SURVIVAL PACT

AS THEY NEAR THEIR THIRD DECADE AS THE BONAFIDE KINGS OF DOUGHY EMO ALT-ROCK, JIMMY EAT WORLD HEAD IN AN AMBITIOUS NEW DIRECTION. WORDS BY SARAH COMEY.

You never quite know when your favourite band will end up disappointing you. Because let’s be real for a second: every band ends up sucking at a certain point in their career. Most will fall off the wagon somewhere around the fifth or sixth album – others are luckier, and make it deep into the double digits. Jimmy Eat world are now ten albums down, and not only are they yet to break a sweat, they – somehow – just keep getting better.

Easily their most open-hearted and ambitious effort yet, Surviving takes the raw, temperamental poignancy that made the Arizona alt-rockers such a jaw-dropping force to begin with, and ups the ante by a margin the size of their millennial fans’ student debt. Which is to say, of course, that it’s an absolute levithian of an LP.

In an effort to unearth their secrets to longevity,

Australian Guitar made a quick detour past frontman Jim Adkins’ favourite deli on the way home from a day at the office... Because you can’t call it stalking if you’re just in the neighbourhood, right?

How did you want to push Jimmy Eat World further than ever before on this LP?

The challenge we gave ourselves is to do less things that felt like more. And to do that, we definitely leaned into some of our strengths as a guitar-rock band. There’s some varied textures and different kinds of songs happening on Surviving, but I feel like it’s really weighted towards our core guitar-rock roots.

So you were trying to find the power in simplicity – to not have simple songs, but simple concepts that you can then turn into these big, powerful songs.

Yeah, definitely. I’ve always been a fan of having restrictions in place – self-imposed lines to colour within. You can get as subversive as you want within those lines, but you need to establish some kind of parameter before you can allow yourself to explore. That way, the song comes to life in a really interesting way; it wants to be effective for the kind of song it is. For me, that’s where the reward is, when you are developing something with a song telling you what it wants to be.

Do you find it crucial to step out of your comfort zone with each new record to keep things feeling fresh, not just for the fans, but for yourselves as creatives?

Oh yeah. The worst thing you can do isn’t necessarily coming up with an idea that you don’t like. The worst thing you can do is come up with an idea that you think is exactly you. Like, what are we doing in that case? We have nine other albums that sound like us! What are we doing adding more stuff that sounds exactly like that? I feel like a really good gauge of whether I’m on the right track or not is if I find I’m laughing at myself a little bit – just a little bit. If you’re struggling with your self-identity, then you’re growing. Your strengths are useful, but if all you’re doing is executing your strengths, you’re not doing anything exciting. If everything feels easy to you, you’re not on a path of growth.

It feels like you’ve kicked the emotional energy into overdrive on Surviving. What drove the anthemic nature of the record on a creative wavelength?

It just sort of came out that way. I think when you’re working on material, you have to strike a fine balance between trying to be present and tuning out. Because music is all about responding to something you’re hearing. You might be creating what you’re hearing and trying to respond to it at the same time, but as a songwriter, you also need to be able to turn around and be outside your own belt in a way.

Unless you’re able to silence the inner critic, you’re not going to get far. You’re just going to be shooting down every idea as soon as you have one. Writer’s block is when you can’t shut off your inner critic and you don’t get anywhere. It’s a tricky line to balance there. And in the process of shutting off that inner critic, you end up with a batch of songs that start to tell you something about where your subconscious is heading. And we listen to that, and we try to explore more aspects of what our subconscious is trying to tell ourselves. And I guess in the case of Surviving, that’s guitar–rock as a prompt.

So I was reading that you would record some of your guitar parts on an iPhone as a way to experiment with your sound...

I wanted to get a particular kind of sound out of an acoustic guitar; I wanted it to feel spontaneous and immediate. So I just threw my phone down and started a voice memo – I wasn’t concerned about mic placement or acoustic treatment of the room. I was in the warehouse of our studio space, it was not ideal. And I took what I recorded and I dumped it into a session and… It sounded great!

I was like, “Huh?How!?” I ended up having to process things to make it sound more like I intended, because it just sounded too good. I can see why there are SoundCloud rappers that have never seen an XLR cable before, because the microphone in your iPhone is really good. It might be the most expensive component in the entire phone.

What about the guitars you were repping?

For almost every part of the recording, I used the guitar I play live, which is an off-the-shelf Fender signature model of mine. It’s kind of like a Les

Paul Thinline hybrid, and I just really dig it. It does everything I want a guitar to do, so that’s really all I play. The only difference between what you’d buy in a guitar store and what I play is that I put .013 gauge strings on mine, and Fender told me I was insane if I thought they would package it like that for retail.