After a decade of writing, evolving and finding their way, Culture Wars have arrived at a defining moment with Don’t Speak. The album feels both like a fresh beginning and the culmination of years spent figuring out exactly what the band wanted to sound like — and, perhaps more importantly, who they wanted to be.

​

Built around a stripped-back approach to songwriting and shaped by years of touring, Don’t Speak captures the tension between the person you once were and the person you’re becoming. Across songs that explore growing up, mistakes, loneliness, ambition and acceptance, the record finds beauty in the uncertainty of life not always unfolding as planned.

​

A: After ten years you’ve released Don’t Speak. Does the album feel more like a beginning or a culmination of everything that came before it?

​

CW: Kind of both. I think it really does feel like a beginning. Dave and I have been trying to be in a band for 10 years. The two of us have known each other for that long, but the band has not really existed for that long, I mean I guess we're getting close to at this point, but,  I think what we've been trying to do since the very beginning is this, is this band, is this album, and all of that is very new considering from the start of the pandemic on, once Caleb and Josh kind of got in the mix.  This is, at the same time, a culmination of a lot of really hard work that we've done to really build our own sound and our own band and almost rebuild everything and develop on our own, which is what the labels used to do.

 

A: The album is described as being about the tension between who you were and who you’re becoming. When you listen back now, which version of yourself do you hear most clearly? How has the album incorporated the idea of identity?

​

CW: It really is kind of split because half the songs are really from the “who I was,” and the half is like the “who I've become” kind of thing. I would say that I hear more of the “who you were,” just personally, because you're always growing. You're always kind of hearing those places. Even now, like, the “who I've become,” I hear those now as “who I was,” because it’s been maybe six months, maybe a year. I don't think we try to incorporate an idea of identity. I just wrote from a biographical standpoint and that’s just what happened. I didn't even try to write from a biographical standpoint. Write what you know, I guess, you know?

 

A: When writing “Typical Wars” did you feel it allowed you to say things that you maybe either weren’t sure of or things there was space for before? How did it feel afterwards and expressing you felt so wholly?

​

CW: I think the majority of working on it was really just trying to figure out what the hell I was trying to say. It was hard when I started because I rewrote those lyrics a lot of times over years because this was one of the earliest songs written for the album. I think at the time, I didn't know what to say because I hadn't figured it out yet. So once I figured it out, yeah, it was pretty satisfying because I was like, “That's why I took so long to do this,” and I still wholeheartedly feel like if I had just put out the first version of the lyrics, it just wouldn't have fucking landed. If the song was like, “How cool it is to be stuck in your typical ways,” which is kind of where it started, because that's where I was and I thought I was doing the right thing, I think it'd be very unrelatable. So I'm glad that it took the turn that it did.

 

 

A: “Bittersweet” seems to capture a very adult realisation: life doesn't necessarily go the way you planned, but that doesn't mean it goes wrong or is a bad thing. Has making this album changed your definition of success?

​

CW: I don't think it's changed my definition of success. I just think it's tempered my expectations of how we're going to achieve it. When having a band, you're building a business and most things are not going to go the way you want them to, and there's so many relevant pieces to life that are like that, and relevant pieces to my life where I have all these hopes and dreams. You think you're gonna run off in the sunset, and it’s not how it happens. We're not living in a fucking movie. It's more just being able to handle things and then being able to look back and be like, “No, you've achieved all these things you've ever wanted. You've gotten all these things. You just had to get kicked in the nuts 10 times on the way there,” and that's what makes you appreciate those achievements.

 

A: If they were just handed to you or they just happened, that would be different. It's given me an appreciation for what has happened, but also the patience to understand that just because we hit a wall doesn't mean it's the end of it, and also the persistence to be like, “Yeah, it's a wall.” There's always a wall. Just push, just keep pushing.

 

CW: “In the Morning” deals with loneliness, late-night decisions and a past version of yourself that you’ve since outgrown. Have you felt an element of healing and contentment visiting those emotions and becoming ok with them?

