Interview by Kris Peters
Nothing More are a band on the rise. And rapidly.
Since the release of their seventh studio album, Carnal, last year, Nothing More have become the darlings of the hard rock scene, with three songs from that album already taking out top position on Rock Radio. And what does a band worth their promotional dollar do when they strike gold on a release? Yep, you guessed it, re-release the album as a deluxe special and draw in a whole new bunch of fans while placating existing lovers of their music.
While more often than not such a move reeks of cashing on for the sake of it, with Carnal Deluxe, Nothing More have expanded on the quality provided the first time around, plus added a new song to keep diehard fans happy.
HEAVY spent some time with frontman Jonny Hawkins earlier this week to go over Carnal Deluxe and why it is superior to the original version. We start by asking if Carnal was received as well as the band hoped.
"We knew this was going to be a strong album," he affirmed. "We felt a lot of confidence in our bones about this one. It just had good songs, and when we put it out, it performed as good as we had hoped, if not better. We have three number ones in a row, and now we have the song Freefall that will be climbing the charts, and we're - knock on wood - but we're hoping for a fourth number one."
We ask if the anticipation and excitement levels are the same for a Deluxe release as opposed to the initial album.
"I'd say typically not," he smiled honestly. "Deluxes are fun little ways to kind of boost the album and push it back up to the top of people's streaming platforms. But that's the main goal, I think, is just reminding people and getting them to stream it again. I mean, for us, we did have a feature on a song called Freefall with Chris Daughtry. So that was kind of cool, because we hadn't released that version of the song yet.
And then we had some cool remixes and stuff that were like good workout tracks or things to drive fast to that we didn't have on it before."
In the full interview, Jonny spoke more about Carnal Deluxe and the value of being able to release upgraded versions of an album. We ran through each of the five bonus tracks individually, and Johnny told us more about each song and the new versions available. We spoke about K9s For Warriors and the organisations success in dealing with mental health and why Nothing More chose to help them, working with David Draimen from Disturbed, the band's pleasure at having Chris Daughtry on one song, the new song We're All Gonna Die and how it came to be on the album, touring plans and more.
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