Joel and Sean from This Century were rad enough to sit down with PropertyOfZack as they pulled into New York City with The Maine on tour. Check out the interview to read up on the An Evening With The Maine tour, the bands time in the studio, and when their debut LP will be coming out. Enjoy!

For the record, could you state your name and roll in This Century?
Sean: My name is Sean. I play guitar in This Century.
Joel: My name is Joel and I sing.
 
The An Evening Out With The Maine tour has been going for a while now. It’s a different kind of tour. Can you tell us about your time on it?
Sean: It’s kind of a different situation because they don’t travel with a lot of bands, which is kind of nice to just have us play and then The Maine play. I think the best part probably is just the overall family vibe with the whole show. Everybody knows each other. It’s super easy.
Joel: Yeah, we were buddies kind of for a while before this tour and this is kind of a dream tour we’ve wanted to do for almost two years, I think. And The Maine finally had a chance to do a headlining tour and they asked us to be the support for it. So it worked out pretty nicely.
 
Were there any concerns with fan reception before the tour started? How has the reception been?
Sean: The fan reception has been really interesting. A lot of places where we’ve never toured in before people are singing songs at a level I didn’t even really think was possible for us. I thought the reach that we had was a lot smaller, but it’s great. I think, if anything, we’ve been overwhelmed with the response.
Joel: There’s been nothing but positive with this tour.
 
How did the tour come together in terms of This Century being on it?
Sean: Pat, who drums in The Maine, has been a big supporter of ours for a while and he’s kind of been a big driving force in helping us get going in a lot of ways. And he was a big supporter of this idea. He always wanted to do it. I think the whole band wanted to do it. The band was really cool with wanting us to be involved in it, but I think Pat definitely…
Joel: He kind of lit the flame.
Sean: Lit the flame, there you go [Laughs]. It was like the Olympics.
Joel: Put a fire under whoever’s bottom.
 
What’s your best memory of this tour so far?
Sean: We’ve had a lot of great memories.
Joel: I was pretty fun of Toronto, Canada.
Sean: Canada was awesome.
Joel: Canada was great.
Sean: Just the amount of people that knew of us in Toronto was crazy.
Joel: We went into it expecting maybe 20 kids knowing us and we were kind of pleasantly surprised with the response we got.
Sean: And I think what’s interesting about Canadian fans versus US fans…Not to anyway bash on US fans…Canadian fans don’t get music as often, so there’s not this sense of like, their getting tired of it or that they’ve been exhausted from having so much music. So they want to consume every ounce of it and they want to do it in a way where they really have a lot of respect for the music community and we appreciate that a ton.
 
The band released the Hopeful Romantic Sampler on July 13th. How has the reaction to that been?
Joel: It’s been awesome. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. We kind of wanted to release that because we have a new album coming out and we new it wasn’t going to be released before our summer tour, so we just did that one and that’s actually our opener on this tour and we’ve gotten nothing but positive responses.
 
You said you had an album coming out soon?
Joel: We do have an album, yes. We don’t have a release date…
Sean: We’re looking towards the end of this year. That’s the plan.
 
In terms of the Hopeful Romantic Sampler, you said that was planned with the tour?
Joel: Yeah, we wanted to have something to promote in terms of new music. I think some of the kids that come out to the shows and stuff that had our EP or heard of us, they had only heard our EP and putting out Hopeful Romantic was something new and fresh. Also, we wanted to start playing new songs. We wanted fans to know the new songs when they came to shows. I think that was really big for us to just finally be able to play some new music because we had been playing the same songs for a couple years now.
 
Can you talk about the writing process for the album?
Joel: The differences between the writing process of this album and previous projects before is that it’s been a lot more relaxed. We’ve had a lot more time. We kind of started writing for this album maybe over a year ago.
Sean: I think the really big difference is that it’s a lot more collaborative. In the past I had kind of had a skeleton of a song and it would kind of be driven that way and like everyone would kind of add their thing that they liked or disliked, but it wasn’t quite as collaborative, but I think with the new record a lot of the new material is a lot more divided up in terms of everyone having a little more piece of the pie in a good way and I think it’s made us a lot more closer to the music. Not to say that any of the music before didn’t really have that, but it’s added that extra level, so that’s a big difference.
 
When did you guys get into the studio for this new album?
Joel: We began April 26^th and we got out on July 3^rd.
Sean: It was crazy. We actually came into the studio with no songs. We had written probably 100 songs and were only sure that we were going to record one of the 100. And there was a time where we didn’t know what to do anymore or what song we could write that was going to be on this record. I think that the big thing was that we kind of just realized that we needed to go back to being more bare bones and not think too much. I think that was the big thing. We met with our producer, who’s a great guy, and it made everything a ton easier and we wrote pretty much the whole record in a week. Then went write into pre-production. Two and a half months.
Joel: I think in the end it actually turned out being better. There’s like an energy and excitement about the music that we didn’t have.
POZ: Would you say that that’s the main difference in sound?
Sean: It’s a lot more exciting. A lot punkier. Possibly because a lot of influences for us kind of seeped in to what we were doing. But we still have our funkier elements.
 
After the summer tour with The Maine is over you don’t have any dates announced. What are your plans for the fall?
Joel: We do have a tour coming up in the fall, we just haven’t officially announced it yet, but we’ll be posting dates probably within a month or so.
Sean: We’ve got a lot of stuff going on. I think we’re going to go and record some more songs.
Joel: Possible music video.
Sean: I think that the next year’s going to be very important for us in just getting our music out there and promoting it. I foresee us being on tour for probably the rest of next year.
 
Do you have a target date for this album?
Sean: I mean, I would say towards the end of the year.
 
What do you think this tour has done for the band in the long run?
Sean: Everything. It’s been great. The Maine are very, very gracious to allow us to be on the tour and to get the music out there. I think their fans have been incredibly receptive towards our music and incredibly gracious to just like listen to some of this new stuff and just like be cool with listening to a lot of new songs. Sometimes you’ll be listening, but you won’t be getting into new songs, but they’re still great fans.
Joel: Having them chose us as the main support maybe even means a little bit more to the kids.
 
Thanks so much for your time, is there anything else you’d like to add?
Sean: Two things. One, check us out on iTunes, we have that sampler out. Also, we have this thing called the Sixteenth Project, which is four albums of free music that we started and if anyone wants to download it they can go to tc16.tumblr.com, so I think that’s it.

*This interview was conducted by Emily Coch