SWMRS Explain How They Almost Became A Boy Band And Tweaked A Popular Blink-182 Riff While Making Their “Becker” Album

Cade, Cole, and Max Becker sit down with me to discuss new music and how “DELONGESONG” came to be.

Just a few weeks ago I wrote up a little article about the impending “Becker” album due from the newly rejuvenated SWMRS lineup. SWMRS has been a favorite band of mine going back to 2017, when I was in between junior and senior year of college. The band’s first two albums were a really big part of my early twenties, and captured the punk spirit and genre-bending prowess of my favorite band, The Clash. In fact, they are one of the only modern bands that has made such a memorable imprint on me in my adult life.

That fandom hasn’t been without some turbulence though, as I detailed in a few recent articles that you can find here and here. Despite all that has happened, SWMRS, and more specifically co-songwriters Max and Cole Becker, remain persistent. The band has reformed with their brother Cade taking over bass duties, and a rotation of drummers, including Wyatt Blair, Sam Benavidez, and longtime friend Jamie Stewart taking over for most live shows. Fortunately, Cade, Max, and Cole all were willing to sit down with me to discuss the latest album, as well as the past, present, and future of all things SWMRS.

“Becker” was produced by the three Becker bros in conjunction with Kourtney Kyung Smith and Wyatt Blair.

Interview highlights below, note the transcript is edited only for clarity and conciseness. The entire interview is available in video format at the bottom of the article and I highly recommend you watch it to capture all the nuance and great insight from the Becker bros!

Matt: The new “Becker” album seems to really firmly plant your flag back onto the musical landscape. Where did the motivation for these songs and the change in musical direction come from?

Max Becker: We were on this track with our vision and our art, and we still believe in what we do, and we think we can really uncover the next step for us.

Cole Becker: I think there’s more of an art to it, when we first went into the studio to make these songs [for “Becker”], it was with the vague intention of starting a new band actually. “Sonic Tonic” has so many reasons why it was the way it is. The songs are great, but the recording itself, the sessions just came and went. We had what we had and that’s the record.

Max: We were put in for 3 days, each song was recorded live for two takes per song tops.

Cole: We had the album [“Sonic Tonic”] finished and we finished it long before it came out. We had it and felt like we should put it out because they are great songs. And it was just a tough sell, it was a more low key album, more power pop, and things weren’t going well with SWMRS by the time that album came out. So we basically played a few more shows and said it’s done, we’re going to start a brand new band. We’re going to call it Becker, we’re not going to have a drummer, we’re gonna have a drum machine, we’re going to do synchronized dance moves. We should try something crazy. At the end of the day what we know we have is good songs and each other.

In the process of making the album and finding the song, we started to realize this is Becker, but it is “Becker” the album, and it is a SWMRS album. SWMRS has always been Max and I’s songs.

Max: It’s our life’s’ work, and we don’t feel like abandoning it. We’ve connected with people all over the world with our music, it’s the dream. We’ve been given a gift that we have to take care of.

Matt: Your last album “Sonic Tonic” felt like a cleansing for the band, SWMRS was not in the best place, it was an album that came out of nowhere, but with “Becker” sonically, how did you try to reestablish the band’s direction and sound?

Max: We had a lot of time and conversation with this amazing produce Wyatt. [Blair], he feels like our George Martin, this extra member where we’re all speaking the same language together. Take “California Wintertime”, this song, we want to have a feel that’s like “Champagne Supernova” but we don’t want to larp Oasis. We want to bring in what SWMRS does, let’s make the bassline more interesting, and then it will be our own song. He was just shepherding us through that. Everything on the record was totally intentional. It’s the next chapter after “Berkeley’s On Fire”.

Cole: It felt cool to be back in this pocket of cheeky, experimentation. That’s always been our bread and butter since we started SWMRS, drawing on unexpected influences. When we met Wyatt it was like a breath of fresh air, he’s so open minded. You throw a crazy idea at him and he’s like ‘yeah, that sounds great, in fact here’s how you do that, they did this on the New Edition album in 1984’.

Cade Becker: He’s an encyclopedia, here’s our AI drummer, we’ll feed him different influences and he’ll work it in somehow.

Max: He’s a really good drummer.

Cade: We spent like the last year in the studio, little sessions throughout the course of the year, and we went in thinking we’d be maybe a pop group. We’re three brothers, with no drummer.

