Liverpool pop punk outfit WSTR are set to release their debut album Red, Green or Inbetween on 20th January via No Sleep Records. After the success of their debut EP – SKRWD, the band have gone from strength to strength and achieved many accolades that most acts don’t achieve off the back of only one EP. 2016 saw WSTR travel the UK and Europe with international touring bands such as Neck Deep, A Wilhelm Scream, Moose Blood & Creeper, and were welcomed onto established festival slots, at Slam Dunk Festival, 2000 Trees, Hevy Fest and Butserfest. Lead singer Sammy Clifford provides a truly authentic pop punk voice and the lads really come into their own in the new album.
Completed by guitarists Danny Swift and Kieren Alder and bassist Alex Tobijanski, the quartet grew up on the ‘original’ mainstream pop punk bands, like Blink 182, New Found Glory and Sum 41, and they make no bones about being the product of their influences.
You can check out Footprints from their upcoming album Red, Green or Inbetween below!
We managed to catch up with guitarist Kieren Alder as talked about the upcoming album, latest tour, proudest moment and more!
So how pumped are you guys for Red, Green or Inbetween?
We can’t wait to release it! We’re extremely proud of what we’ve created and have been sitting on it for a while so we’re eager for everyone to hear it in full.
Tell us a little bit about the album and what is your favourite song from the release?
It’s still WSTR, just the songs are a lot more thought out and structured better I think. Most of ‘SKRWD’ was written in a practice room whereas with ‘Red, Green or Inbetween’, we took our ideas and built the songs around them on the computer so every little detail was put under the microscope writing the record. I think my favourite song is Eastbound & Down.
So how has the release of Footprints gone?
It’s gone down great! We released it just before we went out on our headline run and kids are already shouting all the words back at us so we’re stoked!
So how did the The Inbetween tour go?
Better than we expected! We played a lot of cities we’d never been to before so to have a turnout like we did every night was reassuring to us for sure. We had a lot of fun and can’t wait to get back out with Seaway in January.
You guys will be heading on tour again in January/February, what venue are you most looking forward to?
It’s gotta be the Underworld in London. We’ve only played it once before when we weren’t really too well known, before we’d released our EP actually, so I’m looking forward to going back to such a well known venue and seeing how things have progressed!
What has been your proudest moment so far?
For me personally it’s gotta be either playing the Guildhall in Southampton or the O2 Academy in Liverpool. The first show I ever went to was at the Guildhall like 8 years ago or something, and now we’ve played a sold out show there so that’s pretty surreal to me. And Liverpool because I promised myself when I moved to uni there, way before WSTR was a thing, that one day I’d play the main stage at the O2 Academy, and now we have!
What has been your funniest moment on tour?
The Neck Deep tour we were on back in April was pretty rowdy throughout. We all shared the same bus so every single day was a party. There’s too many moments to pinpoint that I’m sure some people know about already so just that tour in general I guess.
So you recently opened up a merch store in America, how surprised were you that the demand was there?
Yeah it’s crazy seeing people from the other side of the world connecting with our music, and so much so that they’ll order merch from our UK site and pay the extra to have it shipped to America. We felt it was about time the US had their own WSTR store so hopefully that makes things a bit easier and cheaper for them!
So in your music video Lonely Smiles, you asked fans to send in some videos, how much does these fans mean to you guys?
I know it sounds dead cliche and everyone says this but they say it for a reason, without them we wouldn’t be able to do half the things we manage to do, so they literally mean everything. We feel we have a great connection with our fans online too, we love chatting to anyone who’s willing to give us the time of day and it really doesn’t go unnoticed so thank you
You can pre-order Red, Green and Inbetween via iTunes now!