Late Nite Wars are a band that will certainly be on the rise throughout 2011 beginning with their debut record, Who’s Going To Miss You If You Go?. It’s a fast-paced pop-punk piece of gold, and it will be hitting your music libraries soon. Erik from the band was kind enough to take the time to do a interview with me to discuss the process behind creating the album, how the band has grown, tour dates, and more. Read up on the whole thing below!

For the record, could you state your name and role in Late Nite Wars?
My name is Erik and I play guitar and sometimes sing. Band dad.

The band is gearing up to release its debut record, Who’s Going To Miss You If You Go?, on May 10th via Panic Records. Two tracks have been released so far. How has the initial reaction to them been?
Pretty solid so far. The first song that we debuted was somewhat of a departure of what we were doing before. It was cool to see what people thought and for the most part it was positive.
AbsolutePunk.net was nice enough to feature us on their site with an exclusive stream of a different song that had more of the feel of our older material..just fast-melodic-pop punk.

How would you compare the way fans are reacting to how they first reacted to It’s Okay Or Even Worse?
IOOEW was on a smaller scale where it was just more of a transitional period between our member changes and what we wanted out of the band. The record was mainly released in support of our summer tour and to help get out new material before the upcoming full length. But the reaction to that EP was great and we’ve only been seeing better things since the promotion of our new full length.

Panic Records has been your home for both of these releases. How has your relationship with the label been?
Solid. The label is held up on the back of one dude, Timm McIntosh. He does a great job at handling that position. Timm spent a lot of time touring in bands himself (Trial, Champion, Wait in Vain) so he knows what the musician needs. He’s been fully supportive of what we want to do.

WGTMYIYG? was supposed to be released in the fall. Can you briefly discuss the delays?
We started pre-production in late August and went back at the end of September to track everything. This was our first time dealing with this many songs for a single release and just took longer than we expected to get everything in order. 

Late Nite Wars entered the studio with Ryan Stack to record the record. How was working with him and what do you think he added to the album that might have been missing otherwise?
Everything we have released has been recorded by Ryan Stack. He is a great friend that we consider the 6th member of LNW because he’s been there since the beginning. 

Can you discuss the writing process for the record and the theme that spread out through the eleven songs?
I’d either come to practice with a skeleton of a song or someone else would have a riff or an idea in mind that we would work off of. Pretty standard process. With more material we had a chance to cover a few more different topics than before: symmetry, seasons, death, friendship, depression, discovered happiness, tour horror stories, and of course the hatred of the nine to five.

The band is in the midst of scheduling a late-spring or early summer tour. Should we definitely expect a long US run?
Yes.

Is the plan to continue touring throughout the year as much as you can?
Yeah, two of the members are still in college so we are just doing what we can for now.

The record is just under 30-minutes. Does the band have any more written material that did not make the album?
Yeah and that actually was the main reason for the delay. We were able to get one of our biggest influences to do a guest vocal spot, the wonderful Travis Shettel (Piebald, Totally Travis, TS and the Past Haunts), and things just ran on a different schedule so we had that song and another that we didn’t have vocals done for in time packaged together on a limited 7” run. If you pre-ordered our new record on vinyl it came with it for free.

Could we see any smaller releases throughout the year or in early 2012?
There may or may not be a split release in the works.

Thanks so much for your time, is there anything else that you’d like to add or that we should be on the lookout for?
Thank you for your time. 2011 is going to be an exciting year with a lot of new material from great bands. Keep your eyes and ears on Maker, Washington Square Park, Pinsky, Mixtapes, 1039, Born Without Bones, and Light Years.