PARX AND RECREATION

THE NEW WATERPARKS ALBUM, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, IS THEIR BOLDEST AND MOST DEFIANT YET. AUSTRALIAN GUITAR TAKES AN INSIDE LOOK WITH FRONTMAN AWSTEN KNIGHT.

The blood red aesthetics of Waterparks’ longawaited fifth album, Intellectual Property, are entirely fitting: the Texan pop-rockers have always been loud and showy and a little off-the-rails, but here they’re downright vicious. It’s their shortest album (by a whole two minutes) but it’s easily their most diverse; plot-twists are aplenty, with necksnapping shifts from saccharine pop to scorching rock, all tied together with Awsten Knight’s sharpest quips and stickiest hooks.

As the singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and creative genius tells Australian Guitar, this record is Waterparks’ most ambitious because it needed to be. Their last disc, 2021’s Greatest Hits, was a gamutspanning epic that burrowed into and made a home out of every sound they’d ever played with – which, given the band’s total rejection of genre, meant it was a pretty huge effort. Greatest Hits was their longest album (by three minutes) and ran over 17 tracks, each treated like an ultra-condensed deep-dive into one corner of their artistry. In order to avoid stagnating, the band needed to hit Intellectual Property with everything they had; no idea could be too “out there”. No stylistic leap between tracks could be too polarising.

The end result is an album of extreme contrasts: ‘Real Super Dark’ is bold and aggressive, driven by thick guitars and piercing 808s, but its sandwiched by ‘Starf***er’ and ‘Funeral Grey’, two shamelessly shimmery nuggets of bubblegum pop-rock. That ethos bled into the production: ‘2 Best Friends’ is the band’s most spartan tune to date (with “seven or eight” tracks, according to Knight) while ‘Ritual’ is their densest (Knight wasn’t able to count how many tracks it has – his laptop crashed when he tried to open the project file).

Always down to give us a full tour of his working mind – an impressively cluttered jungle, to say the least – Knight wasted no time throwing us in the deep end of Intellectual Property.

Was it your goal to really take the listener on a journey with this record?

Yes! As soon as they get comfortable, I want to be like, “Nope!” But in a good way, you know what I mean? I didn’t want them to be like, “Oh, God” – because I’ve been on shitty roller coasters made of plywood, and it’s not fun. I wanted this to be like,

“Holy shit!” Like you’re watching a bunch of crazy different short films at once, and they’re all blowing your mind. I want it to be like a Pixar short, then one of those horror shorts that win a bunch of South By Southwest stuff, then some A24 arthouse shit… I just wanted to go everywhere.

After five albums, is it tough for you to keep expanding this musical world you’ve built?

Honestly, not really. And I know that sounds kind of goofy, but I don’t know, I feel like if we weren’t clearly progressing, stylistically, I probably wouldn’t want to make another album. Like if we just kept writing

Double Dare over and over, I would be so bored.

There’s always so many more genres and styles I want to try out.

I feel like that really stands out with the contrast on this album. ‘Self-Sabotage’ is the most Waterparks-y Waterparks song you’ve ever put out, but then ‘Ritual’ might be almost the most unique one you’ve ever done.

Honestly, ‘Ritual’ was kind of my “rebellious” song. Songs like ‘Funeral Gray’, ‘Brainwashed’, ‘2

Best Friends’… It was all really simple shit that I just wrote on this little guitar. Because I can get very, very bored with music, so I was like, “Okay, if if we can write some songs that keep my attention – that are good enough to be on the record – with just that little f***ing guitar, then I’ll know it’s an incredible song.

And we’d build it out from there, you know, add in all the fun layers and shit that we all love listening to.

But by the time ‘Ritual’ came along, I was over that. I was like, “Okay, we did it. We accomplished it. We made some big pop bangers on the little guitar – now I want to remind people that f***ing nobody can touch our production. We’ve got to do one song that’s just like an insane, evil production flex.”

Also, every single time we put an album out, people will say, “I miss…” And then they list the heaviest song on the previous album. Like when we dropped

Entertainment, people went, “Man, I miss songs like ‘Little Violence’.” And I’m like, “Did you hear ‘Tantrum’!?” But it’s always like that. So I was like, “I’m gonna stick one song on [ Intellectual Property] that is so mean, so tough, so evil…” Like, I’m doing the most, vocally. We just needed one song that knocks the shit out of people. Because the second it starts being predictable, I’m like, “Get the f*** outta here!”

Does it always feel cool to tap into that heavier side?

Yes! It’s so fun. Because you know, we have a tonne of songs that people who like us really enjoy – they love ‘Not Warriors’, ‘Gloom Boys’, etcetera – but those songs never go off at the show. People sing them and stuff, but that’s not enough for me. I like playing the ones that make people open up the pit – that’s what makes me excited.

I could play a perfect show – no bad notes, I can feel loose, it could be a great vibe – but if the crowd isn’t moving, or they’re not crowd-surfing, or there’s not two pits going on at all times, I’m like, “Damn, that was kind of a bummer.” Otto is totally different: he’s like, “If I hit all my drum fills and I don’t drop a stick, that’s an incredible show.” But I’m like, “No, if they’re bored, I am upset.”

And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve got ‘2 Best Friends’, which is probably the most unapologetically sweet, upbeat song you’ve ever written.

‘2 Best Friends’ is cool to me because every Waterparks song has, like, 40 to 60 tracks in the mix. Every song has like ten tracks of guitars – four of them are doing the chords, two of them are panned, then you double up the octaves and throw a lead on there, pitch it… And then ‘2 Best Friends’ is something like seven or eight tracks.

We challenged ourself to make the most out of the least. There’s the lead vocal, some limited harmonies, and then guitar, bass, drums, like one synth... It’s super bare, you know what I mean? So that was kind of the vibe there. Because like you said, we’re on our fifth album, so it’s like, “Let’s try to change the formula. Let’s see what we can pull off with this and

this and this…”

‘Ritual’ is the craziest song we’ve ever made, production-wise, but ‘2 Best Friends’ was like, “Okay, let’s see how much we can do with the smallest amount of shit possible.” This album was all about challenging ourselves and taking things as far as we could in whatever direction, but still make it sound like Waterparks. We were really trying to flex our songwriting and production muscles.