Our feature series Track by Track allows artists to run through every song on their newest release. In this latest edition, Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath dissects the band’s surprise new EP, Nowhere Generation II.
Rise Against surprise-released the new EP Nowhere Generation II this past Friday (June 10th), featuring five new songs not included on last year’s full-length album, Nowhere Generation. In an exclusive for Consequence, frontman Tim McIlrath breaks down the EP track by track.
The new EP comes ahead of Rise Against’s headlining North American summer tour, also featuring The Used and Senses Fail. The outing kicks off July 15th in Las Vegas, and runs through an August 8th show in Norfork, Virginia. Tickets are currently available via Ticketmaster.
Regarding the decision to release these five new songs as separate EP, McIlrath explained, “We’d written 16 songs for [Nowhere Generation] and then we decided to break them apart. Not only could the music get lost, but the message could get lost in asking people to listen to this all at once. I think this is, hopefully, a more effective way to give these issues the platform and the spotlight that they rightly deserve. We wanted to hold onto these and give them to our fans when we feel like they’ve had time to properly digest this first batch, so these songs were the aces up our sleeves.”
Vinyl copies of Nowhere Generation II are available for pre-order via the Rise Against webstore, Amazon or Bandcamp. Stream the entire EP and check out Tim McIlrath’s track-by-track breakdown below.
“The Answer”
“The Answer” starts with an audio sample from a Major League Baseball game. A well-known pitcher had recently seen old tweets surface where he had used racial epithets and homophobic slurs before he was a pro. The tweets were released while he was at an away game, the All-Star Game in fact. When he returned to his hometown stadium after the incident; the crowd gave him a standing ovation. What you hear at the beginning of that sample is audio of that awful ovation, or America at its very worst. The crowd made the story about them, not the pitcher. The song is about how ignoring this sort of groupthink is not the answer. The mix by the brilliant Jason Livermore really brought this song to life.