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For the last 25 years, The XCERTS have been everything to Murray Macleod.
From the school yard to the Scala, the beaches of Aberdeen to the bright lights of the Barrowlands, every moment, every achievement, every milestone and every ambition has centred around the band that he, bassist Jordan Smith and drummer Tom Heron crafted at the turn of the millennium.
Though what happens when everything you have ever known gets thrown into the ringer? What happens when you have to re-evaluate when you weren’t expecting to?
Around the release of ‘Gimme’ the lead single from the band’s last full-length ‘Learning How To Live And Let Go’, Murray’s dad received a cancer diagnosis. Mixed in with an unexpectedly damp reception to said album, Murray, rather than speaking about his turmoil and confusion, bottled things up, put his head down, and just toured, because that’s all he has ever known how to do. Even blocking out his brothers in arms, never really sharing what he was going through.
Then, following his dad’s all-clear, Jordan went through the same experience with his mum. Heartbreakingly, she did not make it.
Life has a funny way of pulling your attention away and making you question the path you are heading down, and, in turn, the things that matter the most about the things you care about so much. Sometimes, it’s a lot more brutal than others. But in experiencing the very worst that it has to offer, it showed the band, in the clearest resolution in years, what all of this is really about.
“When hellish things like this happen within a family, of course, it brings people back together, and it massively brought us back together as those three young boys that started this band,” Murray states. “We had that child-like fear for two years that we were going to lose our superheroes, and the band, for a brief spell, was put on the back burner.
“Then when we came back to actually writing again, and the deeper the conversations got between the three of us, that’s when we had the light bulb moment of looking back and seeing that what made our first record so special was the purity of the three of us being together. Not chasing a hit. Not listening to outside noise. Just the three of us creating and not having to answer to anybody.”
In another dimension, that coming back together may not have happened. But in this one, the result is ‘i think i want to go home now.’, a record of immense beauty, stark honesty and raw intent. A collection of songs that speak for who The XCERTS have been as much as the people they are right now – battered, bruised, but still finding a way – it is resilience incarnate. A vulnerable look at what it means to admit when you’re struggling, and that it is okay to settle for comfort.
THE SOUND
There’s something to be said about just being a rock band that writes rock music. It’s a notion that often gets lost in the modern pressure to keep evolving and chasing something new, but The XCERTS have always had old souls. They are always at their best when guitars, drums, and bass match choruses, hooks, and bridges.
So, when that time came to consider what exactly they were working on, Murray made sure that the thing that drives their heart and soul was at the forefront once more, because that’s what it used to be like when they started.
“Just the three of us, looking at one another, smiling, welling up, hugging one another after we play one chorus over and over for half an hour because we’re having so much fun,” he beams, like such an activity is all he may ever need for the rest of his days. “Just human spirit and human connection. But saying that, at first it wasn’t so much about the music. It was about regaining that purity. Our lives outside the rehearsal room and in the studio were so bad, and so confusing and so nightmarish, that room became a place where we could escape from it all.”
By taking back control of exactly what the band’s purpose was and no longer focusing on the what-ifs of chart positions, tour offers, and viral moments, the trio were able to remember why they have come back to this vessel time and time again. That child-like fear that had gripped them outside of those four walls had been replaced by child-like wonder, a familiar sense of awe that you only get at a time when the world hasn’t tried to dull your sparkle.
For Murray, it was the exact tonic he needed, and it allowed him to thrive in a way he would have been conscious of during previous processes.
“On the last record, the whole mantra was to push against anything that felt comfortable, and that was really fun,” he comments. “That taught me a lot about myself as a songwriter, about finding that middle ground of how far I should be pushing and pulling with experimentation.
“But on this one, every decision made was what was comfortable to us. Let’s not put it under the microscope; let’s express what is actually happening. That’s why you can hear the speakers pushing air and the squeak of a kick drum. It’s why you can hear people talking or the bleed between instruments. We all knew we had to present this record as one, and that meant being as raw and human as possible. Because we wanted to thrash out our truth.”
And the result is just as raw as the band intended it to be. At a time where so much emphasis is on squeaky cleanness, and when it is almost being normalised for AI music to have its place in the spectrum, ‘i think i want to go home now.’ thrives in the dirt. It is scrappy, bristled, and rugged around every edge. It is ugly, bombastic and turned up to the point of it hurting, because that’s exactly what it felt like inside the band’s chests.
A record that speaks to the kids playing covers in their garage all those years ago to the adults packing out the small sweaty rooms across the nation. It is rock music as it should be delivered, and even in its more vulnerable and tear-stained moments, the space that the band have allowed around such sonics makes it all the more effective.
“We have the opportunity to turn the ugly into the beautiful, and that includes in nasty sounds. That’s real to me. I find a lot of beauty in noise. It sounds like everything’s a bit off throughout, and that was intentional. I set my sights on making it like a cult classic, and I feel like that is what it sounds like.”
THE LYRICS
In the same way that the trio allowed whatever felt good and right to flow out of them musically, it was very much the same process when it came to trying to sum up what they were feeling and to make sense of it as lyrics.
Such an approach also allowed Murray to break out of a particular creative cycle that he, for whatever reason, felt as though he had to stick to. The arc. Becoming hellbent on writing in a manner where there was a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how bad things seemed to be. That even if the seas around you are choppy, the lighthouse is blinking in the distance. A redemption, a road to recovery, a nice roll of the credits as you walk off into the sunset.
