UK rock outfit You Me At Six have announced their highly anticipated latest album Suckapunch will be released on January 15.


While not exactly delivering what you would call a massive curveball sonically, Suckapunch is definitely an album from a band unafraid to experiment within their chosen genre and is also one that should consolidate You Me At Six at the forefront of world rock.


Vocalist Josh Franceschi joined HEAVY for a chat at a ridiculously unreasonable hour for a rock star, and still maintained an upbeat and jovial demeanour despite my intrusion.


“It’s kind of…,” Franceschi searched for words to describe the album, “I’m trying to think of a way to describe this… but it’s like an island and it is colonized by You Me At Six. None of the songs are even from the same family, that’s kind of what we went for. We were thinking about… in a weird way it kind of still feels cohesive… it feels like it was something that was meant to happen. It’s obviously still got the DNA of You Me At Six; the foundations and core of our band are that we’re a rock band and we’ve often flared in different sounds and stuff within that bet we are a rock band. This record is heavy and aggressive but it’s also kind of melodic and there are elements of… we really dug a bit more into the dance and hip-hop and R & B stuff that we listen to outside of being in the band and we’ve incorporated these things into our music. I think the mantra behind the ‘No Fear’. If you’re going to do something, don’t worry about it. At least that way no-one can say that you’re trying to emulate the sounds of somebody else or copycat something. If you’re doing it in your own and making it your own… it almost doesn’t matter how off the grid it is."


"Fundamentally this is all a bit of hot air because it doesn’t matter how much I wanna sell it or how much I have faith in it. They (the fans) will tell us what they think of it and if it’s resonating with them and moves them in any way. The main thing is we feel like we’ve done something that keeps it interesting. We’re on our seventh album and you can’t turn into one of those bands that is putting out the same old shit every record.”


In the full interview, Josh delves more into the album, what it’s like waiting for the album to drop for sometimes months at a time, the two singles released so far and how they relate to the record, fine-tuning different sounds to make them fit into the You Me At Six style of music and more.