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After their 2018 disbandment, Welsh-post hardcore group CASEY are back with their third album ‘How To Disappear’, and are brimming with a revitalised version of their trademark heartfelt fever. With new track ‘Selah’ out today (Wednesday, 3rd January), check out our latest Upset cover story.
Words: Steven Loftin.
Photos: Martyna Bannister.
Casey’s reunion cogs were set into motion after guitarist Liam Torrance sent vocalist Tom Weaver a demo which, unbeknownst to him, had been worked on by the rest of the band – Toby Evans (guitar), Max Nicolai (drums) and Adam Smith (bass). Fortuitously, if, unfortunately, Tom’s relationship had recently fallen apart. “I hadn’t told anybody at that point that I was going through a breakup or that I was moving away from where I was living at the time,” he recalls.
With Liam’s message and the demo in question hitting his inbox, it didn’t take long for Tom to realise what he was hearing. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a Casey song’.” Quickly spilling the beans, Liam and co’s draft led to Tom re-evaluating his position.
It wasn’t a running return, however. “I was like, I’ve got to think about it, and I’ll come back to you,” says Tom. When the band called it a day, they admitted in a lengthy Facebook post that they had always agreed if “we no longer felt creatively or emotionally invested in the art that we were making, we would lay Casey to rest”. Albums ‘Love Is Not Enough’ (2016) and ‘Where I Go When I Am Sleeping’ (2018) became the bookends of the group’s time together – until a new page was turned. “I listened to [the demo] a few more times, and I was like, actually, yeah, this is great – and that song was ‘Great Grief’.”
Signalling their return into the musical fray at the tail end of 2022, ‘Great Grief’ heralded their 2023 comeback tour. It was a celebratory experience for all. Discovering that their fans had remained in stasis awaiting their return – as well as a fresh enclave of listeners – they set themselves an internal benchmark while birthing ‘How To Disappear”s familiar yet wide-eyed intensity.
Pushing through their boundaries to explore what’s on the other side, Tom acknowledges this as “certainly something indicative of where we are in our lives now, rather than just trying to rehash what we had created previously.” Being able to return with what they feel is their strongest effort to date is exactly what Casey were hoping for. “I think that we’ve accomplished that,” he continues, to which Liam adds: “To me, this album is the most Casey album that we’ve ever done. To the fans, yes, it’s quite different. But, to me wholeheartedly, this is the body of work that I’m most proud of and pleased with.”
‘How To Disappear’ vibrates with a renewed vigour as Tom’s heart and soul spill out over the epic, euphoric, and energetic instrumentation. It’s all driven by a mindset the band have toted since day dot, Liam explains. “We always go in with very little expectation. When we came back as Casey, worst case, we play a few shows to a few people, no one bats an eyelid – best case, we have an amazing reception. So, for us to come back and be able to do all this, and us almost be at the height of our career after taking this break, it’s incredible. We’re almost busier now than before we took the break.”
For the guitarist, it left a bit of a vacuum when Casey disbanded. He admits that during their downtime, “everything that I was writing in my spare time was subconsciously always for Casey.” Having been in the band for seven years, it was a natural reflex. “When I’m creating music – when I’m writing synth parts, guitar parts, drum parts, whatever it might be – my style is to write in the form of Casey,” he says.
From the moment ‘Great Grief’ and its follow-up ‘Atone’ came together, Casey were back in action. “Cliches are cliches for a reason – because they’re accurate, right?” Tom says. “When we started the band, we had this whole idea around we have no grand design, music is a labour of love, and all this stuff, and coming into this record was definitely no different as we began writing it because we started writing it pretty swiftly after [those singles].”
Tom’s writing is an undeniably integral aspect of Casey. Often mining his rawest, innermost thoughts, feelings, and emotions, the time that’s lapsed since his initial penning to having to dig into it all over again means his perspective has shifted. “Something I noticed in my interactions, speaking after we played and catching up with people I met previously through the band, is how their perspective of the material had changed over time,” he says. “Over the course of that hiatus, where their lives had changed, and they’ve moved on, or they’d grown, and they had different experiences, and then they were coming back to the music from a very different place personally, and finding that meant something completely different to them. I think that the time that we spent away from music, for me particularly, definitely gave me the opportunity to review the meaning of the songs or the meanings that I’d intended for the songs from a different perspective and find a new level of comfort in them that perhaps I hadn’t been able to find previously.”
Giving 100% of himself on stage when re-living the moments and memories he wrote of took its toll on Tom. Nowadays, he’s able to take himself to a different mental space. He nods that “coming back, finding new meaning in it or acknowledging that it’s fine to detach yourself from that to a degree, like it doesn’t make it any less true of the time that it was written to not necessarily feel it on such a deep level anymore.”
It’s not quite a perfected method, as he acknowledges. “I do still feel it on a deeper level. That’s kind of what the song ‘Great Grief’ was about, that trade-off between the positivity and the support that we feel from our community and the joy that we feel from performing and speaking to people and having those collective experiences versus that degradation of mental wellbeing. For example, where perhaps I get upset if I overplay a particular song or think too deeply about what each song means. And it’s then that handoff between, well, is that negative worth the positive? And I think the fact that we’re still here and that we’ve committed to writing a third record is indicative of the fact that it is,” he says defiantly.
But there’s a resolute through-line. “I’ve always maintained that I don’t really care what other people think of the music,” Tom explains. With Casey returning to the fold, he’s being as spiritually candid as his lyrics while keeping that same earnestness that’s earned them a cult-like fervour with a devoted fanbase since 2014. “That isn’t why it’s written. I know that there are artists who will 100% go all-in on writing music for other people to make them feel a certain way or to elicit a certain reaction, and that is their motivation for creating art, which is perfectly fine. I have absolutely nothing against that whatsoever. It just isn’t for me, and it never has been; I don’t think that it ever will be, to be perfectly honest.” ■
Casey’s album ‘How To Disappear’ is out 12th January.. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
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