Cole: We watched a documentary about Depeche Mode and were like fuck yeah.

Max: How sick would it be to tour in a Prius with like a drum machine.

Cade: It was lean, it was also lean because no one would be at the shows. It was lean in a lot of ways. The first song that we actually finished was “Emo Kids”, it’s kind of like the most poppy we go, also we had tried so many different versions of different songs, but that one gave us a direction.

Matt: The songs on “Becker” feel a little more mature, as the band has entered this new era, do you see this as the next direction for the band, moving away from the angst and political topics and the punk music you’ve made in the past?

Max: I don’t know what’s gonna happen. We kind of just write a bunch of songs, and it ends up being what it is. I think a lot of “Drive North” was the way it was because Cole wrote a lot of his songs in this very specific time when he was a freshman at Cal. He just met this girl named Hannah, Hannah goes ‘write me a song’, and he goes ‘sure’ and then “Hannah” is born. Just random things in life. We could go more mature, maybe, but I can’t really predict the future here.

I will say, I’m in my 30s, I’m not going to pretend like I’m teenage and angsty, I think that’s a little weird when older bands pretend to be young. But, I don’t need to write about things that only 30 year olds go through. This 16 year old is falling in love with this person and any love song can be for any age.

Cole: I think the musical maturity is summed up by the fact that my favorite album that I’ve been listening to for the last two weeks is Steve Miller Band’s “Book Of Dreams”. You get to a certain age where you get to a certain age where you starting thinking, man these guys and girls in the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s had this sense for song craft, and hooks, and what people actually want to hear about in a song.

A general critique I have of pop music now is that, I’m not Gen Z, I can’t connect to this fucking shit. Anyone, even if you’re Gen Z, you can connect to [Tom Petty’s] “I Won’t Back Down”.

Max: Like “Hotel California”, I used to laugh at that song as a kid, now I think it’s one of the greatest songs of all time.

Matt: “Becker” really has musical maturity, the songs like “California Wintertime”, “Sure As Shit”, “Brand New Lungs”. It always feels like, in the past, that was one small part of the album. But here the songs are more layered and textured, was that conscious choice?

Max: We gave this album the most time in the oven. We let each song bake long enough to where all the layers we wanted were there. We were very patient with each song, we did a lot of songs two or three different ways. We were very patience. With patience, you get a lot more development.

Cole: A distinguishing feature of making this record was that we finally made it with someone who was our peer. We admire [Wyatt] but we’re not looking up to him, and he’s not telling us what we should do. That combined with the confidence and stamina we have now in the studio, we know when it is right.

When you’re young, you’re on a label, they’re paying for it, we definitely weren’t as invested in the entire process as we were with this record.

Cade: We really let Max run free and have a lot of control. There was many times where I didn’t have much patience anymore, but he just knew there was one last thing to work in there.

Matt: Cade, you’re the newest addition to the band, and the youngest Becker brother, what’s your songwriting past? Are you rearing to put your own stamp on things?

Cade: It’s just nice to contribute because I’ve always been extremely opinionated about their music. I’m coming out from a fan, I’ve been listening to them my whole life as well. I have always had a very set opinion on where I think they need to go. Within this process it took awhile to get fully comfortable, and for them to get fully comfortable with me. I like to skip steps that they like to be in. They like to go through a whole transformative phase that has nothing to do with the song.

I feel like I know where the song is going and I just want to be there, but they need to go through that in order to get back to what their sound is. Learning to take a step back, and let that happen, has been a big thing for me.

Cole: I have a good story that demonstrates this. Max and I find a zone and we’re building it out and we just get so amped and pumping each other. We’ve done this with terrible songs, but when we’re in it we’re just like ‘yeah, this is fucking sick’. We showed Cade this house song, and he was just like ‘this sucks’.

I just remember thinking, god this fucking guy. But then, weeks later I was like wow, he’s right, this song sucks, he should probably be part of the band.

Max: His nickname is “risk management”.

Matt: Cade, do you want to give SWMRS fans your musical history and your favorite bands? What bands inspired you aside from your brothers’ band?

