BRKN LOVE: “I love heavy rock but it’s all really dark and grim. I miss when rock was sexy and fun.”

BRKN LOVE return with The Program, their third full-length album released via Spinefarm Records. The record marks a shift in both sound and approach for the band, driven by frontman Justin Benlolo’s decision to stop placing limits on what BRKN LOVE “should” sound like. Recorded in Los Angeles with longtime collaborator Anton DeLost, the album reflects a more open perspective, allowing for new influences and ideas to take shape without restriction.

Much of that creative breakthrough can be traced back to an unexpected trip to Charleston, South Carolina. Originally planning to visit a friend for a weekend, Justin ended up staying for over two months. He brought along his recording gear, set up a temporary home studio, and found himself writing the bulk of The Program while immersed in the city’s relaxed atmosphere and a new social circle. The group of friends he met even inspired the album title, a nod to their group chat that frequently referenced “The Program” as a kind of inside joke.

In our latest Cover Story, Justin talks about how Charleston played a key role in shaping the record, what it was like writing outside of his usual environment, and how the album represents a clearer, more confident version of BRKN LOVE moving forward.

For The Program, you had a clear vision for the album early on in the process. Could you just talk through what that vision was?

“I felt that we needed to have a different take on the third record. I feel like you need to be a little bit more ambitious when you’re on your third release. I didn’t want to give people the same thing three times in a row. On this one, I had to deliberately think and choose to make some changes. I just let things flow out of me. Going into this, I decided I wanted it to be a little bit funkier, a little bit more r & b, have a little more pop and soul influences, and even a little disco. I wanted to make a sexy dance rock record in a way.

Of course, the roots of it all still sound like a BRKN LOVE record. I don’t think it’s a complete departure by any means but there are a few bits of different information that we dropped in there to give it a little bit of something new. Even when I was making the demos, I was consciously trying to think how we could make this a little more funky. I listened to the record again yesterday because I’ve been talking about it on these press junkets for the past three or four days, so I’m thinking I should probably get familiar again with what I’m talking about. I listened to it yesterday and it still sounds like a rock record. It’s not a funk record by any means, but there’s just enough of it to where it allows us to go to more places as the band keeps going on.

I didn’t want to pigeonhole us. I feel like your second record is an extension of your first. It’s like you perfect what you tried to do the first time around on the second record then now you have to make a change. It’s the third record curse as some people would say. If a band can make it you have got to be able to make it past the third one because sometimes you just run out of things to say. You run out of songs to write. It’s hard to figure out what that shift is without disappointing the old fans, but still trying to open up your audience more to potential new fans as well. I think we pulled it off, but that’s not for me to decide, that’s for the people to decide.”

You took yourself out of your kind of usual environment and went on a trip away. Starting off it was supposed to be a weekend trip then ended up being nine weeks. What prompted the change?

“It’s funny. The guy that I was there with, one of my best friends, he just called me before I got on this call here. One of my best friends I grew up with my whole life, ended up moving down there to go to school and that was the end of our previous album cycle.

We had just finished everything for Black Box and we had a lot of time off which, being in a touring rock band, you’re not afforded that much time off to write stuff, in between. I didn’t plan on staying there that long. I was just going to hang out and I’m pretty sure the first night I was there, we had such a good time. We met all these people immediately. We went to all these bars and Charleston’s is a little big place. It’s not like Toronto at all which is a much bigger city. There’s so many nooks and crannies that you can kind of tuck away in whereas, in Charleston, there’s these central areas that you go to. So, we were in that downtown circuit a lot that first weekend, and we just ended up meeting all these people that we made such quick connections with and it kept turning into me staying just one more week.

I brought all my stuff down just in case as I want to keep busy. I don’t want to just go down there and go on vacation. I wanted to still have my guitars and my speakers, my microphones and all that stuff, just in case I felt like playing. So I had all my gear set up in his office, and I just had this huge jolt of inspiration that kept coming out and it just kept rolling. I can’t leave because I feel like I’m hot right now.”

“If a band can make it you have got to be able to make it past the third one because sometimes you just run out of things to say.”

What was that trigger?

“I don’t know. It was a combination of things. I think the people we met for sure. That’s what they say. It’s the people you surround yourself with that make the experience. It’s the people, not the place. Unlike Toronto, Canada, there are palm trees, it’s beachy, and people are in good spirits. I had a suntan and all that stuff.

Something about that matched with the people that we were hanging out with and, and even the nightlife. Went out to all these clubs and bars that were playing music that typically wouldn’t be played in a Toronto bar. It was all this RnB and funk and disco stuff. I grew up listening to that stuff. I love that kind of music, that’s my favourite party music. I also shifted this paradigm shift in what I was listening to. I stopped listening to rock temporarily and tried to immerse myself in something else so I could gain more perspective on the genre.

