Joe Trohman (Fall Out Boy, The Damned Things) and Josh Newton (The Damned Things) recently started a new band called With Knives. Within a few months, the band has put out an EP and has started to play shows. PropertyOfZack had the chance to speak with Joe a few weeks ago to discuss the origin of the band, making choices with no labels or management, loyal fans from previous projects, and much more. Check it all out below!
With Knives was announced halfway through January, after The Damned Things were taking a break for the rest of the year. At what point did you know that you wanted to start another new project?
It seems to always happen while I’m doing a band. Though it’s not intentional. So The Damned Things, for instance, happened while I was doing Fall Out Boy. Even though Fall Out Boy was a large segment in my career. Then, yeah, starting With Knives kind of happened while doing The Damned Things. But it happened in a very strange way. Basically, Josh had been working on what was called ‘With Knives’ but it was just this kind of cool instrumental thing that he was recording and putting up on his SoundCloud. I thought they were awesome. When we were sitting on the back of the tour bus on our Damned Things tour, I told Josh. I was like, “What are you going to do with that With Knives stuff? It’s really cool.” “I don’t know, whatever.” Then the next day he’s like, “Hey. Do you want to do that stuff with me?” And I lit up. “Yeah man! I would love to!” I’ve always been a big fan. I thought it was awesome that Josh was playing in The Damned Things with us. And I really liked Shiner and Season To Risk. So like two bands he was in that I totally dug at. He’s older than me and I get excited about that. So then we started working on it kind of on a couple of tours. Then when it was very clear that The Damned Things was going to end, not permanently obviously, but end doing stuff after the Australian Tour that we did last year, I was like, “Let’s take this thing into high gear. Let’s just do this.” We really want to do this thing. We’re so into this. Yeah, we’ve been really excited and are just kicking it into high gear.
You seem to have stuck with working with band members that you’ve worked with in other projects. Andy in The Damned Things and Josh now. Is it nice to start these projects but have an understanding of the other people you are working with?
Yeah. I think that was one of the biggest pros to this scenario. Josh and I have such a mutual understanding. We both really like certain things and we both really hate certain things. So there’s like a curmudgeon aspect for this band. So we just link up on so many similar things. One thing we really linked up on besides the music was when we were like, “Let’s do this thing like…Remember how we used to do bands?” When we start the band we don’t worry about whether or not we have a booking agent or whether we have a manager or if we even have a record label. We’re like, “Let’s just do it until the music comes out. Like it’s supposed to in our heads.” Hopefully people will like what’s in our heads. So I think we really linked up on that. That’s kind of what we’re doing. Not to say any other band I’ve gotten into isn’t real, but I haven’t done something this real or under the radar. It really is very under the radar. That’s because we are doing everything ourselves right now. I think that’s something we really wanted to do and it’s something we really linked up on.
You recorded the first EP and released it just the other day. Really fast turnaround. Is another nice thing about doing this on your own being able to record and dish out instead of waiting for six months?
Totally man. Plus one thing we have a benefit of… we’re doing this like a new band. But at the same time we have this benefit of being in a lot of bands. So we went into recording this stuff with Paul from Shiner, we knew what we were going to do, recorded it, paid for it ourselves, we own the masters. We can do whatever we want to do with it. So we always have this idea of doing Son Of Man which is about to become this record label. It started out, honestly, as me seeing Matt come up with these really cool t-shirt designs. Like, “You should sell your t-shirt designs.” Later we were like, “Let’s call this thing a label too. And put out our stuff.” That’s the cool thing. It’s like, “Oh. Let’s just put it out on our label and see what happens.” Like I said, we can do whatever the hell we want with it. We’ll worry about other things later. Like whether or not we can get this thing on iTunes or whether or not we want to work with a more real label. Or whether or not we need managing or booking or anything. Obviously, I hired a press agent that helps out. Because I think it’s nice to have a little bit of outside help, so we’re not…it’s kind of weird being the guys in the band but then also being the guys soliciting and selling ourselves. It just comes out so shitty and that’s not the dudes we are. But it’s really cool to be able to be like, “Okay guys. Here it is.” At the same time, one thing I realize is that it’s changed so much from when I used to record demos and give them out for free at shows. First off, I was in Chicago when that happened, which is a smaller city than New York. There’s a very tight knit group of people. But things are just different in general. It’s cool that we drop it immediately. There’s no promotion behind it. So people never knew it was coming. But again that just goes back to doing it more like a real band. A real band that just loves music and wants to put stuff out that, first off, has no idea about the concept of promotion, so who cares? So I have to kind of keep that mentality a little bit.
I guess The Damned Things carried over more fans from Every Time I Die and Anthrax than Fall Out Boy, just because it’s a totally different kind of music. So is this. But how has the early response been to the EP?
It’s been awesome. I mean like I said, it’s about reaching a limited number of people the way we’re doing it. Even though I have a lot of hours, we have a lot of social things to fall back on. I’m using Twitter. I have fifty thousand followers and all of those people are probably following three hundred people a piece. I can Tweet as much about this record until I get a limited amount. Until I get real proper promotion. Which I don’t know how to fuckin’ do. Because I’m in a band, I’m not in a record label. I don’t know how to run a record label. But aside from that, yeah. The response has been rad. Going back to what you were saying, musically I think The Damned Things was more geared towards an Anthrax fan or Every Time I Die Fan. Just the fan of harder music. But a lot of times, people don’t give Fall Out Boy fans a lot of credit for how open their minds can be. We have a lot out there that are really young and they really just discovered Fall Out Boy yesterday. But there are a lot that have been listening since we started being a band. A lot of those kids have really open minds to music. The amount of Fall Out Boy fans that have been responding are like, “That’s you singing? This is the music? Wow! That’s really cool. That’s not something I listen to normally, I really dig it.” It’s nice to know that we can get weirder and weirder and still be able to connect with people that really get pigeonholed unfairly.
