Their latest high point is on the horizon tonight. When Kerrang! meets frontman Nathan ‘Tades’ Sanville and guitarist Chris Freeman backstage in a spare dressing room in the O2 Forum Kentish Town, they’re a few hours away from taking the stage at the 2,300-capacity north London venue to play their biggest headline show to date.
The duo are contrasting figures, Tades tucked into an armchair in the corner of the room with his smartphone and vape pen dropped into his lap, his face framed by a chest-length curtain of hair and his backwards baseball cap. A couple of times he’ll briefly reach for his vape and his phone when not talking and responds with a joking but sceptical “Are you sure?” when K! assures him he won’t have to re-answer all the usual questions.
To his right, Chris makes himself comfortable with a beer on the adjacent sofa, all bright eyes and dark curls, reflecting on their first experiences with live music.
“We started the band before either of us had been to a show,” he says. “For me, I watched YouTube videos of bands doing DIY shows at the First Unitarian Church in Philly or Gilman in California. We didn’t chat about what kind of thing we were trying to go after, we just started playing. We were mostly just resentful about where we grew up (laughs). They wanted cover songs and there was not a local scene, otherwise we would’ve done something with it. We just wanted to write our own songs, really.”
“We work together very well, the way that we write,” says Tades, when Chris notes that all of Why Would I Watch was written in the studio following an intensive period of touring after the pandemic. “Everything fell into place very easily,” Tades continues. “The bits and pieces start to make a lot more sense. There’s a lot less searching and a lot more finding, y’know?”