When I have to write a record, it’s a nine-to-five job. I’m very thankful I don’t have one of those. I would just sit at the computer every day and just demo stuff all day and lay stuff out. Then I would play it for these people that we were hanging out with and got these unfiltered opinions that we didn’t have a lot of. We weren’t trying to hurt each other’s feelings. We couldn’t because there wasn’t a lot of emotional connection between the two of us so it felt like a very organic system that we had. I think that helped shape a lot of this stuff. I only left because we had to tour with Badflower. There was like a tour that came out of nowhere so I had to go back to Canada.

By the time I had left, I had finished at least 70 or 80% of the record. Since then, I’ve been making yearly trips to go down. I’m almost due for another one very soon.”

You had a vision for the record quite early on. Do you think it would’ve sounded different if you’d recorded it at home? Do you think the album that’s out would have sounded different if you hadn’t gone through that whole experience?

“I think so. The environment has a lot to do with it. I was coming off a pretty heavy touring season and a really long year of playing shows. You get that post-tour depression where I feel like I’m worthless and I’m not adding anything to the world.

I was stuck in a rut when I was here and, quite frankly, I was unmotivated to write songs. There was a lot of doubt. By the time I’m working on my third record, do I still have this? Can I still do this? Is there anything left for me to say? I don’t know if I would’ve even started actively writing if I didn’t get out of my comfort zone here because I’m so set in my ways and I do everything in this room. This is my studio.”

V13 Cover Story – Issue 94 – BRKN LOVE

Going back to previous records then, what triggers you to work on a new record?

“Every single record up until this point has had very definitive moments that have started that process. Obviously the first record, you work on your entire life. I was working towards that since I was a kid just trying to find my way and my sound and all that stuff. The first record took me years to make just because of the desire to make it and get on a record label and have a touring band, all that stuff but the second record we had to do during Covid.

We recorded that when we were in lockdown and we were sneaking into studios and shit. It was a very, not hush-hush thing, but it was bleak man. Nothing is going on. You couldn’t go anywhere. We didn’t get the chance to tour our first album because we put it out on February 14th, 2020. So it was a month before everything shut down. We had decided that we had to keep the machine rolling. We had to have some music going so then we were just hunkering down and writing those songs and recording them.

Whereas this record was like an impromptu shift. I happened to go down to this place and it was almost like the right place, right time, and it just hit me like a wave. I had worked on most of the lyrics when we were recording. I usually leave the lyrics to the last minute to sort of. I figure out what it is I’m trying to say when I’m writing a song. I’m just trying to get the big things down which, for me, is the melody first and foremost then just some basic riffs and rough drum parts that we will change later or at least build on later.

Then I went through a pretty significant… I had relationships and I had my heart broken and all these things happened in my life that influenced the lyrical content on the record. By the time I’d got around to laying it down to tape, I’d say this record is probably the most lyrically connected or the most lyrically relatable. The first record was my teenage angst. I was being very melodramatic. Then the second record is, for lack of a better term, it’s phrases that sound cool. We were just painting a canvas with words. I wasn’t too particular about anything. I didn’t have much to say. It was more about the riffs.

Then, this time around, on that point about being deliberate and making a conscious decision to do something different, I decided that I wanted to say something this time around and not just leave it super open-ended. I wanted to give people a real story.”

What was that like writing about personal events bearing in mind that it’s not something you’ve done in the past?”

“It wasn’t super tough. I wasn’t writing everything out and thinking that this was breaking my heart but it just felt like things I needed to get said. I think, in the context of making a record too, I’m not quite experiencing the full weight of everything because, in the interest of time, every time I make an album, I set myself two weeks. Studio time is expensive and we don’t have a lot of time to dick around.

“I wanted to say something this time around and not just leave it super open-ended. I wanted to give people a real story.”

It wasn’t until after when I listened to the album, I could hear myself laying my heart on the line and that seems to have resonated with a few people. It’s been a question that’s come up a few times where people would ask if this is your heartbreak record. That kind of thing. It is, and it’s human experience and it’s the first time I’ve touched on these things.

I’ve never really written about personal relationships up until this point. Generally, before it was all about internal struggle and just me dealing with myself. As I’ve grown older and wiser, I’ve sort of dealt with a lot of that stuff so this record is more about my external relationships.”

Do you think it will change the way you approach relationships, both in a personal and in a business way?”

