Awsten Knight Talks Transcending Genre On The New Waterparks Album

It's an exciting time to be a Waterparks fan right now. Not only did the Texan trio recently unveil a brilliant new single Turbulent and an entire new ‘green’ era, they also announced that they'd signed to Hopeless Records for the release of a new album, due out this year.

Naturally, we had to catch up with frontman Awsten Knight to find out absolutely everything – including if Turbulent is a good hint at what's to come from the follow-up to last year's 4K-rated Entertainment, and if Hopeless have been happy and supportive in giving Awsten complete creative control over Waterparks' output.

“What’s cool is that everything that will come out next is written already – we just need to finishing recording,” he explains. “Everything has got demos. Recently, actually, like a week before Slam Dunk, Hopeless said, ‘Hey, can we come and hear stuff?’ And I was so apprehensive, because it’s a weird thing for someone to come in and hear something that’s unfinished. I didn’t want anyone to say it wasn’t ready, because it’s like, ‘No shit!’ But people from Hopeless came in and were listening and going, ‘Holy fuck!’

“I explained what I wanted to do and how I wanted this album to be: I want every song to be the best fucking song, and I want them to be able to all live in different worlds. Like, if we’re referring to playlists or anything like that, I want every one of these songs to be able to just live on its own in a completely different fan base, you know what I mean? That’s the idea behind this. There’s one song that could have been considered a little bit pop-punk, and I was like, ‘Fuck this!’ So we just changed it up. We get on all the playlists that are like, ‘Pop-Punk Forever!’ and I’m just like, ‘Meh, I guess…’ I just want every song to be able to live comfortably with completely different sets of people. That’s a cool, conscious thing that I’m really excited about.”

Awsten also says that he hasn't been influenced by other styles of music on new material – instead, he takes inspiration from films, TV shows and anything else along those lines. And it's resulted in some pretty wild ideas…

“While we’re making albums I try not to listen to any other bands, just because it’s so easy to accidentally fall into somebody else’s lane, and I never, ever want to do that,” he says. “It’s funny that you mention movies being influential because there’s at least three songs that come to mind right now that feel like a movie score (laughs). But it’s cool – it’s like taking a movie score and then putting a song into it. I don’t want to get too in-depth yet, but you can probably find most genres, or at least pieces of genres, in these songs.”

Pick up this week's issue of Kerrang! to read our huge new interview with Awsten for loads more. It looks like this…

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