Stop me if you've heard this one before... "Deftones but with shoegazy elemen-" Wait wait wait before you immediately toss them in the pile of 'nu-gaze come late-lys' trust me that Split Chain are something special. These guys are serious. They're in the business of writing soaring, epic, attention seizing rock hits. Not album cuts, honest to god fearing hit singles. They're as much Catherine Wheel as they are My Bloody Valentine, as much TRUSTCompany as they are Deftones. And they might just take over the globe. I sat down with the band to chronical their ascent at their debut show in Los Angeles, California to catch up and catch them on their ascent.
Holiday Kirk: This is Holiday Kirk of the Nu Metal Agenda. I'm in conversation with Split Chain. Guys, introduce yourselves.
Tom: Hi, I'm Tom and I play bass in Split Chain.
Bert: I'm Bert, and I sing in Split Chain.
Kirk: It's your first time in America?
Bert: Yeah.
Kirk: What are some of your more UK specific influences?
Bert: It's hard because there's not many UK bands that come to mind but I think Oversize was a big one initially.
Bert: We're friends with them now. When we first started, they invited us to do some shows together. So we did those shows and I was like, oh, we found another band that kind of wants to do the same thing.
Bert: They're really good, really, really good. They're more like shoegaze, very much like Hum.
Kirk: What do you find the big differences between the UK music scene in the US?
Bert: I'm going to be real here. The UK is very, from our experience, gatekeep-y. In an American environment people are just down to share music. Everyone's down to go to a show and have a good time. In the UK. It's kind of like not all the time. In certain scenes, if you don't know the band, you'll just stand there and wait for the band that you want to see. But then everyone here is so nice.
Kirk: How do you guys become a band? How long have we known each other?
Tom: Since about 11. So, 19 years.
Bert: Jake and Aaron and Ollie?
Tom: I think they all met at uni.
Bert: And then met through those three. So we've known each other for a very long time. Like we were friends before this.
Kirk: How did you guys settle on your sound?
Bert: It wasn't a conscious decision. We didn't mean to start a band. We were just at his house going ‘Fuck, we're bored, oh fuck it, we'll write a song.’
Tom: ‘Cause I was getting sober
Bert: So Tom is getting sober and we can't go out to bars so I was like, I'm going to come round, make sure you're not bored, we’ll just write a song for fun. It was like, let's try to copy a Superheaven song. Then we kept kind of just doing that.
Tom: When we heard the stuff that came out of what we were writing and we were like, you know what? We've got a little bit of extra money...
Kirk: I appreciate you saying that the songs are really good because rock bands are conditioned now to settle for less. But in the UK indie bands have been able to find a foothold in the pop market, think of Bloc Party, the Arctic Monkeys, The 1975. Bands with number one singles, top ten albums. You have a more expansive vision of what you can accomplish.
Bert: We used to go to festivals all the time when we were younger especially like Reading Festival is a very big mix of huge indie and pop artists but it was still headlined by Queens of the Stone Age. There's no ceiling to rock.
Kirk: And England has more of a copacetic relationship with rock than it does with rap. Because I remember when Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury, that was a bit of a controversy. But the good thing about you guys, and I'm gonna get the confirmation right here, the good thing about you guys is that you're a nu-metal band.
Bert: Yeah… Yeah?
Tom: It wasn't supposed to be nu-metal.
Kirk: I made that decision.
[Laughs]
Kirk: But with that in mind, what is your guys' relationship to the genre of nu metal?
Bert: I mean, huge growing up.
Kirk: I always blow people's minds by saying like, Limp Bizkit, they never had an actual Hot 100 pop hit in the United States. “Rollin” was a number one single in the United Kingdom. Limp Bizkit is big in the UK, Slipknot huge in the UK. Papa Roach was a really big deal. 36 Crazyfists.
Bert: They were huge. But going off of what you just said we prefer touring the US than the UK. I don't know if it's like maybe it's like a novelty for now, but at the moment the shows have been so much better.
Kirk: British people are very disinterested as a nation. British people generally are kind of arms crossed, like, ‘Yeah… I’ve seen better.’ whereas Americans are like… “Yeehaw!”.
Tom: Yeah I think it was exactly how you describe it.
Kirk: So when will you be hiring a DJ?
Bert: Maybe we're in the market one for one..
Kirk: You got the new single which is called…
Bert: “I'm Not Dying to Be Here.”
Tom: New single available streaming platforms, etc.
Kirk: I'm assuming you're in album mode, how many songs are in the chamber?
Bert: Including the one we just released? 11-ish? Yeah, we'll say ‘ish. We're going to keep it vague. It's all new.
Kirk: Do you guys like the song “Elite” by Deftones? You have a very direct reference to the guitar part in one of your songs.
Tom: “Extract.”
Kirk: Are you guys into Deftones?
Tom: Yes. Massively massive.
Bert: We lived together during Covid so we were isolated together and that was every fucking day, especially when Ohms came out.
Kirk: Deftones have a lot of hype now but even 4 or 5 years ago they were like a big secret. So when I hear from people on social media come around say, oh yeah, Deftones they’re like a TikTok band. To me I am so excited that people are into them and I would rather they be a TikTok band than not.
Bert: I remember when we announced LDV Fest, the comments were, oh, it's just a TikTok fest. That doesn't mean anything. You should be excited that all your favorite new bands can actually be seen.
Tom: I guarantee when Myspace was around and festivals were built off of MySpace people said the exact same shit.
Kirk: What is different about now, however, when Deftones recorded White Pony they had so much money coming in from Maverick that they were able to have their own separate houseboats to live on during the recording. Could you speak a little bit to the economics of being a young rock band now?
Bert: It's hard. It's fucking hard. Yeah, it's very hard.
Tom: Epitaph treats us very well. It's like a dream come true.
Bert: The people that we've worked with, for example, Carlisle producer and Zach Hughes, Kelly's brother, he did the video, both of them said dealing with Epitaph was like the best kind of experience I've had with a label.
Kirk: The economics, though, of being a young rock band. Does that ever influence your creative process?
Tom: I guess it did inadvertently because everything we did was DIY. And it still kind of is. When we filmed the first few music videos we put them on the same shitty camera. The video for “Future” was shot in the corner of my apartment.
Kirk: Do you guys see yourself having a ceiling as like, double platinum, top ten?
Tom: I want more than that.
Bert: All I would one is for, like, the early 2000s when you heard Limp Bizkit on daytime radio and shit like that, that comes back round, great
Kirk: Split Chain on daytime radio?
Bert: Fuck, yeah. Maybe I would like to do it.
Tom: It's going to happen. I'll give it a year. Minimum.
Split Chain is currently on tour with Silverstein. Their single "I'm Not Dying to Be Here" is available now via Epitaph Records.
