UK pop punk band Neck Deep have released their highly-anticipated ‘Self-titled’ album via Hopeless Records. Featuring previous singles ‘We Need More Bricks,’ ‘It Won’t Be Like This Forever,’ and ‘Take Me With You,’ the band’s fifth studio album encompasses everything Neck Deep have excelled at across their career, enhanced and dialed to eleven. From the bouncing bombast of their latest single ‘Dumbstruck, Dumbf**k’ and the ripping intensity of ‘Sort Yourself Out,’ to the poetic introspection of ‘They Don’t Mean To (But They Do),’ their self-titled record is an album that boasts a song for almost any occasion (including, in ‘Take Me With You,’ the impending alien invasion).
“We worked hard to get this album made, but we stayed true to ourselves and made the album that best represents us, from the ground up,” shares vocalist Ben Barlow on the new album. “We can’t wait for everyone to hear it and feel the same way we did, and to hear these songs sung back to us in a huge year of touring.”
In the little over a decade since the band formed in the Barlow brothers’ spare room in Wrexham, Wales, a lot has changed. From the scrappy, naively hopeful beginnings that define the starting of so many teenage bands, the pop-punks have gone on to be one of British Rock music’s most successful global exports in recent memory: top 5 records in both the US and UK, global touring, viral hits and over a billion streams just some of the fruits of ten years spent mastering their craft.
But now, as the band stands on the brink of their fifth, self-titled LP, there’s an acknowledgement that the more things change, the more – in some ways at least – they stay the same.
“This album is the sound of us knowing ourselves and knowing our ability” explains frontman and youngest Barlow sibling Ben. “It’s unapologetically us. We’re professional songwriters now and we’ve really honed in on what we’re good at – but it’s also about having fun and enjoying writing these tracks. And there are those little sonic signatures in the mix that even I can’t really put my finger on that just make it Neck Deep. It happens when we get in a room together and it clicks – it’s us just doing our thing like we always have”. Eschewing a keen list of collaborators and producers eager to work with one of rock’s hottest properties and choosing, instead, to write and record in their own warehouse space, mere miles from where they grew up. Old school, just like it used to be.