Feverish and uncompromising, The Hunna deliver a cathartic overhaul on third album ‘I’d Rather Die Than Let You In’, offering a dose of realism, nihilism, inspiration, and empowerment through some of their hardest, heaviest material to date.
for fans of My Chemical Romance, twenty one pilots, Green Day
Stream: “Young & Faded” – The Hunna
What you wait, what you wait what you waiting for? I can’t fake it!
Ryan Potter’s voice fills the tempestuous “I Wanna Know” with unhinged urgency as he sings into the black, an electric current ripping through the air. After two albums’ worth of intimate upheaval and hard rock fury, UK rock band The Hunna have shed all pretense and found a new core: A raw, uninhibited kind of in-your-face vulnerability that skips the introductions and gets straight to the point. It’s powerfully direct – some may even find it abrasive – but damn, if it isn’t catchy. Feverish and uncompromising, The Hunna deliver a cathartic overhaul on third album I’d Rather Die Than Let You In, offering a dose of realism, nihilism, inspiration, and empowerment through some of their hardest, heaviest material to date.
Friday night make-up’s runnin’ down your face
Hanging on with your hands around my waist now
Tattoo the scars so we don’t forget the hate
With my head on your heart and your hair on my pillow
You and me babe, with our kamikaze ways
They tell us we’re forsaken time and time again
But we know they’re shaking,
yeah they should be condemned
We are the young and faded
We are the lost and wasted
We are, we are the young and faded
Lost and wasted
– “Young & Faded,” The Hunna
Released October 2nd via 300 Entertainment, I’d Rather Die Than Let You In is a seismic storm of intense hard rock energy and intimate emotion.
Don’t be fooled by the album’s title, for it’s not directed at you: This is The Hunna in their truest form, letting all of us in to see, hear, and feel their emotions more clearly and vividly than ever before. It’s inner turmoil manifest in explosive alternative, emo energies the likes of which we had tasted on 2016’s 100 and 2018’s Dare, and now it’s ever-present on a record that reels through the deep end in search of understanding, connection, self-discovery, and meaning.
“I feel this album is our most honest album yet and we held nothing back on this one,” singer/guitarist Ryan Potter tells Atwood Magazine. “It was a true catharsis for us, and the album holds exactly how we were feeling and how we feel for the future.”
Active for just over five years’ time, The Hunna’s short career has been the thing of rock and roll dreams, with Potter, lead guitarist Dan Dorney, bassist Junate Angin, and drummer Jack Metcalfe taking the world by storm with their unapologetic and expressive take on a familiar hard rock sound. For their third album, the Watford band worked with legends like Travis Barker, Josh Dunn, and Pete Wentz, and teamed up with esteemed producer John Feldmann (Blink-182, Twenty One Pilots, Panic! At The Disco, Black Veil Brides & All Time Low). The result finds them digging deeper into themselves than they ever had before – and finding a treasure trove of feeling off which to create.
“I think the experience in general, working with Feldy and all the incredible artists was a first for us and it really pushed us…” Potter reflects. “Compared to the environment of previous records, it really made us better ourselves and fall in love with music again.”
I’d Rather Die Than Let You In‘s overall message – if a half hour’s worth of music can be dwindled down to just one thing – is one that hinges not on anger, but on humility: There’s a desire to persist and persevere, to live, and to be free of these demons throughout the band’s stunning performance. “I want to feel something – ’cause anything is better than nothing,” Potter sings at one particularly volatile moment of truth. He’s not tired – he’s just over the bullshit.
Potter hopes The Hunna’s fans can get over it, too. Figure out what matters most to you, and focus on that – or in other words, “save your breath now.”
“We hope listeners feel empowered,” the frontman says. “We hope they’ll find strength from the stories to take on their own situations fighting adversity wherever it may be; we hope they feel it’s okay to feel whatever way they need or want in times of despair, and find new fight to take them through the dark times. There is always light.”
The band affectionately call this LP their “Hunna horror story.” Intimate upheaval isn’t easy or simple: There’s a lot to unpack musically and lyrically, and who better to do that than the band themselves? Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside The Hunna’s I’d Rather Die Than Let You In with Atwood Magazine as Ryan Potter goes track-by-track through the music and lyrics of his band’s third full-length album!
We hope they feel it’s okay to feel whatever way they need or want in times of despair, and find new fight to take them through the dark times. There is always light.
