ADTR's Advice: Fight Out Your Differences & Don't Let People Take Advantage

"We just got comfortable doing it at home, and it's easy to be detached when you're doing that," A Day To Remember singer Jeremy McKinnon explains of the heavy-hitters' typical creative process, speaking during their US tour with blink-182. Thus, for their latest record, they instead rented a cabin in the mountains and worked with Bill Stevenson of Descendents. "There's always something to do at home... When you leave, all you're thinking about is writing a record. So that was really important to us to do that on this record. We all got in a room, played together like we haven't done since we were writing records in our parents' garage."

"You've gotta talk about it, so that's what we do. We just holed up, argued it out and I think we're better friends for it."

This spawned the Floridian five-piece's new collection of arms-around-your-mates anthems, Bad Vibrations. "We've been doing this for so long, and we're really good at communicating with each other even when we're having rough days. Like, we usually just fight it out and it's over within an hour," McKinnon laughs of inner-band interaction. "I think that's the number one thing that bands fuck up on. If you give a shit about what you're doing, you have to take care of your relationships. You're not going to do that by holding on to negative shit for years. You've gotta talk about it, so that's what we do. We just holed up, argued it out and I think we're better friends for it." The Some Kind Of Monster approach? "Minus the psychiatrist," he chuckles.

Other heavy acts have flirted with similar genre-mashing, but few have garnered such commercial viability. "If a song doesn't feel right all the way through to us, it doesn't make the album. So regardless of if one of them is your favourite song or not, if it's not completely great to us as a group, then we're gonna wait and put it on the next album if we can ever finish it. That happened with All Signs Point To Lauderdale, and it happened on this record with We Got This. Those were songs that we tried to write for other records that just couldn't get worked out in a way we were proud of, and we worked it out now."

Closely following Bad Vibrations' release (again issued on their ADTR label) will be the conclusion of their lawsuit with former home Victory Records. The vocalist says there's a court date slated for November. "We couldn't have done it any other way, honestly," he states of the spat's public nature. "We were making decision after decision on the fly because of just how unpredictable a court case is."

McKinnon's hopeful younger groups can derive something positive from their experiences. "In a lot of ways we did the best we could with what we had. We really needed that label to help us out of a bad spot, and they did. And for that we'll forever be in debt, but that doesn't mean that people can take advantage of you. There's no right or wrong way to do things with your career. Just be safe and make sure you're doing things for the right reasons."