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MTV Radio: Do you feel today that this album has the largest sound you guys have ever produced as a band?

Brett Scallions: Yeah, by far. It's only our second major release, so I think we definitely topped the first record, and anything before that was basically just demo stuff, more or less. We really took our time to try to make this record the best that it could be, sonically. Capturing the aggression, I guess you could say.

MTV: What was the first song that you decided was going to be on the album?

Carl Bell: A song called "Solace."

Scallions: Some of the songs we were working up on the last tour that we did. And we actually started playing some of the songs on the last part of the tour, just to figure out what we wanted to do with them. There were about four or five songs there that we already had a pretty good grasp on before we went into the studio, and then the others, we just kind of laid the groundwork. Everything changes, of course, once you get there, but "Solace" is one of the songs we've been playing for awhile. As well as a song called "Innocent." [RealVideo]

Bell:We recorded a song called "Bad Day" [RealAudio] for the last record and that's been in our repertoire forever. The label pretty much put a gun to our head and said, "That song is going on the record."

MTV: The record itself is just filled with, if I may say so, aggression and angst, and there's an underlying theme of pain and hurt. Was that a conscious decision?

Bell: I think it comes from just being more inspired by darker times. I think you're more creative when there's a little bit of something that's stirring you up inside. I don't know, maybe one day we'll write, you know, "Groovy," or "Groovy Kind Of Love," or something, but that just doesn't inspire me.

Scallions: Frustration does.

MTV: So how did "Hemorrhage (In My Hands)" turn out to be the first single? Was that a group decision?

Scallions: I think the band just felt really strong about that being the first one. We wanted something that had a lot of power and depth and aggression in it, and I think that song just had all the right little trinkets in it that make it a great song, and we convinced everyone else that that's what we wanted to go with.

Bell: We've been on the road for about two years and I'd been writing a lot of stuff. And we came off in November from Australia, and we were trying to go into rehearsals in January. We were like, "Man, we need some more songs." That was one of the songs that came out of the one month off out of the two years that we've had. We got together and rehearsed it, and then when Brett sang it, it really blew it over the top. That chill factor goes off, and you go, "We got something here."(RealVideo)

Bell: Also, I had been listening to this Blinker The Star record ["August Everywhere"], and there are just amazing strings on there, and I flipped through it and found that David Campbell did the arrangements. At that time, it didn't register with me who David Campbell was. So we got to L.A. and we called David Campbell up, and we're like, "Oh, that's Beck's dad!" So on the way over to meet Beck's dad, we were wondering if this is really Beck's dad. We knocked on the door, the guy opened the door, and we were like, "That's Beck's dad!" Perfect. He looks just like Beck. A beautiful person. Great arrangements on the song. It really worked out great.