However, with the amount of quality content they were producing, they decided to release an LP instead. Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.The writing for 8 began at the end of 2015, when the band was putting together Side B of their Trust Fall EP. A bunch of the songs would be great as a wind down in the middle of some other incubus album, but as a whole, I need more INCUBUS songs. But on the rest of the record, I'm missing Mike's shredding Jose's creative drumming the excitement in general.
Wolves (which was the only song they played from the album last time I saw them, in 2015 with the almighty deftones) hit me. I will say that I like the final half of the album more than the first half. I listened to it today and.it was kinda like listening to it when it first came out. I didn't really like it then, and I was a defender of Light Grenades to some originalists. I hadn't listened to it since the year it came out (fuck I'm old, that's almost 10 years ago and I'd been out of college for a year since it came out ☹️). I've been seeing a lot of posts and comments on this sub about how INNW is underrated.
Listening now, there's a lot of high points on the record in terms of performance and songwriting, and it just took some time to grow. But then this happens a lot with Incubus. Hold Me Down is another really good, rocky track that just never even made the track list which still baffles me. I feel it could have done a lot better for them, it's a quintessential Incubus style track, and didn't even make the record. I think one of the biggest mistakes the band have ever made was not releasing Surface To Air as the first single, or a single at all. Maybe knowing a lot of the inner turmoil that was going on around that time for the band has made me think about it differently, as a dark kinda record. That said, the record as a whole has grown on me throughout the years. I still despise Promises to this day and will argue it's perhaps the worst Incubus song ever recorded, still makes me cringe. I loved Adolescents, Wolves, Thieves & Tomorrow's Food. The record itself at the time was a massive disappointment to me at the time and I perhaps forced myself back then to try and like it more than I did. Eventually upon hearing Adolescents, I was kinda thinking that we were going to get something in the vein of Morning View, a more mature sound that still rocked out a lot at times. Foo Fighters had just come back with Wasting Light which was a hell of a rocky return to form, so I thought maybe Incubus would be expanding upon the LG formula and doing something similar. I still maintain that at the time of release, it wasn't the album Incubus should have put out. But I guess more than that I hope they have been writing some music during the lockdownįor me personally, time & age have been kind to this record. I hope the live music industry can recover from the pandemic and incubus and my other favorite bands can get back on the road. I also think my age at the time of release and now helps. (When they fired him I thought of this interview that is surprisingly still on Steve’s YouTube where Brandon says something to the effect of “sometimes I think Steve is trying to destroy us.” It’s at 33:30 or so)īut I think all that darkness that they’ve talked about since made the album much better and gave it staying power. Then all that stuff with Steve Rennie happened. Which is still too cringy for me to watch. Then a few months later they put this out on YouTube: Basically he looked so depressed the album leaked and ruined the sheet music project. Then the album leaked and he put out some video that I can’t find anymore. I remember Mike wanted to send out sheet music for promises promises for fans to try to figure out what it would sound like before the album release. I also think back to what an awkward time 2011 and the INNW tour was as a fan. I know it’s been said on this subreddit before but I was just listening to the album in my car and realized how often I come back to it over other albums.