“I don’t know. It’s tough to say. It’s tough being a musician and being a touring guy and trying to get an actual committed relationship just because we’re gone all the time. It’s also not like we’re working a desk job. It’s nightlife. There’s a big element of trust and a big element of… trust is the biggest thing. Communication has to be kept up. There’s a lot that you have to keep up for that sort of thing to work.

Then, if something goes wrong, you know that your musician partner might write a song about you forever cementing what happened. It makes for the best music because it is one of the most relatable human traits, love and loss and heartbreak. Pretty much everybody can connect to that in some way shape or another so I figured that this was the chance to do it and lay it out there.

I don’t get nervous about it anymore. I used to worry about how people would perceive me, or if it was too melodramatic or whatever. I don’t care anymore how people are thinking about it or if people even like the music. First and foremost, I’m making it for me, and I want to stand by it and I want to be happy with it. If people like it, great. If people don’t, that’s fine too. I had to do this for myself.”

You came away from a lot of what sounds like incredible experiences. As a writer and just as a person. What did you take away from it?”

“I walk away feeling proud every single time I do something like this. I can’t say anything profound. It’s always an achievement when you walk away from something and you really feel like you did the best you could and you’re happy with the finished product. You want to do your best job, but it depends on me. It’s more personal. It’s a little deeper than that. If I’m unhappy with it, I couldn’t face myself or I couldn’t get on stage and deliver these songs or stand behind any of the music. I don’t want to fake it. I don’t want to be inauthentic so that’s why I have this problem of listening to my songs ad nauseum because, if I listen to one of my songs one time and I don’t like it, I know I’ve made a mistake.

I want to be excited. I want to enjoy it every single time just to make sure I make the right decisions. Also, tastes will change as I go on. My parameters will keep shifting and I will keep growing musically in a lot of ways and become more open to different things. I’m never going to look back and think how I regret doing that. Even listening to my first album a couple of weeks ago on the fifth anniversary, I was thinking how this is something I probably wouldn’t have done today.

I didn’t regret it at all. I still enjoyed listening to it, but it’s cool to gain this perspective now because I hadn’t listened to it in God knows how long. It was cool to see, not only the musical growth but the personal growth of who I am, based on what I was saying back then.

I think that it’s cool to have snapshots of your life in a recorded form because it is that personal and a lot of casual listeners maybe don’t see it as such but, for musicians and a lot of artists and creatives, when you’re doing anything, whether it’s music or acting or graphic design, that’s your heart you’re putting on the line and you’re putting it out there.”

BRKN LOVE ‘The Program’ ARTWORK

You talked about avoiding making the same record three times and wanting to progress as the third album is the big album. Was there a particular moment or a song during the whole process where it all changed and you realised you’d moved on to a new era?

“I’d probably say that when Anton and I had written a song called ‘Unholy,’ we both looked at each other and said ‘Woah, this is different!’ We’ve never done that before and, before me going and doing some of the songs with him in LA, a lot of the stuff I was writing by myself and demoing still sounded like what you would expect but we in the studio is when we jazzed things up and added some of the changes.

When we wrote ‘Unholy,’ it was different. I think it’s like a Backstreet Boys/N-Sync song with Black Sabbath guitars. It’s like this cool fusion of things that feels ambitious to me that we probably wouldn’t have done a couple of years ago because I would’ve thought it wasn’t cool. That marked a significant paradigm shift in everything. It set the standard for me thinking that we’ve got to do stuff that’s more in this world.

We did songs like ‘Cruel,’ which is a little poppier in verse, a little bit more like Justin Timberlake-y and then it’s a big rock chorus. A song like ‘12 Wings’ we would’ve never done before, or a song like ‘Break the Scene’ we would’ve never done before. It’s a disco guitar thing, funk disco vibes with rocking vocals and stuff. These things all kicked off probably from the start with ‘Unholy.’

“When we wrote ‘Unholy,’ it was different. In my opinion, I think it’s like a Backstreet Boys/N-Sync song with Black Sabbath guitars”

The first song I’d written on my own that dove into a little bit of the funkiness of R&B-ness, I wrote the song called ‘Shades of View.’ I remember laying it down at four in the morning after leaving a club in Charleston thinking how this is dancey because I still had all those four on-the-floor dance beats in my head. Originally the song title for ‘Shades of View’ was actually Funked Up because it’s funky so let’s give it a fun little title.

That’s a whole other thing. It’s funny when we named demos. ‘Unholy’ was called ‘Groovy Heavy Daddy.’”

I like that for a song title…

“It was groovy. It was heavy, and it was Daddy.”

In terms of moving forward then. Where do you see the sound going given that you’ve opened yourself up to a whole lot of different worlds?”