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:: stream/purchase The Hunna here ::
Stream: ‘I’d Rather Die Than Let You In’ – The Hunna
:: Inside I’d Rather Die Than Let You In ::
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One Hell Of A Gory Story
We made this piece of music back in early 2019 whilst we were on tour, we actually used part of it for a tour video, we loved it so much and immediately felt like it would be the perfect opening for the new album. We like to call this album our own “Hunna horror story,” and this opening track is almost like the introduction to a theatre production. It sets up what the album is essentially about and sets up the story. It speaks about “despair filling the air and a thick black shadow haunting the sky” this is in relation to our situation of finding out our management and label had been taking us for a ride and the beginning of the fall out, “the get it boys” are ourselves & “the damn dirty villain” being our ex label head and manager.
As it goes on it starts to refer to the world & acts that were happening and have grown since making the album “Secretly operating in a lawless state,” the people start to wonder, has it always been this way? Has our home always been so full of hate? It touches on the lies & ignorance from our ‘leaders’ if we can call them that & the damage & heartache they & ourselves have caused to the world we live in. “I don’t think y’all are ready for this, this is gonna be gory, will the get it boys survive this Hunna horror story”. It was written with a comic book style imagination & is something we’ve always wanted to delve into.
I Wanna Know
This song is one of our favourite all time Hunna songs. We wrote it in the last 20 mins of the first session we had with feldy. We had already written “Young & Faded” and “Cover You” that day.. 20 mins left.. let’s go for it, and what came out blew us away. It was exactly the road we wanted to take for this album & we played it summer 2019 to test it with fans & everyone lost their shit.. by the second chorus they were singing along and every time we were asked when it was coming out! It was so great to know people were loving where we wanted to go!
Young & Faded
We wanted to write a song to celebrate the young people of today, send a message that it’s okay to be misunderstood and be in that part of your life which is so excited but at the same time can be frightening, figuring who you really are, what you wanna do, who you wanna be, what you believe in etc all of these things take time and experiences in life shape them. There’s so much pressure & when I was writing the lyrics, I felt strongly that the older generations are so quick to judge and post news painting the young people of today in a bad light, that they’re lazy, obsessed with money, fame and drugs, sit around and just game all day and have no ambition when I think on contrary more and more we see so many young people standing up, educating themselves and making movements to better the way we all live our lives and treat our world, shedding light on issues that have been kept in the dark by older generations or masked by lies. I think there’s a lot the older generations should take responsibility for and now the young people are trying to make a difference, to save us. It’s also got a playful sarcasm to it with the lyric “we are the young and faded, lost and wasted” – you can say we are lost and faded but we are strong and powerful and we’ll show you.
Dark Times
On this album, we feel it’s a coming of age album for us. We’ve learnt a lot about ourselves since the second album, we’ve had to face the hardest decisions and moments in our careers and on top of that just as people we’ve overcome and experienced so much. Life is all about growing and we’ve done a lot of that on this album. Dark times is a song about being frustrated and in despair at evil acts we encounter around the world, it’s almost a song of helplessness, why can’t we brake out of these things, how do we stop the awful acts happening around the world and then the chorus hits this explosive moment where it’s trying to shed some light & hold out hope that one day through all the “dark times” we will find light. This was the first song on the album that we had another artist come by and hang at the studio, this person being Joshua Dun from Twenty One Pilots! Feldy didn’t tell us he was coming so was a huge surprise and so exciting that he wanted to be apart of the record. Huge fans of Twenty One Pilots and he’s such a genuine dude, was the start of a crazy journey!
One Second Left
This track is about us being on tour, I find hard to sleep most of the time and let my mind relax but I find it almost impossible on tour with the travelling on the bus as well. It literally feels like at any moment sometimes you’re going to drive right off a cliff, I also think about my family and just everything that we’ve got coming up each day, it can send you into a really tough place of exhaustion and your mind plays tricks on you. This song is about me being in my bunk and trying to escape those moments. This one is one of our favourites cos it’s atmosphere is very different to our previous albums, also because Pete fucking Wentz came in and worked on it with us which again was such a trip! I had his bass when I was a teen and seen fallout boy so many times, again another incredible punch yourself moment for me.
