Live at Electric Bristol: Alien Ant Farm

new beginning as a band first formed in 1996 can get. At the same time, it’s not a record that dismisses

and disregards the past. Far from it. A record of deep contemplation, ~mAntras~ was born out of various

trials and tribulations—its songs don’t just take the listener on a musical journey, but, as its title

suggests, also on a personal and spiritual one. After such a long time without making new music, there’s

obviously a lot for them to catch up on. As it happens, they’d actually tried to do this earlier. The band

had recorded four of its songs a number of years before—including “Everything She wAnts”, a cover of

the classic Wham! Track that was first released in 2020—but then things kind of stuttered because of the

pandemic.

“When that song first came out,” says Mitchell, “the idea was to just kind of steamroll along and keep it

going, but shit happens. We had a falling out with our producer, and I was personally just drinking and

not really liking where I was in my life. Not to make it sound dramatic, but I felt like I needed to try and

get better, and maybe do that by myself, in a weird way. Usually, you should rely on friends to guide you

through that stuff, but being in a band is a little bit like being in a marriage. I don't know what was

rubbing me the wrong way, and I can't blame the band, but I just felt like I needed to step away for a

second and get my act together. I felt like I was pretty useless to anyone if I wasn't useful to myself. So

we took a break, and I think it was for the best, because it was so much better to have that clarity. It was

very necessary to hit the reset button.”

“There was a lot of shit that happened in those years,” adds Corso. “We obviously had such success at an

early age, and luckily we’re still here. The band has been through some serious adversity, and this album

is the product of that and the soundtrack to it.”

Alien Ant Farm have encountered a lot of that adversity since blowing up in 2001 with two iconic

songs—first their own composition, “Movies”, and then their classic, generation-defining cover of

Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”—but none more so between the release of Always And Forever

and this record. It’s no surprise, then, that a lot of it has been captured on the 11 tracks that make up

~mAntras~. As Corso puts it: “Growing up, divorce, children, family, death, band break-ups, bus wrecks,

surgeries, illness, health—everything is in this record. It’s literally a product of all the fucking shit, good

and bad, that we went through.”

All of it, though, was channeled into crafting the most confident and self-assured album of the band’s

career (“The manure makes the flower grow,” quips Mitchell). And despite the false start, when Alien Ant

Farm felt they could pick things up again in terms of making new music, they did just that. What’s more,

they found themselves thoroughly reinvigorated and re-inspired. Older and wiser and no longer as eager

to please the music industry, the band really leaned into what it meant to be themselves on this album.

Though they kept those four initial songs—“The Wrong Things”, “Storms Over”, “What Am I Doing?” and

the Wham! song—the band self-produced the other seven tracks, recording them at Cosgrove’s home

studio.

“To not have to go to LA was great,” says Mitchell. “It is fun to pack up and go to some weird location and

live there and make a record, and we’ve done that a handful of times. We’ve done it almost every way

now. So to be able to just go home and be in comfortable spaces with people you’re comfortable with

meant a lot to us.”

You can hear that sense of comfort in the very fabric of these songs. Beginning with the hypnotic,

sensual groove of opener “The Wrong Things”—a compelling compound of emotional, lyrical angst and

trippy instrumentational layers—this is a record that stays true to its title: a series of mantras that reach

deep into your soul while trying to tear it apart at the same time. Just listen to “Last dAntz”, a song much

more pain-riddled than its typically tongue-in-cheek title would suggest, or the infectious self-flagellation

of “So Cold”, with its mesmerizing nods to prog rock. In fact, prog is one of the most salient influences on

this record. You might be surprised, but that’s not something they’re afraid of in the slightest to admit.

“For a band that released “Smooth Criminal”, we are a crazy prog band,” chuckles Mitchell. “If you

scratch that just a couple of songs in, there’s some real goodness going on in there.”

“Longevity has kind of become the luxury,” says Corso, “because it lets us do all this stuff that we want to

do. It gives us a bit of wiggle room to have those prog tendencies and move in ways that feel good to us.

We’re not really looped into too many musical trends.”

That’s something that affords the band an unusual amount of musical freedom. Whether that’s on the

catchy anthemic rock of “No. 1” or the reggae-tinged torment of “What Am I Doing?”, the breezy yet

downbeat acoustic lament of “Glasses” or their reworking of that Wham! song, ~mAntras~ represents

the freedom of true artistic expression, the eschewing of expectation, the re-solidification of a close-knit

group of friends who have been through thick and thin together and come out—even if it’s almost a

decade later—so much for the better. That’s all consolidated into the title track. True to its name, it’s its

own shapeshifting mantra, one that captures not just the spirit of the record, but encapsulates almost

three decades of the band at the same time.

“For that song,” says Mitchell, “I was thinking ‘What if we just throw in like the whole history of the band

in a three minute chunk?’ It was really fun and it was really emotional. I remember I was tearing up

towards the end of it, singing it. I changed the melodies of the original songs, but there's probably a

good 20 older Alien Ant Farm songs riddled through that one, and it was really cool to do.”

“It was really therapeutic, too,” says Cosgrove, “in the way that mantras are meant to be in a spiritual

way. We healed on this record in a big way.”

“We knew that we needed to heal,” adds Corso, “but we didn’t know just how far we could go. And

where we are now is amazing—we’re firing on all four pistons and everybody’s really motivated, happy

and ready to put this music out.”