After my first interview with Colorado band Rain in July last year, Rain In July talked this week about their first record and is excited to announce their release of their first EP on February 7th. In addition to the EP release they also partnered with The Ananda Agency for a show commemorating the release of the EP February 12th at the Marquis Theater with bands such as All Wrong, Safe So Simple, The Abstract, and Maddie’s Changed. Many in the area came out on the 12th to celebrate the release Rain In July’s first record. Aside from the show I asked them the hard hitting questions relating to the EP and what they see for themselves in the future as the band progresses on in their journey to success.

Enjoy and Happy Listening!

So what can you tell me about the new single that's out right now from your new EP Trying to Breath?

The first single we released is called Knockout. It was definitely one of our favorites from the EP, and is a fun, upbeat song that we thought was the perfect way to debut our sound to a lot of people. It was our first time in a professional studio making music that sounds professional so we wanted our first track to be a song that we feel represented our sound well. We think Knockout does that, although don’t expect the entire EP to sound similar.

What were your musical influences going into Trying to Breath?

As a band, we took a lot of influence from early 2000’s Emo bands such as Taking Back Sunday, Fall Out Boy, and Dashboard Confessional. In the studio we listened to a lot of State Champs, Pierce The Veil, and Transit which we took elements from while in the recording process.

Vocally, I took a lot of influence from many different places. I really enjoyed Like Pacific’s most recent album, which I really tried to work in (you’ll hear it especially in the final track "Can’t Erase You"). I also took influences from poppier sounding vocalists such as The 1975, Oh Wonder, and James Arthur. It’s kind of funny because what we listened to on the drive every day in the studio definitely shaped my ideas heading into the studio. We all have very different musical tastes, whether it be Yuta (Guitar) playing some great pop punk bands such as Grayscale and The Wonder Years, Ethan (Drums) playing Jimmy Eat World and Taking Back Sunday, or Reilly (Bass/Vocals) playing some real heavy stuff, I always loved hearing how those bands sounded on recordings.

What do you want people to take from this EP?

I’d like for people to take away an understanding of who we are as a band from this EP. We really feel like it’s an accurate representation of a sound that we’ve been working on for quite some time now, and we’d love listeners to hear the extent of it. We think that our sound is branching off from the “typical pop punk” sound and we feel that the EP encompasses that.

What was the music making process surrounding the EP, I'm sure there were other songs you considering before narrowing it it down to these few? What made you say this looks done as a final product?

We have been writing songs for over a year now for this EP, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. We wrote so many songs, and had so many different ideas before boiling it down to our 4 favorites. I think that once our time in the studio began approaching it was known by everyone that these were the 4 songs for the EP because it really did feel right.

As far as the final product, I don’t know if you ever take a step back and look at a piece of art and say “it’s perfect, nothing else needs to be done” but I think we came about as close as we could and we are all extremely happy with it. We had the most amazing experience we could have dreamed of at Rusty Sun Audio with Nick Nodurft. He really filled in the blanks where we couldn’t and helped us so much with the record so that by the end of it, he had as much input on these songs as we did and that’s what we needed.

What were some of your inspirations for some of these tracks?

Lyrically, the ideas for most of these songs came from my personal life and just kinda expanded after that. Reilly (our bassist/vocalist) is amazing at reworking lyrics to just roll off the tongue and that really helped a lot. I write a lot of poetry and lyrics whenever I can and most of these ideas came from that. Breathe is the song that means the most to me lyrically, we’ve had that song for over a year now, and I originally wrote the chorus about a week after my Grandma died a couple years ago. The entire EP revolves around one line in that song, Trying to Breath, just trying to catch a breath when there isn’t one available, and overcoming everything that seems to just want to pull you down.

So after finally completing this EP what's up next for you guys ?

We have some shows that we are really excited about coming up! We hibernated for a really long time writing and recording this EP and we are extremely stoked to get back to playing live shows regularly. We are headlining our favorite venue on February 12th for our EP Release Show at The Marquis in Denver, and after that we are playing with Carousel Kings, Abandoned By Bears, and Bad Case Of Big Mouth on March 15th at Herman’s Hideaway in Denver.

We’ll be touring this Summer, and we are back to writing again. The studio really taught us a lot and we feel that we grew as songwriters, and we will be playing a bunch of new songs at our upcoming shows.

Honestly, we are so excited for life after the release. We spent so long writing and recording this record and we just can’t wait to begin to play shows supporting it.