Lost
This song again, shows a different side to us and one that I don’t think people will expect. We’ve had so many ideas that with our previous label and management were warned off doing them, so for this record we could finally experiment with all of those ideas. This song almost has a chase and status vibe about it which we love! We wanted to have a song that live the drop was a nod to chase and status but always maintaining what the Hunna is. We can’t wait to play this one, the song is about those moments when you’re feeling low or upset or like you just need a personal day or minute whatever it is, you need some release and time, doing what we do that’s hard to come by as it’s a very demanding place to be especially when we were in the middle of leaving our last label and management there were times I felt I just wanted to go away somewhere and not tell anyone, just to have some me time and feel present again.
One Day You’ll Thank Me
This song is one of our favourites to play, it’s at such a nice tempo and chorus hits so hard! We also got to really experiment with 808’s and electronic instrumentation which is what we wanted to do on this album.. open up our horizons by going from just a vocal, 3 guitars and drums to delving into other genres. We all listen to so many styles of music, I’m heavily influenced as a singer by the weeknd and rnb artists & “the hunna” came from our love for hip hop. This song has also got a real kinda toxic emo feel which is where our roots are as teenagers so combining the electronic hip hop verses with then full band chorus’ worked beautifully. Super happy with how this one turned out!
If This Is Love
This is the gem of the album! It went through a lot of different versions but the finished song is way beyond what we imagined. I had the lyrics to the song for quite a few years and always wanted a female voice to tell the story with me, again previous label and management tried to get us off that idea so now we could finally go for it! I heard an artist called phem on Spotify and was so intrigued straight away by her tone of voice and I thought what she was doing was very unique, that maybe a year or two before going to do the album. We got invited to the Halsey Halloween party in Hollywood whilst recording and by chance met Phem at the party, we got talking and she loved our music and vice versa. I sent her some of what we’d been working on and she was super stoked so she came by and asked her to jump on the song… very quickly it was like everything had come together, our voices blended so well together and took the atmosphere of the song to the next level. It’s such a raw honest song and it felt like fate the way it all worked out!
Anything is Better Than Nothing
This song is a heavy hitter!! Another one we can’t wait to play live, we worked on it with Mike Duce (lower than Atlantis & headache) & Dan Lancaster along with feldy. It’s a song about the kind of limbo period of when we were dealing with our previous label trying to stop us from releasing music or doing anything as the Hunna again and being with lawyers etc when we just wanna do what we love! You never think when you’re a young kid with a dream that you’d be in that situation so it was a lot and it was scary for a time, within that period I found myself getting a bit lost and trying to pre occupy my mind with something else which was alcohol & drugs but using them a lot more frequently than perhaps before. I remember one day getting to a place where I was just exhausted and couldn’t get out of bed cos of everything happening and the effects of the drugs and alcohol and just feeling awful and almost like I couldn’t remember what had happened over the last months or so, almost like a blur. I realised I needed to get a grip back on reality & put that away otherwise it and they were gonna beat me and no good was coming from trying to escape I guess. “I just wanna feel something”
Cover You
This was the first release from the album & it’s a biggie anyway but it also features rock drum icon Travis Barker! Total trip, we never thought we’d be in that position, the fact he along with everyone else involved on the record want to be apart of it and support us is overwhelming and after everything that had happened juiced us back up so much, he’s mesmerising to watch and be around. The whole recording process with feldy and everyone was exactly what we needed.. it made us almost fall back in love with what we were doing.
Horror
Horror is a song written about the earth and touching on the issue of global warning. “My world cries but all we do is feed it lies” representing the fires on LA and in other parts of the world along with other disasters that happen is our world crying out & all we do or are told by people in higher power are lies and no action, we let it continue to what end? It’s a subject on other albums we weren’t in the mind set and like I said we’ve grown up a lot and the way we view the world and things that happen within it are very different. People post the horror of the fires and disasters on Instagram etc but nothing is actually being done to prevent it.. everyone just gets some ‘likes’ for it. “Filter out the horror” was a lyric that flew around when i was writing the lyrics. We were there in LA when the fires were happening, it was like hell on Earth.
I’d Rather Die Than Let You In
This song is the perfect song to end the album. I couldn’t pick a better song. It holds everything that the album is about and everything we feel. It’s a song about tenacity “I know I know I know, I should let you go, leave the past behind but I would rather die than to let you in”. This song has so much angst and anger, it’s a song about revenge and showing power back to our previous situation. They told us we wouldn’t do or be anything without them. This album and especially this song is a big middle finger. The fans filled us with support and confidence the whole time and they were a huge part of us finding more strength to keep going and they fought with us every step of the way. This is where the new Hunna era begins and we can’t wait for it.
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