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Features: Track By Track: Funeral For A Friend

Drummer Ryan Richards talks Rock Sound through the making of new album 'Welcome Home Armageddon' one song at a time.

In less than a fortnight Funeral For A Friend will unleash their fifth album 'Welcome Home Armageddon', it's a record that we love and one that has made the quintet feel like a brand new band, a pretty impressive feat a decade into their career.

We recently sat down with drummer Ryan Richards and got him to talk us through the new album track by track, telling us how the songs came together, what he loves about the band's reinvigorated sound and how important it is to finally get a finger snaps credit on a song (seriously, it's a massive deal). You can read the fruits of that conversation below...


01. This Side of Brightness
"This actually started as a short piece of music that gave us the melody we wrote 'Old Hymns' around. We went back to this piece after writing 'Old Hymns' and decided that it would work really well, not only as an intro to the song, but to the album. We're on our fifth album and have never used an intro track, so it seemed like a good place to start as we meant to go on - by doing something that we had never done before on a record."

02. Old Hymns
"Gav [Burroughs, guitar] originally came up with the 'This Side of Brightness' piece and we sat in my room trying to construct a song out of it. As we were doing that Matt sent us an email saying that he had some lyrics he really liked that he thought would work well over a faster/punkier melodic-hardcore track, something along the lines of the bands we grew up listening to from that genre like As Friends Rust, Rise Against and Propaghandhi. That gave us a bit of direction, the chords and melody from the intro worked really well played really fast - so became 'Old Hymns'!"

03. Front Row Seats To The End of The World
"It was a lot of fun for me to do a lead vocal again on a track, as it's probably something I've not done since way back on the first record - and even then it was a co-vocal with Matt [Davies-Kreye, vocals] on tracks like 'Red Is The New Black' and 'This Year's Most Open Heartbreak'. It's also the first track I've ever done finger snaps on too! I remember reading the liner notes to Michael Jackson's 'Bad' and seeing him credited as 'Vocals and Finger Snaps' and it inspired me to one day be credited as such on one of our albums. I've now dreamed the dream - and it's a beautiful thing."

04. Sixteen
"One of the two tracks we included from 'The Young And Defenceless' EP (Damned If You Do... being the other). We included this track because it ( seemed to go down the best out of the EP tracks at our live shows and we really wanted to make an album full of really exciting tracks that translated well to the live setting. Matt originally came up with an acoustic skeleton of the song and we all loved it, originally it actually sounded more like a Secret Show (Matt's country side project) song, but the melody and the lyrics were so good that we had to find a way to make it work. It was definitely a lot of fun having the band interpret the parts in our own individual ways and turning it into a Funeral for a Friend song."

05. Aftertaste
"This is another first for us - being that the song was written and performed on a seven string guitar using a tuning we'd never used before. You can really hear that come through in the riffs. I think using different tuning and instrumentation allowed us to recapture that classic FFAF sound but offer a fresh take on it. It's definitely got that trademark sound, but in a new and different way - which is pretty exciting for us and our fans."

06. Spinning Over The Island
"Something else we haven't done in a while is a tracks like 'Escape Artists...', 'Novella' or 'Hospitality' that take you through a whole host of different riffs, sections and moods, bringing you out at the end of a song somewhere completely different from where you started. This is one of my favourite tracks on the record."

07. Man Alive
"This song was actually the first idea Gav brought to the table after joining the band, and I think he made it obvious to us what we had been missing for the last few records - RIFFS! Gav has definitely reawakened the guitar demon within Kris [Coombs-Roberts, guitar], and I think this song was the catalyst for that. It was the first heavier song I'd written with Gav for about eight years (after leaving Hondo Maclean) and we locked in straight away again, which you can hear on the intro and the verse. It's quite reminiscent of the way we used to lock the guitars and drums together in our old band and Matt's done a great job of getting the melody in there over it."

08. Owls (Are Watching)
"Having Rich [Boucher, bassist] join the band was a real bonus as he's a great all round musician, and Owls was the first idea he brought to us on guitar, it actually came together the quickest out of any song on the record in a really natural and organic way. When we've done the more 'spacey' and 'ambient' songs in the past I think we've probably been guilty of not putting the our stamp on them and let them drift away a bit, but we've really made sure on 'Owls' that, beneath all the harmonies, keys, strings and guitar effects, that there's still power and urgency to the track - and that it's something that really belongs on a Funeral for a Friend record."

09. Damned If You Do, Dead If You Don’t
"The other track we brought in from 'The Young And Defenceless' EP. We actually decided on this track making the cut after playing it on our last few tours and seeing how well people respond to it. It's a really vibey track and huge fun to play. Definitely a big live track."

10. Medicated
"This is probably the most 'different' song on the record, just for the instrumentation and the vibe, which is a lot more relaxed than the rest of the album. We wanted to write a more mellow song without making it a ballad or too light to play live - and I think we've achieved that. Probably the track that will surprise people most on the album. Throwing a live drum n' bass rhythm into a down tempo track was definitely something we've never done before!"

11. Broken Foundation
"Probably the heaviest track we've ever written and, again, a lot of fun to play. This is probably the one I'm most looking forward to playing live. Again - there’s a first on there with Kris doing his first recorded guitar solo! He's been waiting almost ten years to unleash the beast and now it's out for all to feast over!"

12. Welcome Home Armageddon
"Like 'Sixteen' this was one that Matt brought as an acoustic skeleton, it also changed a lot but kept the melody that attracted us all to the idea in the first place. As an album closer, it was always the clear choice - both for vibe and melodic content."



'Welcome Home Armageddon' is out on March 14 on Distiller Records, to read much more about the new album pick up the latest issue of Rock Sound.

Andrew Kelham