“With each album we’ve looked at tearing up the rulebook,” says singer Rob
Damiani of his band Don Broco’s creative philosophy to date. He’s not wrong;
with Priorities (2012), Automatic (2015) and Technology (2018), the Bedford
four-piece have forged their own path, marrying hefty riffs to irresistible pop
melodies on records brash but buoyant, savage but slick, all while sounding
unlike anyone else. It was evidently a recipe for success, too, given that Technology
reached number 5 in the UK Album Chart.
Even with a discography characterised by confounding expectations, however,
nothing will prepare listeners for Amazing Things -with its abundance of
styles, emotions and pop culture references making for the most combustible
powder keg of a record this side of Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the
Hot Dog Flavored Water. It is one of the year’s best albums, and unquestionably
the most eccentric.
“I speak for all of us when I say that being considered eccentric is absolutely a
compliment,” reveals guitarist Si Delaney. “It suggests that something sounds
different -less obvious and more unusual. We’ve always prized ourselves on
making music designed to wrong-foot listeners. We’ve definitely taken that
desire to the next level too.”
The roots of Amazing Things date back to the latter part of 2018, when Don
Broco, in the midst of the lengthy album cycle for Technology, supported Linkin
Park legend Mike Shinoda on his 23-date US tour. Despite their arduous
workload at that point, the band set themselves the challenge of writing a new
song to play at their show at London’s Wembley Arena in February 2019. As
fans now know, that song ultimately turned out to be HALF MAN HALF GOD,
though it was very nearly the track, Uber. Now, with its Giorgio Moroder style
synths and a moody build recalling Nine Inch Nails’ Something I Can Never
Have, Uber provides one of this album’s highlights.
“We knew there was something great about the song Uber but something
didn’t quite click into place at the time and we couldn’t force it, so we put it to
one side,” Rob says of the song’s faltering development and subsequent second
wind. “As soon as we had a break from touring later, though, we came
back to it and were able to unlock the undiscovered magic in it. It’s great to
have it on this album for that reason and because, musically, it harks back to
Technology.”
Funnily enough, technology (with a small ‘t’) played a key role on Amazing
Things, with the band writing the majority of the record on lengthy Zoom
sessions during lockdown, before decamping to Suffolk’s Decoy Studios at
the end of last summer to complete it. “You can only take a song to a certain
point,” Rob says of the limitations of working online. “Being on a screen for
eight hours a day isn’t healthy, so by the time we got to the studio and were in
a room together in the middle of beautiful countryside, it felt like an escape.”
The band were under the watchful eye of Jason Perry, who produced the
band’s second album Automatic (2015) and co-produced Technology. “He’s
been on a journey with us,” reveals Si. “On Automatic, we’d given him the
brief that we’d wanted to make a polished pop-rock record, which we succeeded
in creating. This time, however, we’d told him we wanted something
wild that threw everything at the listener, bringing lots of our weirder elements
to the fore.”
For evidence that the mission was a success, look no further than the first taste
of the album. While lead singles traditionally cleave close to what a band has
done before, as a way to safely bridge into a new chapter, that’s not the case
with MSR (Manchester Super Reds) -its raging, unpredictable structure the
result of endless tinkering from a band striving to enter unchartered territory.
“We messed about with it for a while, stitching and re-stitching, to deliver
these very deliberate, jolting shifts that we’ve never done before.”
And despite drummer Matt Donnelly being a Manchester United devotee, the
song isn’t
