scherzinger – she's pretty fit - but she's got a song called 'Don't Hold Your Breath'. Then, we were like, “Okay, we'll call it 'The Best You've Never Had',” but a band called The Swellers called one of their new songs 'The Best I Never Had', so...
Max: And Beyonce.
Josh: And then there's Beyonce! Beyonce was the selling point for us to just change the name of the song to just 'Reckless'.
Matt: Politics, politics.
Josh: I think Dan hated this song when we first recorded it. Has you opinion changed now? Do you like it, and if so, why?
Dan: Not really, no.
Josh: So Dan doesn't like this song. It's probably his least favourite on the album. Hopefully though, in time, he'll grow to love it.
Max: It's probably the song that most resembles the stuff on 'Hold Me Down'. You can relate it back to our previous work like 'Take Off Your Colours' and 'Hold Me Down'. It's definitely more pop punk-y, a bit more jump up and down kind of vibe, but I think it has a place on the album as well to show the direction that we've come. You can't just go from one sounds and into a totally different direction.

Time Is Money
Max: I actually wrote this riff when we were in Reading recording 'Hold Me Down'. I thought it would turn out to be a really good song that we could put on 'Hold Me Down', but I remember Josh saying, “No, let's just wait until the next CD.” It turns out to be the heaviest song we've ever written in our career, I would say.
Josh: Probably because of...
Max: Yeah, probably because a certain someone called Winston McCall from Parkway Drive actually does vocals on this song. I just think it's nice to do something a bit different since, as I said, it's the heaviest song
Josh: The cool thing I think about 'Time Is Money' is that we all enjoy listening to music that is slightly heavier anyway, so as soon as Max played us this riff, we knew it wasn't gonna be a light-hearted poppy, rocky song. We knew we could only take it in one direction and just thought, why not take it to the heaviest it can go. Lyrically and vocally, we didn't actually have a chorus for the song until we got to LA. We re-wrote the chorus as Dan was tracking his drums, so it all kind of came together. I think that's why it sounds quite natural, and kind of pissed off which is how it's meant to sound.

Little Bit Of Truth
Josh: This song, I'd say is us as a band... if there was ever a You Me At Six song that was heavily influenced by Jimmy Eat World, it would probably be this one. We're all massive massive fans of Jimmy Eat World and I think that's pretty evident during this song. It's definitely one of the songs that came together quite easily and painlessly because we knew where it was gonna go as a song. I remember when we were doing pre-production, we completely re-wrote the middle-eight.
Dan: We added an extra part.
Josh: So, if anyone ever says that pre-production is a waste of time, it's not! We wrote a middle-eight.
Dan: We used to just get drunk at pre-production and play covers with Deaf Havan all night. Just us and Deaf Havana playing covers with John Mitchell. The drummer of Jethro Tull used to come in. We were at his house doing pre-production and we used to just do covers of Bon Jovi and stuff with him. It was really fun.

The Dilemma
Josh: The next song is a song called 'The Dilemma'. The title of the song was nicked from a film which has Vince Vaughn in it, and is actually about a dilemma where he thinks that his mate's wife in cheating on him. Bit of shinfo, but I thought you should know that I stole it from a film. This song sounds very burlesque-y and we had a lot of fun writing and recording this song, especially when we threw the bass instruments onto the middle-eight.
Max: I personally like the Fonejacker quotes in the song.
Dan: Terry Tibs.
Max: Terry Tibs is in there. Massive fan!
Chris: He personally came and did it.
Max: Yeah, he personally came down to LA, sold us a couple of motors, wined and dined us. He brought a caravan, we bought it and we wrote this song.

When We Were Younger
Max: The next song is Terry's favourite. It's called 'When We Were Younger'. This is definitely the most experimental song we've done. We got to work with a guy called Damian who does a lot of programming work for Bjork. It's the longest song as well, at six minutes long, I would say, and it basically just builds up into one at the end.
Dan: It's very different. Some people love it, some people probably don't love it, but it was something that we had to get out of our system. That's 'Sinners Never Sleep.'

You Me At Six's new album 'Sinners Never Sleep' is out now via Virgin Records.

Read the full interview in the Autumn 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.