Against The Current hoped to avoid any major change when signing with Fueled By Ramen just last year. Instead, lead vocalist Chrissy Costanza’s ultimate goal was to enhance the band’s strengths and pop rock mentality. Most importantly, she didn’t want their unique image to transform into something phony and unoriginal: “Ramen said, ‘We love what you’re doing now, we just want to blow it up and make it huge.’ Not, ‘What you have is good, but we can do this better.’ They really understood where we were coming from and where we saw the band going with what we built so far.”
And for a young band from Poughkeepsie, NY, Ramen’s success with other obscure-turned-massive bands (including twenty one pilots and Paramore) rendered enough hype for an ideal partnership. Costanza’s experience recording the debut album In Our Bones was extremely eye-opening compared to the independent release of their EP Gravity last year.
“Take a step back and breathe. Look at what you’re doing and what you want.”
“Finally with a label,” says Costanza, “we had time and [money] to make multiple trips to L.A. We had all of these other elements to play with and access to all of these amazing writers, and that really taught us so much about songwriting, since we hadn’t really done any co-writing sessions before. Ramen supplied these connections we’d have no access to.”
Although Costanza isn’t one to tweet about what she ate for breakfast, the “Wasteland” singer does encourage consistent cyber updates that help boost fan interactions:
“If you decide to boycott social media, you’re only really going to hurt yourself. It’s an enormously awesome, unparallelled tool and a great way to cultivate a universal connection. It’s a huge resource you can’t compete with anymore.”
Above all, always approach the industry creatively, but never lose sight of your brand and business standards:
“Take a step back and breathe,” she advises. “Look at what you’re doing and what you want. Too many people go right for it, but you need to have a vision. It’s important to know what serves the band and your image.”
Against The Current are performing on the Vans Warped Tour this summer.
Photo by David Aday
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