Knocked Loose vocalist Bryan Garris has talked us through the process behind the band’s recent collaborations with Poppy and Motionless In White‘s Chris Motionless on their recent album ‘You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’.
KL are the winners of the Artist Of The Year award in the 2024 Rock Sound Awards Issue and during our new interview with Bryan, he told us about the record’s two collaborations – ‘Suffocate’ with Poppy and ‘Slaughterhouse 2’ with Chris – came together.
“It’s really interesting with the features on this record because we were fans of both before we even started”, he says. “That’s where, ultimately, situations like this should start. Why would you want to collaborate with them if you do not like them? So, being a fan of Poppy, we played When We Were Young a few years ago, and she was playing on another stage. We had a mutual friend, and Isaac and I were like, ‘We want to meet her’, and we had a very casual introduction. Fast forward a couple of years, and she actually reached out to us. She sent me a message on Instagram saying, ‘Love your band, we should collaborate’. So, being fans and coming from a place of being fans of each other, Isaac and I sat down and wrote the song specifically with her in mind.”
“Interestingly, it happened with both songs, which had features”, he continues. “As fans of Motionless In White and fans of Poppy, what would we like them to do? For Chris, his first verse in ‘Slaughterhouse 2’ is a fast double-time punk beat, specifically cause we wondered when was the last time we heard him scream over something like that. It was fun to step into their worlds and ask how we wanted to hear them, and we learned a lot from thinking like that. Moving forward, it’s going to be how we approach guest features because it’s so much cooler and so much more organic. That’s so much better than just thinking, ‘We have this part, let’s throw another voice on it’. It also helped people gravitate towards it as well.”
