On Friday, August 30th, All Eyes West is set to release their third full-length, titled Like Lightning. The album marks the band’s first new material in over four years and we’re premiering one of its songs below, called “Kick the Clouds.” We recently spoke with singer/bassist Justin Miller and talked about how the record came together. He cited a hectic touring schedule and various issues in the band members’ personal lives as the main reasons that it took several years to finish the album. Miller explained, “On my end, my mother was diagnosed and very quickly taken by pancreatic cancer. A day after the funeral my first child was born. So, everything kind of flipped upside down. I eventually moved out of the city, fought some demons, dove headfirst into raising my kids and kind of started doing a little repair work on my life. So, obviously all of this left a little less time to focus on the band. We still remained active, but it slowed down quite a bit.”
Miller indicated that a few of the songs on Like Lightning were written in 2015, shortly after drummer Ronnie DiCola joined the band. Some of the songs that followed would unfold from a single riff, while others were primarily arranged by guitarist Jeff Dean and DiCola. When commenting on the overall writing process, Miller said “It was pretty strange. With all that was going on outside of music, it bled into the band for sure. I mean, there was a bit of tension between us for a while during the writing and recording of the album, but we always pushed through. All that shit we were going through is on the record. It’s in the music and it’s in the lyrics. We pulled it together and it means a lot to us. For me, it’s a very personal album. It was the glue that kept us going.”
In regards to the song “Kick the Clouds,” both internal and external factors played a role in its creation. Miller said, “Lyrically it was inspired by a bunch of different things. With everything going on in my life at the time, I was bursting with a million things I wanted to express. The music really spoke to me as we wrote it and I wanted to shove everything into it.” He continued, “I’d say the overall inspiration was this feeling of ‘Is everything fucked? Should we just burn it all down?’ Not just my personal life or the band, but all the politics, the state of the country, social media, anxiety, and all the angry people I seemed to encounter on a daily basis. It just felt like everything was boiling over. Still kind of does, I suppose.”
Check out the song now and be advised that it’s highly representative of the urgency, concise writing and exceptional performances that are displayed throughout Like Lightning. Be sure to pre-order the album from Jump Start Records here and look for the band to announce a record release show in the coming weeks.
