German outfit The New Roses have been steadily building their fan base across four previous albums, but have struck gold with their latest offering Sweet Poison, which is out on October 21 via Napalm Records.
An album full of rock goodness, Sweet Poison embraces 1980s Retro style rock with enough lashings of modern day angst to elevate it into a sonic level all of its own.
HEAVY caught up with frontman Timmy Rough to discuss the album on the eve of its release.
“It was supposed to be out last year already,” he began, “and, of course, under the current circumstances there was no chance to release a proper record. So we wrote more songs, we spent more time in the studio and kept on working on it, and now we are so excited to release the new record, because last year we were still able to play festivals and everything but only with older material. For a band, it is always a thrill to play new music to an audience and see the reaction and have a new kind of connection… it’s a magic feeling to play new material to an already existing audience.”
While having its soul drenched in rock, Sweet Poison also contains nods to music both past, present and future rock stylings, with Rough admitting the process through the pandemic was difficult for the band.
“We had to come up with all the material during lockdowns,” he said, “and that was a big challenge for us. Usually we write our material on tour, so we write about stuff that we see and that we go through on tour but this time was a whole different situation. We decided not to write about the COVID topics like the frustrations and the tears and the fear of being forced to stay off stage. We thought that everybody in our audience is sick of it. You turn on the TV, it’s all about COVID. You turn on the radio, it’s all about COVID. Your best friend calls you, twenty seconds later, you talk about COVID. So we thought there’s enough about COVID out there, we don’t need another record or musical therapy with that, so our intention was to come up with a record that is 100% good time rock and roll. That was our goal, then we looked back on our older material on the first record and topics about our early days in the band and thne I wrote a lot about my teenage days and my wild 20’s and that is how the whole record came together. Everything fell into place from there. We had a lot of demos because we had a lot of time – there was more than 60 demos I guess – and we picked our favourite 11 songs and here it is.”
In the full interview, Tim discusses going back to their roots and how they tapped into that, the singles released so far and how they represent the album, the guitar driven opener My Kinda Crazy and how it sets the tone, the acoustic track True Love, future plans and more.