For me, it's more just about like, pardon my French, just being like a young, horny college student. It wasn't necessarily like healing and contentment. It was just the immediacy of where your brain is when you're that age. It's more coming of age, kind of recognizing what you were like as a kid or a young adult. I don't really see it as a bad or a good thing. It was just growing up and making mistakes and figuring it out.

 

A: You’ve been described as mixing ’90s rock swagger with modern bite. How do such seemingly different influences find their way into a Culture Wars song naturally? Has the band's sound changed because you wanted it to, or because the people in Culture Wars have changed over the past decade?

​

CW: Anything pre-pandemic, I consider development honestly, and not necessarily like a vision of the band. I think it was us figuring out what we wanted to do. In most cases that's not really done publicly. For a while, the labels would snatch you up and you do it all behind closed doors, and then when they were ready, they'd do it. In our case, Caleb said at the beginning, “If we're gonna do this, we need to approach everything completely differently.” We were like, “We're just gonna only write songs with two elements, and if it's not good with a guitar and a vocal only, then we don't do it,” and I think that's very different from, “Let's try and build a really cool track and then I can try and sing on top of it.” Like, “oh, this is really cool music. Let's see if you can get a melody.” And it's like, that's not a song.

 

I think it forced us to get away from the ego, get away from trying to be cool, trying to do this, trying to do that, and just write a song that you like playing and singing. It only sounds 90s because it's just guitars, bass, and drums. When you have a great song, the band can just be the band. So that's just what happens. It sounds like the band because it is the band and we didn't have to put on a bunch of synthesizers and tracks and just to make it tolerable. It just is what it is. So I think that's really what happened.

 

A: There’s a noticeable ambition in the scale of this record — it feels designed for big rooms and big stages. How did imagining the songs place outside of the studio and the idea of gifting them out to the world play into how they were created?

​

CW: We've been doing this over a long period of time and we've gone on tour, support tours and stuff during that time. We got to go out and play these in the real world. We had half an album that we totally put in the trash after touring because we didn't want to play those. We didn't think they fit what we were doing. So, ‘Don’t Speak,’ ‘Bittersweet,’ ‘(Tokyo),’ ‘In The Morning,’; those kinds of things all came from after tour, but we were lucky enough to get these shots with like LANY and Maroon 5 and these as I call “big boy rooms,”  but these are big, “big boy rooms.” We did play in arenas and stadiums and played for a ton of people. We were very lucky to get those opportunities, but we learned really quickly what we wanted, what we didn't.

 

We were playing the first half of the album that stayed, we just didn't want to play the other half. We were putting that half out as we were doing it, but when we went back with the album after doing the Philippine arena and stuff like that, which is like 65,000 people. After doing something like that, Caleb and I were like, “Oh, we need to look at this differently,” and we remixed the entire album based on that show, and that was based on the song ‘In The Morning’ and how that was mixed. He went back and remixed everything because of how we did that so it sounds like it fits in those larger places because we played them in those larger places and then made the record sound like that, with that inspiration. That's kind of how it happened and put together in that style from it.

 

A: Looking back at the early version of the band compared with who you are now, what would surprise your younger self most about where Culture Wars has come to now? You’ve described the album as finding peace in the in-between. What’s been the beauty in those feelings and the moment?

​

CW: Well, I just think if you told me in my 20s, “Hey, I know you want to start a band now and you want it all to happen right now, but it's not, you know, it'll. And it will happen, but it's going to take you fucking ages.” I just would be like, “Are you kidding me? Like, seriously, that's how long it's going to take?” Once you get there, you appreciate it all that much more and life is funny. I think there is beauty in that circumstance. We're in this place, just as an example, we're in this place now where we're selling out shows and touring and doing bigger shows than I ever thought we could on the first record. We're doing these big rooms. It's surprising to me that we've come this far so quickly in the last year. I also just had my son and now I'm balancing being away and having this big life change. It's like, of course it happened at that point, and it couldn't have happened when I was younger and had more time on my hands, but it’s just the back and forth of life, and you know, so very appreciative of it. It's great, and I'm happy we got there at all, because most people never do.