Grady Allen is surprisingly calm, wrapped in a bright yellow sweater and enjoying the afternoon sunshine. You’d think with Anxious’ second album, ‘Bambi’, coming out in less than a month, the frontman would be at least a little nervous, but Allen is remarkably zen about the whole process. “[‘Bambi’ is out] very soon, which feels super weird. It's like been this thing just really far in the distance for a while now: It’s like…” he waves his hand vaguely, “oh yeah, it's gonna come out eventually and now it's like…oh shit it's gonna be here in like two weeks. There are some singles that I think are like a little bit of a shift than like what we've done previously and I feel like they've all been pretty well received. So, I hope people like it, resonate with it. I don't know. That's probably that's about what I hope for.”

When he mentioned a shift, he’s referring to ‘Counting Sheep’, the lead taster single that signalled a new LP. It’s deceptively teenage, in a loveable outsider way, catchy enough to be memorable and strike a chord with the growing number of Anxious fans. “That was the first single that came out for the record,” Allen explains. “I think it came out in early October. So it’s been out for a couple months now. We chose it as the lead single because I feel like, you know it kind of toes the line of the whole record in that it’s it’s big and it’s loud and it’s like this heavy rock song. But it’s also laden with like these big melodies and a lot of different things that I think are very intrinsically this record. So I think to me it’s the perfect introduction point for the record: a big heavy rock track like punk or whatever, but still has a lot of the things that feel like so intrinsically like ‘Bambi’ to me.”

More singles followed. “After ‘Counting Sheep’, we released ‘Head & Spine’, which I think, of all the singles, it’s the most like ‘Little Green House’.” referring back to Anxious’ 2022 brash and charming debut album. “It’s heavy. It’s fast. And then after that we chased it with ‘Some Girls’, which I think is the biggest step outside what we’ve done as a band so far as a single. It’s dancey. It’s poppy. I think you know it’s been flattering for me, and I feel like the reception is generally been “man, this song is just undeniable!” Allen smiles one of his rare warm smiles, pleased at the reaction he received. “I think there’s plenty of people who I see on the Internet saying, “I like Anxious when they’re a heavier band or whatever” but even [those people say] this song is really undeniable so that has me pretty excited. I think this song is like a good example of [what we wanted to achieve]: we didn’t want to half step anything. We didn’t want to be like “well we’re going to write this pop song but like we feel like we have to scream on it or something.” We didn’t want to do anything like that and just make the best song possible. And I think that is that song.”

‘Bambi’ has been a long time coming, the product of a lot of introspection. “I think so much of what ‘Bambi’ is about is realising that I spent so much of my youth, teen years and young adulthood with like a very specific tangible vision of like what success and what like happiness looked like, which was being in this band, and then getting to that place, a lot of the things I wanted being realised and feeling like it didn’t feel exactly like what I wanted it to feel” Allen says. His tone turns more serious when he considers how he weighed up his life so far. “I would say, I don’t know, since I was about 12 years old, I wanted to be in a band and tour. In the past couple of years, entering my early twenties and everything, there’s been like a certain amount of reckoning with that and figuring out exactly what life needs to look like. But I like being in a band. I like punk music and it’s cool to get to do that with the people I love all over the world.”

“I started Anxious when I was fifteen years old. Um, I’m now recently twenty four. It was a few months ago, but like in the grand scheme of things, recently I was worried about the only lens and perspective that I would have to define the world was through punk music and touring. And I felt like I was seeing plenty of people who were older than me, with their lens being purely like punk and hardcore music and everything had made them bitter and sour to the world. It hadn’t enlightened them. It just made them… there was kind of this rejection and unwillingness to engage with things that were… I don’t know, to cut off relationships just because somebody might not know like who the Crumb Suckers are. That’s a really unfortunate perspective to have. And then I think when young people find things that they’re passionate about, they tend to get really narrow about it and they just really focus and they shut everything else out. That’s for anything that young people discover and they get passionate about, whether it’s sports or drama or film or music or anything. But I think where punk and hardcore music differs is it kind of rewards that sort of mentality. There’s this,” he marks off walls with this hands, “and there’s the outside world, which is fucked and is trying to corrupt this thing. All to say I spent a lot of years in my young teens to the early twenties saying, I’m defined as like this guy and I’m this thing and I’m this guy in a band who believes these things. And I think I kind of just needed some space to define myself abstractly of those things. So I think that’s where all of that lies for me.”

