Interview: lovelytheband chase down demons with debut album, ‘finding it hard to smile’

Living with anxiety and depression is like wading a moss-riddled, dank and polluted swamp naked. You think your porcelain skin has enough fortitude to weather the waters, but one small cut or stab to your gut, and you’re down for the count. The poison squeezes into the tear, pumps into your blood stream and ruptures your heart in a matter of minutes. Dear outsiders, those blessed to live with a clean mind, you couldn’t possibly understand. When it strikes, you can never quite be ready for it, even on the good days. Mitchy Collins collects up his own brokenness and glues the shards back together again. Almost like Humpty Dumpty but throbbing, bleeding and incredibly painful. “I could use a distraction to cope with my life,” he sings with the acid-tongued “alone time,” a woozy but chunky dance track on his band’s debut album, finding it hard to smile.

“I don’t have to feel good / I just want to feel better,” he later grants, the clouds whirl in dark circles over his head. Even when the production busts wide open into a splendid rainbow, the heaviness never really goes away. Alongside guitarist Jordan Greenwald and drummer Sam Price, the trio called lovelytheband carve out unhealthy habits and clawing emotions with dusty sweeps and flourishes, decorating the buoyant and otherwise jovial melodies with visceral ferocity. “pity party” vibes hard with crusted, ’80s-hardened grooves (“Please set me free, anxiety,” Collins begs), and the daring choices made throughout the record’s runtime is equal parts tragic, beautiful and romantic. Through baring the scars that never seemed to properly heal, in songwriting that’s born of harsh, true-to-real-life pain, the band comes closer to self-renewal. It’s never over until it’s over, but they can at least come to terms with it. “This album was definitely a big therapy session for me. Writing these songs and putting this album together made me come to grips and own up to a lot of things I knew I needed help with in my life and need to take control of,” writes Collins over an email to B-Sides & Badlands.

Admittedly, the last several years of his life were marred with bad decisions that served to only exacerbate the turmoil bubbling and brewing inside his fractured skull. “I was in a really self-destructive pattern, drinking too much, partying too hard, all to self-medicate and try to fix or keep the damaged parts of myself at bay – kind of just hiding from them and running away from my problems instead of asking for help and facing them head on,” he says. “Music is my therapy, I know that sounds cliché, but it’s the truth. Writing songs is how I get a lot of buried stuff out of me.”

Vigorous standout “these are my friends,” paired with a boldly acrobatic hook and tribal, rib-cracking drums, best illustrates the marrying of both the good and the bad. “That’s an everyday struggle for me but I’m doing my best, taking things one day at a time,” Collins stresses. And within a wall-to-wall of sound, which seems to cause a claustrophobic effect to ripple outward into the listener’s own experience, his voice is pleading with the voices inside his head and those outside, as if wrangling each compartmentalized version of himself into a makeshift whole. “My heart and I don’t get along / It’s something that I’m sad about / Everybody needs a pick me up / But I should probably slow it down,” he sings.

Not only is his honestly invigorating, but the juxtaposition of the slick production and mournful lyrics is a marvel to behold. It’s a choice that “makes it a little bit easier for people to digest,” he says. Even the pop and fizz of “maybe, i’m afraid” is sobering and calm, despite the Coldplay-sized hook that jars and hits the chest. While framed in the context of a burgeoning romance, it stabs down to his fear of “accepting the good things,” he acknowledges, “and allowing yourself to be happy and be grateful and not be so self-sabotaging. I have a terrible habit of pushing anything good in my life away.”

With “your whatever,” the band bends stinging heartbeats with the past’s ghostly presence. “[This song] is a special one for sure. It’s about two girls in my life I hold very very dear to my heart. I’m willing to be in their lives in whichever capacity they’ll have me,” says Collins, whose phrasing rides the arrangement like a saddle. “You get to meet a few people that change you for the better in your life, and I do my best to hold onto to those people.”

The synths of “stupid mistakes” tickle the earlobes, and moments later, the drums sneak and slither into the ear canal. It’s an irresistible anthem, that’s for sure, and it’s beginning on only drums is even more climactic. “Our producer [Christian Medice] had that track and started with the pounding drum beat you hear, and the story kind of just fell out. That’s a song about how sometimes alcohol makes you think something is a really good idea… but in reality its quite the opposite,” he says. From the blustering guitar underneath, rising and falling in puffy cloud-bursts, to the sharp bob of “huh” in the mix, it’s a moment of clarity. “Too many skeletons / Too hard to keep them in the closet where they’ve been,” the trio confesses.

finding it hard to smile rushes by at such a brisk pace, you probably missed exactly how profound and vital it really is. lovelytheband are grand pop marshals of their own creation, dipping melodies into a pool of incisive craftsmanship. If you dig further into the lyrics upon each listen, you’re hit with astounding insight and advice to really living a life worth living. “I learned mostly writing this album that it’s perfectly okay to not be okay, and though it’s scary, it’s ok to ask for help when you need it. It took me a long time to realize that. I’m glad I have,” says Collins. “I wrote these songs and they helped me a lot with a lot of things I didn’t feel great about in myself, they made me open up a bit and talk about stuff I was scared to, all I can hope for is that maybe these songs can help someone else, too.”

Their star is rising, and with that comes the pressure to always be accessible, forced to offer up their humanity as a sacrifice to some unseen, all-knowing god. “This life, though it’s a wonderful and rewarding one, can definitely take a toll on you. People forget artists and musicians are just people at the end of the day with the same struggles and problems everyone else deals with, except ours are out on display for everyone to comment on,” he observes. Equipped with one of the year’s best albums, Collins, Greenwald and Price loudly and proudly set the record straight on mental health and what comes after. We need to be ready and willing to finally listen. It’s time.

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