If you’ve never heard of Don Broco, buckle yourself in and look them up. They are one of Britain’s hottest bands and the Bedford based alt-rockers are back this week with a smashing new track entitled ‘Money Power Fame’. We caught up with lead singer Rob Damiani to discuss ups and downs of Don Broco’s career, the new album, and the upcoming tour.
Hit The Floor: You’ve been going since 2008. Tell me a bit about the ups and downs of your career so far.
Rob: Probably the downs mostly definitely towards the start of our career we’ve played a lot of terrible shows. But at least now we’ve learnt our craft and played terribly when there weren’t many people to watch us. I guess the ups of our career were once we released ‘Priorities’ and started getting songs out. Playing Reading and Leeds Festival in 2011 before that was definitely an up. It was before we got signed, and we were on the BBC Introducing Stand.
HTF: How was the response to your first album, Priorities?
R: When the album came out in 2012 people really started hearing of us, and coming to our shows. We’d always imagined playing those big shows and tours, and that album campaign took us to the places where we never thought we’d get to.
HTF: With all the focus your new album, have you missed being away this year?
R: It’s been kinda weird for us, because we’ve just been writing this album. We’re just so used to playing shows. I mean, we were playing every week at the start of Don Broco, and then we started playing proper tours, but we went from that to just writing. One of the only things we did all year was supporting You Me At Six on their Cavalier Youth tour with Young Kato. It felt really good, because it gave us that real buzz and kick. It reminded us about what it was all about, because that’s what it comes down to; the live shows.
HTF: After without dropping any new music, how does it feel releasing the first track Money Power Fame?
R: We’ve had this song for a while now, and we’ve been desperate to get it our to our fans for months now. It was one of the first songs that we actually wrote, and it’s a song that we got really excited about really early on. It’s got this big riff, so it’s a nice big live song that we’re dying to play.
HTF: As an album, do you reckon it’s better than Priorities?
R: Definitely better. We were much more excited about the release of Priorities as it was our first debut album, but this time we’re stepped things up. Priorities was more of a trial and error process; this album we just sat back and figured out what we like about ourselves and our sound.
Hit The Floor: Can we expect to see a change in Don Broco’s tone then?
Rob: It’s kind of a broad album, which just kind of takes off from where Priorities left off. It’s got songs that cover a lot of ground vocally. What we’ve included, as you can hear in ‘Money Power Fame’, is the energy of our early songs. That energy, the stuff that just makes you want to jump around, is inside this album.
HTF: With the Kerrang! Tour coming up after Christmas, are you excited about the line-up?
R: We think that the tour is going to be a lot of fun; I mean, there’s no other tour really like it [Kerrang! Tour], as it’s not bands you’d normally see together on a package. For us, we just love everything, and we love having all these different bands playing music together across such a broad spectrum of rock. Sometimes when bands go away for a while and come back they play all the new music that nobody knows and not the old stuff that the fans want to hear, so we’ll be focusing on playing a mix of old and new. We’ve had good responses so far to it!
HTF: So we can expect 2015 to be a good year for Don Broco?
R: Yeah! 2014’s been quite hard for us being away, but we’ve finally got new music coming out this side of Christmas, the album launching with this tour, and we’ll finally be back out there. It’s gonna be sick.
You can listen to the latest single ‘Money Power Fame’ below. Don Broco will appear at The Black Heart, Camden this Friday, November 28th as part of the Dr Martens #STANDFORSOMETHING tour, and are headlining the Kerrang! Tour in February 2015.
