More about: You Me At Six

SUCKAPUNCH is a couple of years and some huge personal upheavals in the making for shapeshifting millennial dependables You Me At Six. Surrey’s hard edge have sexed up again as they move beyond VI, their middling pop outing. On SUCKAPUNCH, it’s all balls-out riffs put through grinding pedals, driving DnB and some much-missed Josh Franceschi yells. Behind the shift, though, - one which works to make SUCKAPUNCH the best You Me At Six record in years - is what guitarist Max Helyer calls “a destructive time”, followed by an Eat Pray Love moment in a luxury Thai studio.

For Max’s part, a long-term relationship came to an end as the SUCKAPUNCH chapter began. “I was engaged and ready to get married. And I witnessed the crumbling of something before me,” he tells us. It’s an experience mirrored by his bandmates Josh and Chris at nearly exactly the same time: “I remember our bass player [Matt] turning around and saying ‘right we’ve got to do something about this. we’ve got to get away and be isolated.’”

The resultant decision was an enviable one. You Me At Six ended up at Karma Sound in Thailand’s Bang Saray, living among verdant greens and bright sunlight, just a stone’s throw from an idyllic beach. It’s where the record was finished, though SUCKAPUNCH is a patchwork of experiences from all over the world: a pre-Covid suitcase busy with destination stickers.

‘Voicenotes’ for example, was started by Max on his home computer, while ‘Kill the Mood’ sprung from an impromptu writing session the day of a big show out in L.A. Album highlights ‘Beautiful Way’ and ‘MAKEMEFEELALIVE’ emerged right from the eye of the storm that was Max’s break-up. “When I look at it now it is a bit of a diary. ‘MAKEMEFEELALIVE’ was the pinnacle of what I was going through,” he says. “It was me pouring my emotion out. I did feel pissed off, I did feel angry, I was confused about my life.”

The overdriven dance-punk monster of a riff was inspired, too, by The Prodigy, written in the wake of Keith Flint’s suicide in 2019. “They had an impact on my life and I wanted to play homage,” Max muses, remembering the time they played alongside the band at a very rainy 2015 Isle of Wight Festival. He cites Marilyn Manson as a further heavy influence, but acknowledges that jungle and hip hop also found their way into this seventh record. “There was so much inspiration from the pool of music we grew up on, from emo music to electronic music to going to Fabric and getting that DnB influence.”

All of those things are present, but it’s the struggle and the search for peace that comes through most strongly on SUCKAPUNCH. There’s suffering here, but there’s also brothers helping brothers: it wasn’t Franceschi who was suffering a break-up, yet it’s his words that so neatly match up with the wrought riffs and battering percussion produced by Max and producer Dan.

“On the last couple of records Josh has become a lot more open to share his lyrics and ideas,” Max agrees when we point out this symbiosis, “‘Beautiful Way’ was the sum of the madness that I was going through in my life. He was writing lyrics that represented himself but in universal terms it connected with me.” The pair sat together - in L.A., in Thailand, at home in the UK - and bounced ideas off each other, pushing one another to reach higher. “Josh is like my brother,” he says simply, “we feed off each other and that’s how we’ve always worked at our best level.”

For the many fans who Max says reached out during the Great Quarantine of 2020 and credited their music for helping them through, SUCKAPUNCH will likely offer the most potent self-help of all their albums. It’s desperate and furious but never hopeless: this is a struggle record that is also fun. “We’ve all gone through really difficult experiences and I think this is some of Josh’s best lyrical work that he’s ever done,” Max explains. “We wanted to make a record that was a journey but that was also diverse.”

He compares the diversity of the forthcoming album to 2011’s Sinners Never Sleep, an oft-cited “favourite record” of fans: “I feel like this is us making a record like that but with ten more years of life experience and of writing music.” And where better to realise the band’s most colourful offering than in Thailand?

Thailand: a part of South East Asia close to where Eat Pray Love protagonist Elizabeth Gilbert ends her year of self discovery. A popular gap year destination redolent with the magic, beauty and mindfulness that helps westerners ‘find themselves’. “Thailand allowed us to be a bit more creative and experimental: it allowed us the freedom” Max agrees. And though making music was his “yoga, meditation and release”, he did find time to actually meditate too - “twice a day every day.”

It was no holiday though: the band were at the studio for five weeks and would often spend 10am until 4am the next day in the studio. But they did find time to visit that beach. “It was a five minute walk so when it got to evening time we’d walk down there with a few beers and sit on the beach and watch the sunset” he remembers. No doubt it’s part of what helped Max “bounce back” from his curtailed engagement. “It was everything I needed it to be when I didn’t realise it was. When the record was done it felt like what I played and created on this record is everything that sums it up.” ‘This is not going to be forever and you’ve got to bounce back’ he told himself at the time.

SUCKAPUNCH has the same effect. It has the power to mimic pain and struggle, but the nuance to take those feelings and make them part of a whole. Thirteen years on from debut Take Off Your Colours and ten from fan favourite Sinners Never Sleep, and You Me At Six may well have produced their best record yet. It just took destruction, friendship and rebuilding (by way of meditation) to get there. 

SUCKAPUNCH is out now.

More about: You Me At Six