Lonely the Brave profile: Cambridge rock band on new album Things Will Matter

'The way we’ve done this record is different to the way most bands would'

Lonely The Brave (Daniel Ackerley Photographic/press image)

“We're only minimally stressed.”

At The Lexington in London, Lonely the Brave's guitarist and vocalist Ross Smithwick is thinking about the fact that the band is about to play their first live gig since November 2015.

“I’m excited to be playing the new stuff,” he says, meaning material from their second album Things Will Matter. “The first one we wrote as a four-piece, and we did all that before we had labels or anything else. So the way we’ve done this record I suppose is different to the way most bands would - we’ve had a long time to work on this one, some of the songs on there hark back to just after we finished The Day’s War, but a lot of that was only finished right before we headed into the studio.”

“And obviously when Ross joined the band we had another person writing and influencing, and that changed things,” guitarist Mark Trotter nodds.

“I felt welcomed straight away,” Smithwick says. “I didn’t really think about it when I joined - it was just before the first album was released, so even though I wasn’t on the record I was touring with the material.”

I mention some recent stats that suggested bands are having a hard time getting radio play (stations tend to favour solo artists and duos).

"We don’t really think about it to be honest,” Smithwick says. "I guess for labels and the type of labels that are putting those artists it’s easier for them to work with someone that they can mould and do what they want with, than to do with five guys who have got fairly strong ideas of what they wanna do… as we found out…"

Formed in 2008, the band have always set out with an ambition for music that could fill stadiums. I don't really buy into the guff about “the death of the guitar band” - it's about as convincing as Gene Simmons announcing the “death of rock” - and Lonely The Brave are a living, breathing contradiction to that rather tired proclamation.

These guys can play well, they look great onstage and they manage to balance between a typical ambient rock sound with lyrics that strike a little deeper than you might expect.

Singer David Jakes has a wonderful, gravelled quality to his vocal work; words rip from his throat as though the very words are painful to sing and he seems incredibly attuned to the emotions of his audience, he's a rare talent.

It's pleasing to hear they don't live in London, either; a converted barn in Cambridge suits them just fine for a studio (“it's alright, apart from that there's definitely something dead in there”), and they mention how “everyone has their own scene” in music, suggesting they feel they've carved out their own place away from the mania and madness of the capital.

Check out the new album Things Will Matter, and see if you can catch them live before they do transfer to stadiums. Incidentally they're playing tonight at All Saints Church in Kingston.

Things Will Matter is out now on CD and to download