Digital Spy

**Digital Spy** is a British website that covers the topics of entertainment, such as music and movies. They have done two interviews with The Neighbourhood; one in 2014 and one in 2015.

## Interview #1

The Neighbourhood have come a long way since their mysterious emergence online in 2012 with debut track 'Female Robbery'.

A year later the Californian band released *I Love You*; an album of dark, brooding tracks synonymous with their monochrome image.

**Digital Spy** caught up with the band to talk about their penchant for all things black and white, frontman Jesse's stint as a child actor and sharing a label with One Direction.

**The word 'moody' often gets thrown around when people talk about your music. Do you like that word?**

"Yeah, I don't know if I'd ever describe it like that but I get why people do. Our sound's anxious in its own way. I think moody can be looked at a couple of different ways. It can be cool and dark and moody but it can also be like, 'You're being a little bitch get over it'. That's just how the f\*\*k I am, that's all I know how to translate. I'm up and down. Our manager was watching us play the other night and he was like 'Are you all good?' and I was like 'I dunno man I guess I'm just moody' that's how it comes out sometimes."

**Like resting bitch-face.**

"Exactly."

**Your name's spelt the British way, but 'Sweater Weather' would've been 'Jumper Weather' over here... are you appealing to both sides of the Atlantic?**

"I've never heard anyone say that before! We f\*\*ked up, what can I say! Maybe it would've been even bigger over here if we'd called it 'Jumper Weather', man."

**You've turned down TV appearances because they've refused to feature you in black and white. Do you ever worry that might alienate people?**

"I guess, technically. It's a stupid metaphor, but it's like a glass being half empty or half full, it depends on how you look at it. I think it's cool that we stick to something. People have respect for it."

**Why is it so important to you?**

"It's important to stick to something. [The black and white image] was one defining thing for us where we were like, 'We're gonna do that, we're gonna keep it'. There's been things that we've gotten away with that maybe weren't up to par with where we should've been, but because they were in black and white people will look at it and go, 'Wow, that's cool. That's The Neighbourhood's thing'. All it is is a filter, it's so simple but we're starting to define it."

**What have you stuck a black and white filter on that hasn't been up to par?**

"Certain visual things. Not that they weren't up to par, they were fine for that moment, but now we're bigger. We're not just kids touring around in a van any more - it feels good to be pushed."

**Is being from sunny California at odds with your dark image?**

"It's that contrast I guess, we're from happy, sunny, blue skies California with beautiful weather all the time. Music is a release of some sort and I think our music is a cool outlet to get out the bulls\*\*t. It just feels better to make darker songs."

**Are you not creating a grey area by merging two different genres (indie and hip-hop)?**

"I think it translates it. I think everybody lives in grey for the most part so we have to translate it in a way for everybody to be able to stomach it and understand it so it's our black and white opinions coming together to form this grey zone."

**You don't go in for encores at your shows - is that a Neighbourhood policy?**

"Yeah we usually don't play encores, we don't like them. They're kind of f\*\*king cheesy and they're so forced - we don't want people to beg for us to come back on. It's like being a model and being on the cover of a magazine and going to the most popular news stand around, waiting for people to walk by and be like, 'Wow this is a great magazine!' It's just forcing more attention, it's desperate."

**Sharing a label with One Direction and being self-confessed 'N Sync fans, would you call yourselves a boyband?**

"I think we're like a modern boyband. I think One Direction are old news. Five guys singing over that production, I think that's dated. It's interesting that the world continues to follow that trend."

**Rock and roll is also dead according to you?**

"Yeah, well it is."

**What can revive it?**

"Definitely a movement. It's just not strong anymore, in pop culture especially. You probably walk past any major member of any major band in any mall around the world [without realising]. Our parents, or whoever, are listening to Coldplay or Imagine Dragons and these huge bands on the radio are probably walking by the lead singer. Chris Martin's probably a little bit different, but I mean the guitar player in Coldplay - I don't know what he looks like. The lead singer will usually get to that level, but it's not like Guns N Roses, it's not like Motley Crue, it's not like f\*\*king bands."

**You've spoken about having visual influences, what are they?**

"I really liked wrestling when I was a kid. I really liked that kind of s\*\*t, I just loved their hairstyles and their characters and their attitude and their clothing style. It's just so ridiculous - they're literally wearing tights with like...honestly kind of like what I'm wearing now - like leather jackets and s\*\*t. It's cool, it's fun."

**Will you stay 50/50 between hip-hop and indie for the next album or is there a genre you'll sway towards?**

"We'll have to see... pop if anything. I think we take from hip-hop and from indie but when it comes down to it pop music and pop culture is an overall umbrella you could generally put us under. I guess that's what we'll lean more towards but it's hard to say."

