The Devil Wears Prada On Their New Illuminating Album ‘Flowers’

‘This vision of a record in three acts? It’s funny you picked up on that, it really is three different acts. It’s like, what is wrong with me? Frustration and anger about that. Then acceptance of it and learning how to live with it and move on. I feel like the older you get, the less time you have to just be sad all the time. There’s just not time. You have kids or you have family, you have responsibilities.’

The Devil Wears Prada guitarist/vocalist Jeremy DePoyster explains to me the deep introspective meaning within their illuminating new album Flowers. From deep within the bowels of John Cain Arena in Melbourne, mere hours before starting their Australian tour with Bullet For My Valentine, he goes through the three ‘acts’ that make up the album while simultaneously accepting the three acts of his life. Recently married yet on the other side of the world, technically still touring the previous album ‘The Color Decay’ and then a month away from the new album’s launch.

‘’Color Decay’, we wrote a lot of it in the pandemic, so working together was just tough. We’re sending stuff back and forth a lot, meeting up on occasion, but this record from day one was me, Mike Hranica and Jonathan Gering just going into writing sessions with people and ‘I want to write a song about this’, or someone else wants to write a song about this. Trying to build this collective experience of what that theme means. Whether it’s addiction, stress, depression or just reflection on experiences, it was much more collaborative of our combined experience. We were a lot more upfront because it wasn’t just your own experience. Sometimes it’s hard to express your deepest, darkest thoughts. You don’t want to be judged, but if someone else is validating you the whole time, you can be a lot more to the point.’

The album is in three acts however that aspect is hidden away, to be uncovered and interpreted as the listener feels, however the opening line on the album, ‘I used to believe that if I got everything I wanted, I’d finally be happy’ in The Same Place lends itself to Jeremy’s previous point of ‘what is wrong with me?’

‘That song in particular is about how we had worked so hard to kind of restore our career – obviously we had so much hype in the beginning – and there’s peaks and valleys, so we were pretty deep in a valley and we’re working so hard for years trying to get that respect back. Once we finally done that, you want to just sit there and celebrate it, but then that project’s complete, you have a lot of time to think about all the other things from your life. That’s the kickoff point. It’s like, ‘Hey, I know you follow me on Instagram, it looks like we’re on top of the world right now!’

This starting point of the journey culminates in the ‘acceptance and learning’ of the final tracks, particularly the ballad Wave, which abruptly and ominously ends with the line ‘maybe the world is better without…’ before the upbeat dance rhythms and brutal breakdowns in My Paradise finish it off.

‘It’s not even necessarily about that particular topic, it’s more the racing thoughts that come into your head of just dark stuff that comes in there. You don’t even mean it, you’re not going to act on it, it’s just the racing thoughts and then you snap back out of it. Those two songs go back to back, ‘Wave’ and ‘My Paradise’, for a reason because it’s basically all the way down and thinking the worst things. Then the acceptance of maybe I don’t need to be searching for happiness in anything. Maybe I have enough right here and I need to learn how to just accept that this is good. I don’t always have to be working towards this fiction of happiness. If I look around, my life is great, I just need to learn how to accept it.’

Married, and touring the world with friends is pretty great. Lyrically though, it’s a very introspective album and the vulnerability of the bands writers is out on show more than ever before.

‘I known Mike for twenty years, I’ve been friends with him, even outside the band, very close with him. We’ve lived in the same city a lot of times and we’re just very good friends, brothers basically. John has been in the band for about fourteen years now, so we have this relationship with each other. This album is basically us just sitting on three bar stools and trying to talk about feelings. Especially for men. I think sometimes it’s hard to be vulnerable and you need long friendships to be able to open up that deep with people, and we’re just lucky that we have that. So we kind of try to bring that into the record.’

The middle act, the ‘frustration and anger’ comes out in tracks such as When You’re Gone, recent single For You and the ball crushing trash epic All Out, all exposing the challenges people face.

‘(When You’re Gone), that song is about my now wife, she tours as well, so we had spent quite a bit of time apart, maybe like six weeks or something. We’re just calling and texting all the time and just being like, this sucks! If you love somebody, you want to be near them. It’s really difficult not to be. That was a love song I was writing to her to be like, it’s okay. That breakdown part of it, Mike wrote basically about just trying to console somebody that you love, that you’re apart from and say, this isn’t forever, we’ll be back together again soon.’

The crushing breakdowns, dual vocal contrasts and sonic orgasms are all still here, which begs how do the writers decide who does what?

‘It’s collective and organic. We have the ‘best idea wins’ mentality, really trying not to bring ego into it at all. It’s my philosophy on creativity is you’re more to offer if there’s something that exists that you’re trying to tune into and be able to pull down to earth and to be able to share with people. The more you can get your ego out of the way and just listen to what the universe is trying to give you, the better it is. You’re not trying to validate yourself, you’re just saying the song needs something and let’s figure out what it is. A lot of times, especially lyrically, if we’re writing something, we’ll just sit in a circle and just start trying to explain the idea and say it in a clever way and eventually someone will just hit gold and we’ll just flow off that. Sometimes Mike is very poetic too in a way that neither of us are. You just got to bring him in for the big, come on Mike, sound like somebody screaming. So there needs to be expression.’

As for All Out, which starts at a million miles an hour before slam dunking on your head with breakdowns, there was a slightly different approach in the creative process.

‘That song was more of our old conventional style writing, where it was write the song and then give it to Mike and he takes it away and then brings back all the lyrics and that’s how that is. That song was very much like that. It depends on the song. We’re forced into this game of releasing so many singles to be relevant, but for us, we still are very much of the philosophy that albums are the best way to listen to rock music. A lot of times we’re trying to fill spaces that don’t exist yet on the story of the album. We have a lot of these rock songs, we need something very metal right here. So, we’re always thinking, I want someone to listen to this album front to back. Obviously, you choose the singles later, but that’s not really how we write them, to be a single.’

Back to the overriding journey of the three acts and the message is an overriding sense of peace, calmness and support for all.

‘You kind of need someone to say it’s so okay that you feel that way, but I need you to know it’s going to be better and let’s tough it up and get through it because whatever it is, therapy I don’t know, whatever you need to do to be able to just be like, alright, I’m still going to be in the world. That’s the end of the record basically. These songs started fitting within those boxes. Some of the other ones were great songs, but they didn’t make sense. We just toss them aside and we’ll come back to them later!’

We’ve heard about the act of being married, the act of the new album yet here we are back in Australia technically still on The Color Decay album run, so you got to ask what is it about Australia and The Devil Wears Prada that matches like star-crossed lovers?

‘The history with Parkway Drive, we came over here very early with them and saw how massive the metalcore genre is here. Huge. It’s only gotten infinitely bigger since then, but something was just in the air on that Alphawolf tour last year. Those were some of the best shows we’d ever played anywhere in the world. We were like, we have to come back. We were planning on something else and then Bullet hit us up and we’re like, absolutely. Yeah, we’ll go play some giant arenas! We already have plans for the next two years and on coming back every year. So, we’re going to make that a priority.’

Interview By Iain McCallum

FLOWERS IS OUT NOVEMBER 14
https://tdwp.ffm.to/flowers

On tour with Bullet For My Valentine. tickets from Destroy All Lines…