Being Yourself With JOHN BOECKLIN From BAD WOLVES

Interview by Kris Peters
Bad Wolves hit the jackpot with their 2021 album Dear Monsters,
satisfying existing fans of the band with their output, while also
drawing a new breed of followers to their music.
It was a success in every way, which made their follow-up album Die
About It - out now - all the more significant.
Die About It came with all of the usual fanfare, declaring it
"pushes the boundaries of their soundscape in pursuit of new sonic
dimensions" and more, but, as they say, the proof is always in the
pudding. So is Die About It as good as everyone says?
HEAVY thinks so, but to gauge the album from the band's viewpoint
we sat down with drummer John Boecklin to discuss more.
"Feeling good. Very fresh," he enthused. "It feels like a great
start to a cycle. We hit the road with Bush in America. I feel the
record has a lot of… not avant guard things… but things we
certainly haven't tried before which makes us feel not stuck in a
rut doing the same old. Rock radio, in general, is the kind of band
we are, but we get very, very, very heavy in songs on this one. You
can feel it, every album has a creative rut of getting kind of
stuck in certain formulas, so we tried to do the best we can to
stay out of that and do songs that feel more expressive and make
you feel more emotions than some of the past songs."
We ask John to dive deeper into the musical side of the
album.
"I think where we started it was we weren't going for anything," he
measured. "We dropped any ideas of 'well, this worked in the past,
let's do that'. Sometimes we did that stuff, like 'this did really
good, let's do some of that'. I think some of the first songs that
we wrote for this song musically were Die About It, the song, N.D.A
which in the end has a two-minute saxophone solo, which is just
stuff we had never tried before."
In the full interview, John explores the different sounds and
approaches to making the album, the singles released and if they
are a good sonic representation of the album, how much they
experimented and where the band's limits were, if there was any
extra pressure after the success of Dear Monsters, the overall
theme on Die About It, having the band co-produce the album and
some of the pros and cons with that, how Bad Wolves' sound has
changed over their journey and more.