Alternative rock quartet TOVA have been making waves this year with a series of successful singles and their latest offering, the dark Headcount, continues to prove why this band are ones to watch. Intrigued to find out more, we caught up with vocalist Jack Fawdry to discuss the song’s themes, their writing process, the music video and stories from behind the scenes.
Can you give us your quick elevator pitch on this track? Why does this one standout for you as a band?
Headcount stands out because it was the first song we wrote that instantly felt like ‘us’. It’s a mixture of the most bizarre influences, it basically sounds like garage music had a fist-fight with rock music at 3am and woke up the neighbours with the noise.
How did you tackle the writing process for the song? Was there anything unique about this track compared to your usual/previous approach?
Previously we had written everything live, in a room and just jammed out ideas, whereas Headcount came about whilst sitting at a computer after watching many hours of garage music videos before deciding right, lets just make a garage song with guitars.
I think when you let go of needing everything to fit in and be the same as the next band that’s doing well you tap into something you enjoy purely for the music. We had no idea this song would come out at the time, we just wanted to make something so exciting and new that it would make us laugh at how absurd and obnoxious it was!
Can you tell us how the song’s theme came about?
The ‘Demons, Ghosts, Snakes, Vampires’ thing oddly came about when I saw an advert of The Wizard Of Oz (Lions and Tigers and Bears…) So I ran with that, mainly to make myself laugh, and it came out really well. From there I came up with the story of these vampires in the modern world that had lost all of their supernatural ability, so they had to make do with robbing blood banks to keep themselves alive. Similarly to how people today seem to leech off of the masses to ensure they don’t die out, despite losing their place in the world a very long time ago….
Tell us about the video, do the themes of the single transfer to the video?
For sure, the theme of us both being the monsters ourselves and also being stalked by demons of our own captures the duality of the lyrics in this and many of the songs we have.
The main theme I have recently taken away from the music we’re making, is that the music is being written from the point of view of the ‘bad-guys’ half the time, and the rest of the time it comes from a struggling and worried mindset. The conflicting values of these two mindsets seems to lend itself to interesting approaches to the writing and it keeps me entertained!
Do you have any behind the scenes stories from the video shoot?
A rapper turned up with a live snake and started filming his own music video on the stairs with an iPhone. It was really weird and we all felt a bit tense because there was a five-foot snake just chilling about five metres away from us.
Anything else you’d like to add for our readers?
Yes! We have a performance being streamed worldwide on 12th December. It’s being filmed with the amazing people at Siyan Ltd who have taken care of live production for people like Bring Me The Horizon! The performance will showcase a number of unreleased songs as well as physical theatre, installations, costumes and mad visuals.
TOVA‘s new single Headcount is out now, available to stream on Spotify HERE.
Tickets for TOVA‘s upcoming streamed event, set to take place on 12th December 2020, are on sale HERE.
