Jack Underkofler Gets Honest About Dead Poet Society’s New Album

“We really made it an intention to push ourselves as far as we could go.”

Dead Poet Society frontman Jack Underkofler joined Loudwire Nights on Tuesday (Sept. 15) to help get fans ready for the band’s next album, Monarch. Listen to the full conversation in the player near the end of this article.

“There’s a feeling in your gut when you’re writing that is really easy to ignore because often it’s not the feeling that you wanted,” Underkofler admitted to Loudwire Nights‘ Chuck Armstrong about the journey of this new record.

“You’ll write something and you want it to be cool, like you want it to be the sickest thing you’ve ever heard so bad. You spent all this time doing it, but your gut is like, ‘It’s not,’ but it’s really easy to ignore that and be like, ‘No, it’s good. It’s good.'”

Underkofler shared this because he said from the beginning of the writing process for Monarch, he and his bandmates all committed to not only pay attention to that feeling in their guts, but to follow it.

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“I think everybody really tried to just listen to that no matter how painful it was to listen to that,” he said.

“I think we ended up with something that is, that really defines this band.”

What Else Did Dead Poet Society’s Jack Underkofler Discuss on Loudwire Nights?

• The difficulty of listening to his gut: “You have to brace for the argument that will ensue. Being on the receiving end of it, too, you have to go through the analysis of like, ‘Do I fight for this?’ I think a lot of us did that on this album, where it was like somebody was like, ‘No,’ and you were like, ‘But yes.’ It’s a challenge to get to that spot.”
• One of his favorite songs he’s ever written — “Lost” — is on Monarch: “The band is very collaborative and most of the songwriting comes from the other Jack [Collins, guitarist] and me, but there’s a lot of input along the way, too. There’s one song in particular that I had a heavy hand in writing that when we got into the studio with Paul [Meany, producer] everybody just started changing everything on it. And it was bumming me out. And I got so discouraged … I sat down with Paul and he was so receptive to it. I was like, ‘Look, I wrote this song this way for a reason and I know it’s a demo and it’s hard to hear, but trust me, just go with me on this. It’s going to turn out awesome.’ And so he did. And I kind of steamrolled everybody until it got to a point where everybody’s like, ‘That is sick.'”
• The next step for Dead Poet Society: “We just want to be the best live band out there. I think that’s the next step for us. We’ve spent years playing live, we’ve done tour after tour after tour after tour, so I think that our comfortability on stage kind of skyrocketed, going through a bunch of high-pressure scenarios. And we’ve been so intentional with the look of this album, the feel of this album, that I think we all feel a pressure to make sure that the live show reflects that feeling, too.”

Listen to the Full Interview in the Podcast Player Below

Jack Underkofler joined Loudwire Nights on Tuesday, Sept. 15; the show replays online here, and you can tune in live every weeknight at 7PM ET or on the Loudwire app; you can also see if the show is available on your local radio station and listen to interviews on-demand here, as well as on Apple and Spotify.