Going into the making of AFI’s 12th album, Davey Havok felt “daunted” for the first time in forever. Taking inspiration from British musical icons, not to mention the post-truth world we’re living in, he’s now ready to share himself with their ever-loyal followers all over again on Silver Bleeds The Black Sun…
Davey Havok doesn’t simply talk. Rather, Davey Havok communicates with every fibre of his being. He, by his own admission, is “quite emotive; I gesticulate, I react”. His hands conduct and mould imaginary shapes. His eyes dart and dance as if plucking words from the air around him. Blacked-out biceps flex with emphasis beneath a barely-there T-shirt that hangs lithely off one shoulder. His smile, which you see a lot, stretches and reaches across every inch of his face. The laughter is hearty, frequent, a little bit mischievous, dirty even.
Conversation with Davey Havok is not so much a rigid back and forth exchange of ideas and views as it is a rhythmic flow, a performance, its own form of art. He makes for an incredible anecdotalist, and likely an even better member of a debate team. Thoughts take endlessly long yet enthralling detours. There are pauses for contemplation that create a silence that seems to go on for eternity yet never for a moment feels uncomfortable. Your voice and his become overlapped and entwined. At times you wonder whether he’s flirting. The voice emanating from the other side of the computer screen, from a home in Hollywood, has a soothing yet beguiling purr; an ASMR dream that, in another time and place, you could imagine serving well a career whispering lurid fantasies down crackled phonelines.
And then, of course, there is the new look. You know the one. The look. The fabulous bouffant mullet and Yosemite Sam-style handlebar moustache, Freddie Mercury meets Frank Zappa, that spawned innumerable headlines, reaction videos, memes and WhatsApp group chat conversations when it first appeared in a new AFI promotional photo last month.
“It is pretty fabulous, isn’t it?” Davey laughs. “I don’t participate with online behaviour very much, certainly to the extent of most human beings, but because of the reaction it received, I did receive a lot of texts… Friends would send me some of the more interesting or far-reaching reactions – metal bands who would use my head on T-shirts and flyers, things like that. I appreciate it. It’s an interesting phenomenon to me. It begs the question, who are you people? Because if they were AFI fans, it would not be shocking that I should look different than before. But then if they’re not, how the fuck do they know who I am?! It’s cool. It’s weird. It’s nice. My only reaction to it was: does this mean someone’s going to listen to the music now?”
Ah, yes. The music, of course. Davey Havok is joining Kerrang! today to dissect Silver Bleeds The Black Sun…, the 12th studio album from AFI, the band he started some 35 years ago while still in high school, and which he has fronted ever since.
“When we first started doing this, we knew we were making the decision to be broke for the rest of our lives,” Davey says. “But that was a decision that we were okay with, because we were going to be spiritually fulfilled, emotionally fulfilled, intellectually fulfilled by this life choice.”
The eternal bid to replenish that fulfilment has made sure that the release of new music from a band who have long commanded a fanatical following, whether in their early underground hardcore days, their mid-career brush with emo’s mainstream explosion, and their more everyday existence somewhere between the two, is always a Very Big Deal.
And as evidenced by Silver Bleeds…’s lead singles, the brooding post-punk of Behind The Clock and the Technicolor new wave glow of Holy Visions, the latest reinvention of alternative rock’s eternally shapeshifting musical savants doesn’t begin and end with a haircut…
It started with a conversation and, if Davey Havok is being honest with himself, a fear. What’s next? Where do we go from here? How, he would ask himself, would the band trump 2021’s Bodies, an album written in the pre-pandemic Before Times, released in the fog of the COVID storm, and belatedly toured in its remodelled world? Despite lukewarm critical reactions – “AFI don’t make bad albums,” our review stated, “but there are moments when the drive to evolve leads them to stray too far from their own fundamentals” – it remains a record of which Davey has immense attachment to and which, in its own way, hung like a millstone on its creator.
“For the first time in years, I felt daunted by the prospect of writing a new record,” he admits today of Silver Bleeds…’ genesis. “In light of how much I loved Bodies and a specific type of artistic progression we’d made, I thought we’d reached such a beautiful place that I was unsure of where we could go from there. That uncertainty shook me up a little bit.”