Cade: Because they were so good at this so early, and they were so close in age, they kind of did everything together. By the time that people asked me if I wanted to play music, I was like ‘no, they’re already good at it’, and because I’m a creature of habit, I like to do things that I’m immediately good at. So I just shied away from it

I just never really played an instrument until I asked Max to teach me guitar so I could audition for the “American Idiot” musical at my college. I did a lot of performing through that.

Cole: He was a great performer long before he picked up an instrument, he did musical theatre. Cade’s a stage man.

Max: I think Cade is most influenced by the soundtrack to the OC [tv show].

Cade: Music to me is really based on feel. I think now that I’m two years into learning bass, I’m starting to be able to articulate things more. Now I can give them real meaning to how I’m feeling about songs.

Max: In a way he was kind of functioning like Chris Blackwell, he didn’t know how to play music but he could go like ‘that’s right, that’s not right’.

Matt: One of the cool things about this era of the band is that having Cade join the band somewhat softens the blow of a new lineup. A lot of my favorite bands have had a lot of turnover, not necessarily for bad reasons. It’s so tough for musicians to make money, it’s so tough for bands to stay together, even if they are successful. It feels a little more natural to get back on the bandwagon.

Cole: It is just fucking hard to keep a band together, if we weren’t brothers this wouldn’t have happened. We’ve hyper optimized our touring setup. We travel so light, we’re using these Vox MV50s, all of our shit fits in one Pelican case that we can fly with.

Cade: I’m running a SansAmp through a DI box only.

Max: Our mom does our merch. We’ve made it past the difficult part of being in a young band. For a couple years they can be in a band and sleep on couches, because it’s the dream. And then they get burnt out. Or other pressures take them away, they get married, have kids, it’s part of the turnover of rock bands. Most people who are in bands, they all kind of get into music for different reasons. Some people get to a point where they’re just like ‘eh, I don’t know if I want to do this anymore’. We can’t do that to each other.

Cole: And it’s just fun, now that it is a family road trip every time we go, we’re literally just going on these adventures together. Both of our grandmothers passed away last year, and we are at this transitional point, our parents are at this transitional point too, where we’re confronting how life is so precious. This time we have together, when they can travel with us, and we can have a good time together, it’s such a gift, something to embrace.

Matt: We’re almost out of time, but I have one more question that’s not super serious but very fun. There’s a lot of good songs on “Becker”, but the best song on the album is “DELONGESONG”. Can you describe or explain how and why you guys wrote that song?

Cole: The first version of that song was this kind of low key thing. There was this time in 2019 when Fueled By Ramen told us ‘hey, you’re doing pretty good but what you really need is to write the next big hit song’. So they put us in a studio with a stranger and tell us to write the next big hit song in four hours. So we showed up, and I just don’t think we took things seriously enough.

Max: We take it so seriously that we don’t let that get in the way, that’s more of what it is.

Cole: We show up and he’s got this beat, and think of what can we do with this. So I start writing and I just feel like talking about aliens today. I wrote both verses in like ten minutes, sang them. Max wrote the chorus, he sang it. Then it went into a dropbox folder and nothing happened with it forever. We were like that song is kind of weird, the whole experience was kind of weird.

Max: And it was also a slow song in a major key with synthesizers. It wasn’t anything.

Cole: I think it is funny because all of the reasons I think that you like that song don’t exist in that version.

Max: I show up to the studio and I always have a speech at the beginning of a six day session. You guys, you have to listen to me right now, this song needs to be done and it needs to be hard. We need to make it hard. Let’s listen to Ice Cube right now. Then we actually just copied the bpm of like an Ice Cube song.

Cole: We may have used the same kick and snare sample he uses.

Max: So I was like Cole, you know that verse you made? Try singing it this fast. In the first version we had a little bit of a Tom DeLonge guitar riff for fun. But we needed to bring that element in but have it be a different riff. Then I said, oh fuck, what if I play a minor key version of “Anthem Part II” over the top of it? It’s in a minor key, so it’s not ripping it off, but it is a nod, hey Tom, we see you.

You know what’s so cool? It’s out there for ever, it’s permanent. You put an album out and it is permanent. The fact that you’re having a reaction like that to our record, hopefully it means other people are, or in twenty years they are. Moving forward, everything we do is going to have that level of effort put into it.

Hey all, thanks for reading! Check out the video version of the interview at the bottom of the article

Be sure to listen to SWMRS latest album, Becker, and keep an eye out for their upcoming tours via their website or Instagram page!

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