Simple Creatures Releases New EP “Everything Opposite”: Streaming
Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 and Alex Gaskarth of All Time Low, whose collaborative project Simple Creatures released their second EP “Everything Opposite” on October 11th.
Their debut EP “Strange Love” was released back in April, the new EP was released just 6 months later. But the duo plans to release their debut album “Just Touch It” in early 2020.
From the EP, the duo dropped a new music video for “One Little Lie” directed by Morgan Freed on October 24th.
The duo will perform at Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on November 12th and The Observatory Orange County in Santa Ana on November 14th.
Afterwords, the duo will appear on Good Things Festival in Flemington, Australia between December 6th and 8th.
Learn more about tour dates, click here.
The EP comprises of 6-track, Alex Gaskarth told Rock Sound about each track in an interview below.
“SPECIAL”
“That song was just a party, it's one of my favourites. We kind of we found ourselves writing about a lot of the darker things and moments in our in our lives, and the lives around us, and observations that we've made as people that tour and travel for a living. A lot of those themes were explored lyrically throughout all of this material, and so on ‘Special’ we kind of resolved to that moment of throwing off the depression blanket and being like, ‘Fuck it, I'm going out even though I'm not at the top of my game right now’, like, ‘I gotta shake this off’. That's how we came to land on ‘I want to feel special’, because everybody does. It's this mantra of ‘I'm gonna be okay, I'm gonna make sure that I'm okay’.
“One Little Lie”
“It was this general concept of, again, the things that you do to to find happiness - and sometimes that means fooling yourself into it. It was one of the tracks that we did with Dylan [Bauld] actually, he just brought a slightly different flavour to everything we were doing. That song in particular, Mark really came in hot with the verses that day. I feel like he had a lot of that written, and played it on acoustic guitar in the room then we built the track up around it - it was already very established in his mind as to what he was saying and what he was seeing. One of the things I like most about this project is because there's two people writing the lyrics, the themes are being explored in two minds at once. I think sometimes we come up with some really interesting ways to play off each other, and because he had so much of that song written I went off into another room for a minute and wrote the chorus without thinking too much about what he had just said.”
“NEED ME”
“That was another one that was early on in the process for this project - I think it was maybe the second song that we wrote under the umbrella of Simple Creatures, or what was becoming Simple Creatures. We’d both been off tour for a while, and we were going down this road of exploring validation and what you do with yourself when you're not on the road and not being cheered for. You’re just the person taking out the trash at six in the morning, and going to get coffee for your family. That’s the best thing ever, but at the same time you're just not used to it again - you just come home and there's a transitional period of like, ‘Okay, nobody gives a shit who I am right now’ (laughs). There’s a weird mind fuck that goes along with that. Not to sound like an egotist or anything, but it is an adjustment period of going from playing sold out shows around the world, to then a completely different pace of life - and for me was it about that calling, you know, that you feel when you're sort of at home. It's when you're laying in bed, and you're like, ‘Weird that I didn't play a show today’. You know, your heart's pounding and kind of like if you work out every day and then you miss a workout, you still get the adrenaline rush.”
“THE WOLF”
“For me ‘The Wolf’ is very much the weirdo of this of this EP. We kind of Frankenstein’d the song together from a few different ideas, and it just got cooler and cooler the more things we tacked on, and it was very fairytale where we went with it. We imagined this weird, dark scenario of the monster under your bed and wrote that (laughs). It's a hard one to explain because it's a little more out there but it’s just embracing the weird. The further we went down the rabbit hole, and the weirder and more chopped and screwed the song got, the more ‘Oh shit’ moments there were in the studio. Sometimes you get magic and sometimes you get garbage, but like the time that you twist the knob and get like the really cool sound was like those, those eureka moments I was talking about. You get like one chance to do it and then it's like, ‘Okay, that's it’. You're not ever going to get that again. So it was that was a fun one because it just happened very organically.”
“NVM”
“I kind of imagined it as this sort of struggle of like ‘Are you the good guy or the bad guy in this story?’ - I think that's something that's an interesting angle to explore. It's like the hero that gets to the end of the movie and realises that they're the villain - I think that there's something just cool about that imagery, and so it was something that we wanted to explore a little bit in the themes of the music. It's a story about a breakup and someone walking out on someone else in its simplest form, but I think the twist is that it's like, who was at fault? And why did the other person leave? It's like coming home to a letter that’s saying goodbye. It's like, is that person breaking your heart and betraying you? Or are they leaving because they're running the fuck away from you? We wrote 'NVM' first, and then I think ‘The Wolf’ stemmed from that same theme - like an answer to 'NVM'.
“THANKS, I HATE IT”
“It's one of my favourite songs we've done for this project - it’s kind of a 'gleeful middle-finger to everything’ sentiment, because that's exactly what this project was. I don't want to say that it's a direct response to like the haters, because I think that's a bit pedantic and, you know, a tried method. But I think what I love about the song is that it came really naturally. I think we were sitting and reading Mark’s Instagram comments, which, you know, you never go into the YouTube comments section - it's the dark place, like in the Lion King movie - you never go there. And so we made the mistake of going in there, and just read a bunch of shitty comments. And we were like, you know what? Fuck it. Let's write about that, and that’s how that song came to be. I remember that was really fun, because Mark had an electronic drum set in his basement studio, and I sat down at the beginning of the day and started playing that, and actually the beat from the song came from that - it was just me sitting there kind of tapping out a beat for fun, and Zakk [Cervini] happened to press record. And we built the whole song off that.”