Guided by the suggestion of a longtime friend, last summer the idea of creating a “mood” album was placed on the table – something with a singular atmosphere and tone.
“If you look to the deep past of AFI, you’re going to see a singular mood – angst, anger – on a lot of those older hardcore records,” Davey explains, “but it’s not something we’d ever done with any intent. We discussed different artists and references for the world that we wanted the record to live in, and created a framework that really allowed for the record to be what it became. The writing just kept coming and coming, possibly more so than ever before.”
It’s interesting, we posit, that by restricting yourself in such a way, you found a level of creative–
“Freedom?” Davey interjects. “Yeah. People find that in BDSM, too. You relinquish your freedom to a higher power.”
Early on in the process of Silver Bleeds…, that intent took the form of creating something “dreamy”, something which took its cues from Echo And The Bunnymen’s Heaven Up Here and The Cure’s Pornography. Along the way, however – Davey points to the birth of Behind The Clock on “night two or three of writing for the album” as a formative moment – the dream began to twist into a nightmare.
“A lot of what feeds into the messaging of Silver Bleeds… is this dystopia that we’re living in, and the sociopolitical effect, if you will, of how that affects the human experience,” he says. “There’s an existential element to a lot of the language on the record. There is a tension in the record that I feel reflects the tension in the world. There’s division and uncanniness and surrealism.”
“I thought we’d reached such a beautiful place that I was unsure of where we could go”
By its very nature, then, Silver Bleeds… is a dark record for dark times. On Spear Of Truth, Davey sings that ‘Truth is a spear, is a bard, in the side of the fearful, of the coward’.
“We’re living in a post-truth world,” he begins, “where the loudest sentiment has the power.” He rolls his phone in his hand as he says, “We’re in a time where it takes the least amount of effort to be the loudest. There’s no courage involved in being the loudest; to be in a room full of people and to get up on the apple box and start professing your lies. There’s no culpability anymore. It’s an era of deception, controlling the world, and it is a nightmare. There is light that comes from art. If the art is not subjugated, if the art is not burned, if the artist is allowed to create.”
He knowingly locks eyes as he adds: “If the artist works in truth, of course. There are communities of thoughtful people who work in good faith, but it’s a big struggle, because their voices aren’t the loudest. It’s a war for their voice to be heard, and we need less war.
“Do you ever see those bumper stickers that say ‘God hates facts’?” he adds. “Pick your god and it’s happily twisting the brains of the world right now, happily ignoring the truth.”
It’s apt, with that in mind, that there too exists a coldness and an isolation to Silver Bleeds The Black Sun… – in tracks such as A World Unmade, in which Davey sings that ‘The world has its plans and I have another’, and the closing Nooneunderground, in which ‘There’s no-one on the streets, there’s no-one in the home, there’s no-one in your heart’. The album, Davey says, represents perhaps the first time ever that his lyricism was able to marry with the sonics in its entirety.
“The music was so starkly unique in the context of AFI that it also pushed me in different lyrical directions,” he nods.
That uniqueness will not come as a surprise to longtime AFI observers, who have grown accustomed to their stock-in-trade chameleonic ways. How, we ask, does a band known for surprises continue to surprise? How do you not become the movie billed with the twist ending? How do you not become–
“M. Night Shyamalan?” Davey interjects once more. “Now you’re talking my language. These are all the questions I started to think about for the first time.”
The answer is a beast like no other in the band’s catalogue: a full-throttled, cinematic embrace of the post-punk and new wave influences that were so formative in Davey’s youth, and which have bubbled under AFI’s surface “for decades”. For a band so deeply rooted in their home state of California, it’s a distinctly British record – shaded by lashings of Killing Joke, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus and Sisters Of Mercy that can be found across the board.
“Outside of American hardcore, the majority of music that made me who I am today were those British post-punk bands,” Davey agrees. “It was so exciting to me to experience first-hand a sound that has been in me for so long in a way I’ve never been able to experience before; to be able to create something that is so fundamentally an expression of who I have been since I was 15 years old. To be able to express that part of myself that’s been beneath the surface was so exciting to me.”
