The band is at its best right now with the album You Won't Get What You Want.
Daughters is not the rock band that Brazilian audiences are used to. It's difficult to categorize them into any single musical genre, as that would be an understatement for the band's unexpected sound. There are elements of noise rock, industrial, grindcore, and metal. A mix that is not very common. It's an extremely aggressive sound. Perhaps that's why, even after 17 years as a band, this is their first time coming to Brazil .
Guitarist Nicholas Sadler , in a conversation with Wikimetal, preferred not to dwell on the various genre variations the band encompasses. “I see us as a rock and roll band. It’s pretty basic, but it’s a tribute to rock that we’ve always done with the group.” Even so, the band's sound is abrasive, dissonant, and unpredictable. Something like the soundtrack to a mix of horror movie and nightmare.
The latest album, You Won't Get What You Want , accurately describes what we can, or cannot, expect from them. "You won't get what you want." The album already draws attention for its length. While some tracks from Daughters' previous works were only a few seconds long, here we find seven-minute songs. It's as if the band had been holding onto material for a long time and now needed to release something pent up as urgently as possible.
They were separated for eight years because of fights, dismissals, and drugs. After all that time, Sadler and vocalist Alexis Marshall were tricked into getting the group back together. “We have a mutual friend, and he told me that Alexis wanted to meet me to apologize. And he told Alexis that I wanted to meet him to apologize,” the guitarist recounted. “We went to dinner and realized it was a lie. But, a few minutes later, we decided to make a new album.”
Adler considers it “very unexpected” that, 17 years later, they are still a band. “I was 19 when I started, now I’m 36. A lot has changed; the music I listen to, the movies I watch. What I like in music has completely changed. Many people find it strange, but I don’t like heavy music, for example. My interest is in the conceptual. In the soul and the feeling.”
From album to album, this has become clearer, while the members constantly become better musicians. And the philosophy of "no boundaries for art" helps in the conception of each new material. "This album was basically written by me behind a computer. Each of us has a family and lives in a different place. We managed to meet once a year, I think. So I generated the sounds on the computer, recorded all the instruments, put them on Dropbox and sent them to them by email," he said.
“At one point, I stopped thinking about what Daughters was and just put in what I wanted to hear. I wanted to expand on what people had heard on the last albums. I didn’t want to make a five-second track,” Adler explained. That way, the music became much more terrifying, according to him.
But where does this urge to pursue a sound that borders on nightmare come from? “I ask myself that all the time,” he joked. “It’s not something entirely conscious. But sometimes, when you’re writing a song, you hit a note that feels true to you. I think the most terrifying things are the ones that sound most natural.”
But Adler also thinks there's something psychological in this construction. “Before, I thought it was just a conceptual way of making music. Now, seeing how we've grown, changed, so many years later, I realized that maybe I don't want to admit it. But there's a strange truth in the songs, a hidden, cruel aura.”
If strange things happen at the shows (like Nicholas getting naked or vomiting on someone in the audience), the guitarist's advice to fans is precisely to follow the title of the recent album to the letter. “We don't have any expectations about our performances. We want to go up there, sound good, and not waste anyone's time or money. I want to do the best job possible for the people who come to the show. Beyond that, we want to do whatever we feel like doing in the moment. And leave happy with what we did.”
Without expectations and without limits, Daughters performs at Fabrique Club in São Paulo this Sunday, May 12th. With vomit and naked people, or not, the band's dissonant nightmare is always a great trip.
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