**You feature on the *Amazing Spider-Man 2* soundtrack and you [Jesse - frontman] were a child actor. Is film something that interests you?**

"Yeah I was [a child actor]. I stopped doing it when I was a kid 'cause I hated it so much. I think it was mainly because when you're a child actor, a lot of the time you just get told what to do and they dress you and this and that. Acting is lying, that's literally what it is. When I was a little kid I just didn't f\*\*k with it really, that's why I stopped doing it."

**People are saying you're members of the Illuminati, are the rumours true?**

"Can we turn this off for a sec? No? Well they haven't approached me so no. One of their Twitter pages followed me though when we were having a conversation about it so that was pretty funny."

## Interview #2

You might hear the meows of guitarist Zach Abels's cat on Californian rockers The Neighbourhood's second album *Wiped Out!* In their case, the studio is his mum's house (family and pets are a constant presence), and so "in the creation of every song on this album there was an animal in the room".

That's not the only interesting sound to emerge on the record though. Digital Spy sat down with Jesse and Zach of the monochrome-favouring band to talk cutting the bullshit, diminishing social skills and how Jesse came to write about his dad for the first time since he died.

**1. Jesse speaks about his dad for the first time since he died**

**Jesse:** "I've never talked about my dad before. Since he died it was a thing obviously, but for some reason I wasn't like, 'Daddy's gone, I'd better write these songs'. I wrote one a long time ago but never did anything and it wasn't that great."
**Zach:** "I think it's cool that you're saying something about it now but it's pretty weird that you never said anything about it before."
**Jesse:** "That kind of tells you where my head was at back then and now. I guess there was more the immediate things about life [on the last record]. I'm getting a little bit older so now I'm more aware. It was a long process for me. It was a really hard process. [The album] ended up a lot more like, 'Well you feel that way? I guess I've got to learn to deal with that'. That's how it was lyrically for me. It was a challenge."

**2. He also finds being famous "terrifying"**

**Jesse:** "My social skills have started lacking a whole lot more and I thought it was gonna be the other way round. It's just terrifying the fact I have to talk to more people now than I ever have. I don't feel a lot of the time as...confident. I don't want to say confident."
**Zach:** "Not as fearless?"
**Jesse:** "No it's not that either because I still go into situations like that. I'm just so much more aware now and it's scary being aware. Knowing what people think of you and what I think of myself. Knowing that people are going to see that right up front when I walk into a room and I can tell now. I'm a 23-year-old man and I wear stuff like this. Clearly if I wake up in the morning and do that I'm confident enough to go out and do the rest of the shit, but sometimes it's a lot."

**3. They had a 'f\*\*king weird' session with Grammy-winning singer Miguel**

**Zach:** "That was f\*\*king weird. The little thing we recorded he used in his song and I was like what the f\*\*k. It was a song off [Miguel's] new album. He wanted us to come in to do a session. We didn't really know what it was about, we didn't know if he wanted to write or what. He was like, 'You play this, you play that blah blah blah'. Jeremy [The Neighbourhood's guitarist] came up with this part and was like, 'This is so wack I don't like this' and he [Miguel] f\*\*king used it still! It came out a year later."
**Jesse:** "Clearly he liked it! Which is awesome. But these guys are just like, 'Yeah come in, throw something down real quick and then be on your way'. We're pretty precious with everything that we do so that probably was a hard thing to do anyway."
**Zach:** "It was just kind of like, 'Oh you just wanted us to play'. Well dude if you just wanted us to play you should've got musicians that are way better than us."

**4. They're not angry about high school girls anymore**

**Jesse:** "There was a lot of girl stuff back then. How I feel about relationships and human interactions is totally different now. I was writing songs about girls that I'd been with in high school. 'RIP' is the first song that's definitely not about day-to-day relationships-based pop. There's love songs on the album but it's not as juvenile and it's not as stream of conscious."

**5. Despite being a rock band, they're all about great pop**

**Jesse:** "I'm quite a consumer. I like my music like I like junk food. I can't help it, I like things to be like candy or treats and some treats taste better than others. I just love pop, it's great. I like relating things to taste or colours because we'll see in taste so much in music."
**Zach:** "You hear something and you have to visualise because it puts you in that world."

**6. They're obsessed with black and white**

**Zach:** "It's cool because you hear one of our songs and you picture colour but you get everything in black and white."
**Jesse:** "And that's another cool thing when you come and see us live. You don't have black and white contacts on... *yet*. We're going to try it."

*Wiped Out!* is out on October 30.