Davey Havok has, he admits, very consciously taken his last-ever stage dive. It came over five years ago now, at a 2020 anniversary show that reunited Earth Crisis, Strife and Snapcase onstage in Los Angeles in celebration of their California Takeover… Live LP. In a moment he will be thrilled to know is immortalised online, the frontman took a split-second decision to somersault from the stage, with predictable results. It was while laying sprawled out on the floor looking up at the ceiling – “I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I'm surely paralysed,’” he laughs – that Davey swore off such antics for life. ‘You’re 44 now,’ he remembers saying to himself. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’
The passing of time is something that today is very evidently on Davey Havok’s mind. It’s writ large across The Bird Of Prey, Silver Bleed’s… prologue of sorts, in which Davey croons ‘Time unwinds the serpent / Time defines my face / Time unwinds, awakened by a bird of prey.’ “Time,” Davey says, “is a sick, sick, sick fight that cannot be won. I do not have a healthy relationship with time.”
He laughs that “You’re a kind man for even knowing when my birthday is” when we apologise for reminding him that in November he’ll celebrate his 50th spin around the sun. This July just past, too, marked 30 years since AFI’s debut album, Answer That And Stay Fashionable, when the band’s music brimmed with possibility, naivety and immaturity of youth; the antagonistic child to Silver Bleeds…’ world-weary elder. Despite half-joking that “it is a shocking horror to me that I am the age I am”, Davey states that he “still feel[s] like I’m very much the same person that started this band”.
“I have a greater and greater fascination with time,” he continues. “Particularly in the case of the modern world, and the perception of time going faster and faster and faster. And within our agreed understanding of time, it does conceptually move faster the older you get, due to repetition, a lack of novelty, the loss of mystique and new experiences…”
(It’s at this point you think Davey might have been understating it when he said he’s “done a little reading” around the topic.)
“…So I, who has experienced far more than someone who is 15, feels that time is moving faster. This, conversely, is why, when we look back to being young, those moments hold more impact for us and have more staying power because they were novel. They were new. Everything we were learning was a new experience, and new experiences slow down time.”
(And it is at this point that you begin to understand what Davey meant when he tells you he feels “pummelled by time”.)
“Now add the internet to that. Add social media to that. Add a cellphone to that. They take out all novel experiences. They present to your consciousness experiences without having to experience them, over and over and over and over again. And now if you were to experience things you’ve seen in real life, they’re less novel. So time continues to move faster.”
Davey lets the thought hang in the air for what feels, well, like quite some time.
With all that said, what we have lost in the process, however, is not something he can comprehend so readily.
“I may feel the same person, yet I am confronted with very much not being in the same world that existed back then, and knowing that that world no longer exists is something that is very heartbreaking,” he reasons. “Technology has played a huge part in decimating – or at the very least, deconstruction, deconstructing and rearranging – the cultures that raised me. The inherent value of art has changed.”
“Time conceptually moves faster the older you get, due to repetition, a lack of novelty, the loss of mystique and new experiences”
He points to the example of a pinball machine, or an arcade video game machine (before music took a hold, Davey, a noted pinball wizard, was “raised on video games” like Pac-Man). You spend your dollar. You get three balls, three goes, three lives. They’re valuable to you. You have an attachment to them. They mean something.
“Now make those balls or lives free,” he says. “You don’t connect in the same way. You don’t care in the same way. You don’t invest. You don’t immerse yourself. And now apply that to art.”
But yet through it all, AFI remains. Davey remains. Silver Bleeds The Black Sun… is testament not just to endurance, but to eternal creativity. Asked what the record says about he and his band today, Davey simply says: “That we’re still here, still growing, still progressing artistically.” The idea of following so many of their peers’ leads by semi-retiring into the nostalgia circuit yet remains anathema to a man who views such a move as “cashing in on the nostalgia thing”. “And I’m not a big money guy,” he shrugs. So when Davey Havok goes to war with time once again, he may do so with wholly different weapons, but he remains armed with the same motivating principles in 2025 as in 1995.
“I’m still sending the message to anyone out there who wants something more, or might feel the same way that you and I do, that you have people out there who are with you,” he says. “I’m still providing a connection for the emotionally disenfranchised.
“I think in these times, when people are more isolated than ever, it’s very important,” Davey says. “It’s more important than ever.”
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun… is due out on October 3 via Run For Cover.
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