New Rules In Conversation With FAULT Magazine

2021 has been a great year for trio New Rules. Despite still being very much in their infancy in band years, the trio have worked their way to over 550k monthly listeners on Spotify and 1.1M followers on TikTok. Proof of their songwriting skills is on full display on their most recent track entitled ‘Cheers’ and the good news is set to keep on coming in the new year. We caught up with New Rules to discuss their musical journey, new music and of course, their FAULTs.

Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the track Cheers?

“Cheers” was written on zoom with two friends of ours based out in LA. It’s about celebrating the end of a relationship that just wasn’t right for you, but not necessarily looking back in anger. The tag line “cheers to being over you” is intended to be uplifting, and comes at a good time, because it’s also kind of saying cheers to being over the shitty year everyone’s had. And we will definitely drink to that, or anything to be honest.

What does your songwriting process look like?

It’s the 3 of us in a room with 3 guitars, usually our living room because we always have a mate staying over in the spare room/studio so we can’t use it. That’s how a lot of ideas start and finish, but sometimes we’ll play around with things on our own and bring those ideas to each other. if we’re co-writing with friends or other writers then we’ll either take a hook in and play it to them and if everyone’s into it then we’ll get to work. Or, we’ll all pick up an instrument and jam till something sticks.

Are you quite disciplined and regimented when writing or do you prefer to wait for inspiration to hit?

We all have pretty short attention spans and get distracted quite easily, which, to be fair, makes the process a lot more fun. We tend to write the second verses of songs last and that always takes ages because we have a little bit of the “celebrating before the finish line” thing going on and we start mucking around. But that’s okay. When we have an idea we’re excited about then we’re pretty focused and get it down quickly enough. We don’t always wait for inspiration to hit but when it does, whether we’re together or not, we drop everything we’re doing and take advantage of it, because those moments go as fast as they come.

When you’re in writing mode, are you an artist that likes to shut off from the world and not take in anything else in case it distracts your flow or do you like to take it all in? 

Because there’s three of us and we all write together it’s hard to totally shut off, since it’s such a collaborative process and we all bounce off each other. When we get an idea started it always comes out first as word vomit and there’s magic in that initial flow, whether it’s a word you thought you heard someone say becoming the concept for a song, or a melody someone sings that gets everyone really excited. Disrupting that is frustrating, because it’s usually where all the best ideas come from.

What’s an experience you haven’t written about yet but really want to?

This isn’t something we’d necessarily want to experience, or have experienced but writing a song that could be used as the soundtrack to a bar fight would be badass.

The music industry moves so fast, was it difficult to not release music for a whole year from fear of falling behind? 

We definitely wanted to put a lot more music out last year than we did. We’d written so many new songs that we wanted people to hear, because it was some of the most honest songwriting we’d ever done between the three of us. But looking back, we know there was some good in holding on until now to release new music. Heading into the new year we know what we want to say and in what order we’re gonna say it. We’ve progressed a lot throughout the last year and each new release is going to hopefully show that progression, one after the other. But we’re never going that long without releasing music again, it sucked and we hated it as much as our fans did.

There’s so much buzz around you and your music, do feel extra pressure to live up to the hype of it all? 

We’ve definitely felt like we’ve had to prove ourselves a little bit more than most. Sometimes people look at our band and assume we don’t play our own instruments and write our own songs. We’re not afraid of that though, without sounding conceited we enjoy the challenge of being underdogs. For us it will always come down to the music, and we just want to put out our best.

When you look back on your musical journey, what is the largest hurdle you’d had to climb? 

We’re sure this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it starts with a P and ends in andemic. Getting through covid as a band has done a lot for us. We became much better writers, it forced us to adapt and find new ways to spread the word about our band from home, and we taught ourselves how to produce. It put a lot into perspective too, we love what we do and we don’t want anything to get in the way of it. 

What are you most looking forward to in 2022? 

Releasing new music is up there for us, we’re so excited just to get it out and show our fans that we have actually been working. We’re also about to have talks on when we’ll be touring next, which, covid permitting, will finally see us out playing shows in the States and Europe. We know we’re going to Nashville in January for sure, and we’ve always wanted to visit so we’re looking forward to that. We want to try grits and do an open mic night, those top of the itinerary.

What is your FAULT? (Personal Flaw)  

Alec: Alarms don’t work on me. You’d struggle finding a difference between a guy whose just been hit over the head with a bat, and me asleep in bed. Luckily, my alarm wakes everyone else up, and they in turn wake me up, so it all works out. 

Nathan: I get cold easy and I often sneak off to turn the heating on. I consider it a strength, the boys disagree

Ryan: None, i’m perfect.