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Jan 14, 2019 We Were Promised Jetpacks By Matt Conner

“I think we just got lost.” Adam Thompson cannot pinpoint exactly what went wrong in the creation of his band’s latest album, The More I Sleep the Less I Dream, except to say that, collectively, the four members of We Were Promised Jetpacks looked up and realized they were sonically lost.

“After three albums and touring for six or seven years, you can get pulled into the business side of things,” says Thompson, the band’s vocalist and guitarist. “You’ve got one eye on that and then you’re weighing what you’re doing with your life, which I’m sure everyone does. You wonder if this is really what you want to do with your life. You think you should get bigger if you want to keep doing it. All of that played in our minds along with lots of changes behind the scenes with our manager and label.”

We Were Promised Jetpacks’ attempt to follow-up 2014’s Unravelling took a few years, and the band decided to stop touring in order to focus completely on making new music. Unfortunately, the distaste for their own music was enough to toss an entire album away. It was time to start from scratch.

“We weren’t really sure what we were doing,” says Thompson. “I was coming in with songs with all this structure with a chorus and pre-chorus. We put all this shine on the songs to try to get some radio hits and it ended up being the exact opposite. We ended up with songs that were really weak that didn’t sound or feel like us.”

Thompson doesn’t consider the scrapped album as time wasted. He’s thankful to have the chance to sift through the creative detritus and enjoys the pursuit of something meaningful.

“We’ve always been quite happy to throw songs away,” he says. “We’ve been doing it the whole time. Once you’re done with it, you just forget about it. Some songs had a couple parts that we liked, but those songs became associated with awkwardness and us not knowing what we were doing, so it ended up quite refreshing to say, ‘Fuck it. Get rid of it all and start again.’”

Thompson is quite clear that he’s not masking his own issues under the guise of the band. All of the members of We Were Promised Jetpacks, which also includes Michael Palmer, Sean Smith, and Darren Lackie, were eager to start over musically.

“We’ve been lucky in that we’ve always felt the same about big, important things,” he says. “Someone will mention it and it turns out everyone else has been thinking along similar lines. There were some sad practices and sad studio days when things didn’t feel like us, but it was also clear that we needed to throw our socks off and get on with it.”

We Were Promised Jetpacks will undoubtedly reach another tipping point down the road, but for now they’re a band finely tuned. They’ve been through a creative fire and asked the tough questions.

“I definitely feel this last couple years has been really good for us to reflect on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” says Thompson. “We’re lucky that the four of us have always made the band the priority and we’ve made our lives around that. I have no idea why we love it so much but we do.”

www.wewerepromisedjetpacks.com

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