Soul-searching can only get you so far. The other half of ‘Bambi’s creation comes from good old fashioned hard work from the band, snatching moments to work on it while touring. “We spent months and months and months and months writing and perfecting this record. I mean, from each chord to like cymbal hit, the entire record was mapped out. And then, with this record, we had been on the road for two years and only had time sort of in between to write. And so I think what that resulted in is we weren’t exactly sure where the record was going to go until we entered the studio. We had all the ideas and all the pieces, but it wasn’t the record didn’t feel cohesive and completed in this way that we had hoped. But I mean, songwriting, yeah, I mean, it’s tough. It’s like anything else, you know, consistent practice is what makes it consistently strong.”

Anxious seem to be constantly on the road, sometimes alone, sometimes with their friends. Allen remembers their joint outings with KOYO and One Step Closer as a joyous experience. “Yeah it was a blast. We did it twice. We did like a regional US tour and then we did a full US and it was sick. The shows were great. Those are bands that like we really come up with and us and OSC used to share members for like forever. We’re all like in the same boat now, just being super busy and touring all the time and so. It was just really cool to just get to be on the road together and hang out in a way that we just don’t really get to anymore.” They also have the rare distinction of having a bigger fanbase in Asia than they do in the USA, as Allen discovered. “Two summers ago we did Japan and Southeast Asia. And it was just insane. It was crazy. Southeast Asia has this super rich like history and culture surrounding hardcore music. And it’s something that I’ve been aware of you know both kind of peripherally and directly since I was like a young teen. Some of the very first people to support Anxious weren’t people in our own state. They were people in Jakarta and like the Philippines. They have such a crazy culture of just paying attention and focusing on you know even the smallest bands, so it really felt full circle to be over there. I think probably our biggest headlining show ever to date was in Jakarta. It was like 800 or 900 people and for us that was just like ‘oh my God, it’s insane, that there are this many people right now losing their minds for Anxious.”

One Step Closer might not seem like natural touring partners for Anxious, given the difference in their sounds. Neither band fits neatly into a genre, and even Allen isn’t completely sure how to characterise his music with a label. “I tend to like emo because I think it’s very easy for pop punk to feel like a derogatory term. I feel like even bands that are unequivocally pop punk are like “we’re not really a pop punk band. We’re something else.” Emo, I think, best describes the sound and what we sound like and the sort of music we make. Hardcore is our world. That’s the space that we come from and that’s the space that we care about and are still very actively involved [in]. We get categorised and categorise ourselves in that way. Even though we might not have very much in common with a lot of the bands that we’re playing with, [but it’s in who we are] as people and as a band and how we operate and just the things that we care about. We have way more in common with those bands than we would than bands that sound way closer to us from a sound standpoint.”

“Something that has felt a little bit weird for all of us is a lot of people with describing this record or the new songs coming out is terms like “Oh, this is Anxious doing their big swing” and I think ‘big swing’ evokes the idea of really trying to do something really aspirational. In writing this record and recording it, there was never a moment that it felt like we were really forcing something, it just felt like…this is the band that we are. And so I would say that the evolution has been pretty natural, not really forced. I don’t know we always try to very consciously to stray away from that. We’re just us.”

We can judge for ourselves where we’d place Anxious in the spectrum of hardcore very soon when they head to Europe this summer, which Allen is looking forward to. “I’m very excited. We’ve never been to Europe proper. We’ve just been to the UK. So it’ll be really cool, getting to do a lot of like big fests and a lot of small shows, so it should be cool. I don’t really know if anybody in Europe is like dying for Anxious to be over there, so I’m not sure what my expectations are. I’m just like, I’ll be thrilled if anybody comes, I will be thrilled if no one comes, it’ll still be like, hey, I’m, on the other side of the world. It’s good to do what I love, so more than anything, I’m stoked to kick it for a few weeks, that’ll be really fun. I hope to see you guys when we’re over there in the summer,” Allen grins, “and I hope hardcore and punk music can be a way for you to live and express yourself authentically and not a way that you feel like you have to subscribe to something.”

Whether we call them pop punk, hardcore or emo, Anxious are growing in strength as they mature into their own sound, and we’re anxious to see how their sophomore album plays when they hit the road across the UK this summer. 

KATE ALLVEY

_______________________________

‘Bambi’ is out now on Run For Cover records.