But the truth is that, based on the way the last couple of years had gone, there was no Hollywood ending to be had. Because the things that he and the band had been going through were still very much in motion. Grief is a fluid state, able to mould into whatever shape necessary to infiltrate your heart and mind, and it certainly doesn’t give a fuck whether you’re trying to make an album or not.
So rather than trying to ebb and flow through their story, Murray committed to just writing things exactly as they are, no matter how messy, disjointed and numb it turned out to be.
“I just spoke my truth, and because of that, it’s just a really raw snapshot of a dreadful time,” he admits. “There’s not that much light on this record. It was hard to find it, and that’s totally fine because that was our reality. A lot of people keep asking me if this record is cathartic for us, and it doesn’t feel that way because we’re still actively grieving. It’s a really cruel journey, and it’s unforgiving, and it’s inconsistent. It can hit you at any time. That’s how painful this record is to us. That there is no hint of inner release. It is what it is, and performing the songs is pretty tricky at the moment.”
Not worrying about form or function, just letting whatever needed to come out flow, makes for a curious insight into the pressure the mind is under when going through such heavy situations. You end up with the euphoric realisations of ‘wow’ rubbing shoulders with the damning admissions of ‘sinking feeling’, a complete 180 on the emotions racing through the bloodstream. You have a track like ‘bury you’ that speaks of figuring out how to move forward past devastation, sat in the middle of the record rather than near the end, whilst the complete unravelling of psyche that sits at the heart of ‘losing it’ is closer to the finale. It is full of contradictions, scatterbrained realisations and musings, and inconsistent intentions, and it is all the more perfect because of it.
To have it any other way is to paint over what is really happening, and Murray would rather showcase how bizarre and taxing the ups and downs of this period have been than attempt to put a nice bow on top of it.
“When you sing about something like grief or cancer or heartbreak or whatever, I think people have this expectation that you are going to sum it up so eloquently and so beautifully, and that you will speak on behalf of many people who have experienced loss,” he admits. “But life is heavy, and it’s a total blur, and these experiences that we went through, they do culminate in a horrible melting pot of emotions. You are euphoric one day, and then you wake up the next day, and you’re six feet under. I wrote this way because I set out to be as honest as possible.
“It was just us trying to be as truthful as we could be for the first time in a long time. Not to say that our other records aren’t truthful, or those songs don’t hold weight. They absolutely do. But this is just a new kind of voice for us, and it was the only voice that was an option.”
THE TITLE
The idea of exactly where home is right now has played a massive part in Murray’s personal life throughout this process, as much as anything else. What started as a joke about going to a friend’s house when you’re a kid and the discomfort that comes with being in such alien surroundings, culminating in those immortal words “I think I want to go home”, quickly transformed into something much more emotional and poignant. That home doesn’t always mean the place you grew up, even though Aberdeen has played a massive part in the DNA of the band throughout the years. It is a person, a feeling, a comfort, a solace. It is different for all of us, constantly changing, and matched to just how much the band’s lives were changing around them in real time while making the record. Umbrellaing it with the words ‘i think i want to go home now.’ just fitted the mould perfectly.
Though what cemented it was a moment that Murray experienced, sat in the bedroom of his house in Brighton, in the aftermath of the break-up he had gone through with his long-term partner – another emotional aspect that weaves its way through the record’s lyrical turns.
“She left our home to go back to her family home in an entirely different city,” he explains. “She was dealing with her own mental health problems and subsequently our relationship deteriorated whilst Lynne was going through her diagnosis. So I remember being in our bedroom alone, sat on the bed, head in hands, and I muttered under my breath, ‘I think I want to go home now’. And I kept thinking about that, and that was an interesting thing to think and say whilst actually being in my home.
“It’s an uncomfortable feeling looking back on that, thinking about being in a half-empty room that you once shared with somebody, and all their belongings have gone. But it was very much a jumping-off point in us realising that this is actually a pretty serious title. And there is so much within that conversation of home, and what it means to people, and what does it mean to me, and what does it mean to Jordan and Tom. It’s a lot more poignant than I initially thought it to be.”
THE FUTURE
Life was always going to be different on the other side of this process for The XCERTS, but it feels like the shift in what they want and need from the band is one of the biggest changes.
“For a very long time, it was all about world domination,” Murray chuckles. “We are going to be the biggest band in the world, as all young bands should believe. Now, though, I feel like we are a borderline one-of-one, in regard to that I don’t know any bands like us that have been together for 25 years. That in itself is a win, and the fact that we’re still best friends and love one another, that’s fucking amazing. And when this band ends, we will continue. And this record has no right existing from what we went through, but we’re so defiant, and we’re so in love with our band, and we’re in love with creating together. And that really is enough.”
To pull such virtue from such continued heartbreak isn’t an easy feat, but the fact that the band have been able to do just that through the thing that they love more than anything else is bigger than any radio hit or viral sensation. At the end of all things, we will still always have each other, and what a marvellous thing to be able to say.
“I’m also just so overwhelmingly proud of Jordan and Tom, and myself to a certain extent,” Murray concludes. “But especially Jordan, witnessing what he had to go through whilst writing this record and making this record. Him getting a call during the last week of recording, saying he had to come home now, and vanishing on the first flight to Aberdeen. I think back to that and just how proud I am of him as an individual, the strength he is showing, and his belief in what we do. It’s pretty fucking remarkable.
“This record will live on. It just will. And if it doesn’t for other people, then it certainly will for us. And that’s all that matters.”