“I would love to keep honing in on this dancey rock thing. I miss when rock was fun. Rock right now is very heavy and I love heavy rock of course but it’s all dark and grim and brutal I miss when rock was sexy and fun.”

Who are you putting under that sexy, fun rock category?

“When I think about sexy, fun rock, I always think about seventies boogie rock bands like Humble Pie and the late sixties too with The Faces and all that kind of stuff. Aerosmith and Cheap Trick. Kiss. These are all fun rock bands. ACDC. Those bands are fun. You throw on an ACDC record, you can’t not have a good time. If you do something like that now that still sounds like that, then you’re written off as a classic rock cover band kind of thing.

“I miss when rock was fun. Rock right now is very heavy, all dark and grim… I miss when rock was sexy and fun.”

So you can do the same thing, but you can capture the essence of it. My modern version of that even though this is not a modern band anymore, but like Queens of The Stone Age has a cool, sexy, groove. It’s kind of fun while they still have their darkness, there are some more moody songs they’re good at that. Or Arctic Monkeys is good at that and Royal Blood is good at that. These bands are kind of where I see our band fit in my opinion. I would love to push more into that world. Some of the songs I already have demoed out for our next record sound more that.”

Will the experience you’ve had recording this record change the way you approach writing future albums?

“I don’t know. I hope that we adopt this sort of thing but you never know when inspiration is gonna strike. I like the idea of doing a destination recording. Getting out of familiar patterns but that’s yet to be seen. One thing about writing songs for me is I’m not big on writing for fun anymore. I like having an objective in mind. I like knowing things like the date we’re gonna start recording then when I get that date put on the calendar now I have something to work towards. Practically every record we’ve done has always been like that. Here’s the date and I have no songs, so I have to now get songs.

It makes me more definitive in my choices. I filter out more nonsense. I’m much more deliberate in what I’m trying to do. Up to that point, what I’ll do is I’ll record riffs or melodies into my phone and then bank those. I love having the directive and that start date lights a fire under me. So I don’t know how it’s gonna go the next time around. We’ll see how that goes.”

BRKN LOVE

You talked about when you were writing in Charleston, the new group of friends you met and how their opinions were unfiltered. What was the biggest thing you took away from those people?

“I’m not very good with new people. I would say I’m closed off from making deep connections or involving myself with people I didn’t grow up with. I have a thing which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to, it’s very rare for me to sort of go and just immerse myself in a situation. There was something about the vibe, about everybody that we were hanging out with and the environment. It just felt right.

I have to lean on one of my best friends to influence me for that because he’s much more open. He is very fun and happy-go-lucky. I’m a fun guy for sure, but I question people’s intentions. What are you doing? What do you need Do you need something from me? What are you getting at?

I’m always sizing people up so it taught me how to let loose a little bit. Those relationships have fostered and some of those people don’t live in Charleston anymore, and we see them when we go on tour or when we hang out. One of them moved to New York City recently, and I was just with her a week ago. It’s cool that we’ve been able to make this connection and when I told them I was naming the album The Program, they all freaked out because that was a term we kept throwing around.

“One thing about writing songs for me is I’m not big on writing for fun anymore. I like having an objective in mind.”

We would just use it as a weird passing phrase like ‘Let’s go here tonight. It’s good for the program,’ or ‘Let’s not invite this person because it’s bad for the program,’ as examples and we named our text group between all of these people as The Program. We would call each other, ‘Hey programmers, here’s where we’re gonna be for lunch.’ That phrase kept going around so much and it just dawned upon me that this was mysterious and ominous.

I feel like people can have so many interpretations of what this might mean and it might be a cool title to slap on the record because I think people will see it as some sort of deep thing. It just made sense to use that as the title for the record. Here we are, about a year after it was recorded, and I remember texting them with the album cover and the name and they couldn’t believe it.”

It would be fair to assume that you have taken a whole lot from the experience of writing the record on this trip, both personally and musically. You said you listened to the album again the other week, looking back on that experience, how would you sum it up?

“It was 12 outta 10. It was one of the best times in my life being down there on that particular trip, I did another one a couple of months ago, and it just wasn’t the same. There was something special that lined up. The experiences were so fresh. Also, it wasn’t just for me, my friend had only been there for a couple of months and hadn’t got out of his shell so we were both experiencing these new things in real time, even though he had had a little bit more time there than I did. It was just so spontaneous and being able to experience it with one of my best friends as well.

I never went to college or university or whatever and got an experience like that. I’ve never lived with one of my close friends before and just being around each other all the time kept the energy high. It was such a great time in my life. It was so much less complicated than everything turned out to be. Everything was just so free and fun and we had the best time. It was one of the best times of my life making this record, honestly.”