Features

Five years after their last album, San Francisco's Nothington is finally back with a new album! "In The End" will be out Feb 17 via Red Scare and it could very well be their best album to date. The band will also be trekking all over Europe later this month with shows in the US to follow. We caught up with Chris Matulich to see what's happening in camp Nothington and to clear up a couple of small misconceptions. (photo credit : Steven Matview)

PRT: You have been on a short hiatus in 2016. Why is it you felt you needed some time away from Nothington? And how come you picked things up again not that long after?

Chris: Well, actually our hiatus was very long.  We came back from hiatus in 2016, after about a 3 year break from touring.  Part of the reason for this long break was to catch up with the rest of our lives at home, and the other reason is that we took a long time to perfect all the aspects of this new record. 

PRT: I heard a lot about how San Francisco has changed the last couple of years with rent skyrocketing. Are things really that different?

Chris: Yes, things are different.  You can see it when you go out to bars that used to have a punk rock client base.  You can see how few punk bands are left in San Francisco compared to 7 years ago.  The neighborhoods have changed a lot when you  walk down the street and look at what kind of shops are there.  But as someone visiting the city, I doubt anyone else would be able to tell. 

PRT: This year marks the 10 year anniversary of “All In”, your first album. How do you look back on it? Anything you would have done differently?

Chris: I would have taken more time to write a few more songs.  Usually when you write an album, you write 15 songs, then you record the best 12, then you only put the best 10 songs on the record.  For that one, we literally just put the first 10 songs we could write on it.  But it came out pretty good anyway.

PRT: To celebrate the occasion, you will be doing a European tour in February. Why a tour in honor of your first album, when you have a new one ready to go?

Chris: It’s not really in honor of our first album at all.  That’s a misconception that it seems was lost in translation to a few people we’ve talked to in Germany.  We are celebrating the fact that we have been a band for 10 years.  That’s a long time, it’s a big deal to us.  So we are celebrating both our new album and the 10 year anniversary of starting this band together.  We really aren’t trying to celebrate our first album at all, the focus for us is the new ablum.

PRT: Speaking of the new album, “In The End” is your first release in five years. Which is a pretty long time in between releases. What took you so long?

Chris: Well as I explained earlier, we took a few years to catch up with life at home.  We had careers and families and relationships to catch up with after touring a lot for 5 years.  We needed to re-connect.  We also took a lot of time to make sure everything on In The End sounded the best that it could.  The recording and mixing process was a long period of time compared to most albums.

PRT: I read in an older interview from 2013 that you already had 10 songs ready for a new album. Did all of those find their way onto “In The End”?

Chris: I don’t really know haha.  I bet most of them did.

PRT: You recently shared the video for the song “The Lies I Need”, which is apparently your first video ever. How come that never happened before?

Chris: It’s actually our second video.  We also released one for a song called “Cobblestones” a few weeks earlier.  We never did music videos before because I’m not a huge fan of them.  But once I started messing around with some ideas for the videos, I decided we should give it a go.

PRT: What’s up next for Nothington once the European tour is over and the new album is out?

Chris: We’ll be doing some dates in the US and probably will see you for some festivals later this year.

PRT: One last question… in the movie Almost Famous there is a scene where the band is in a plane and they think they are going to crash and so they come out with all these big secrets. If you were in that situation, what would you confess?

Chris: I would confess that I sometime hide beers in the backstage area for myself so that Jay doesn’t drink them all before I get a chance.