Seaway Expands Beyond Their Pop-Punk Roots on ‘Big Vibe’

Four albums into their career with the release of Big Vibe, Canadian pop-rockers Seaway have found their niche, and offer a pristine model of how to seamlessly glue the early ‘00s pop punk they grew up with, to their own matured, riff driven alt-rock sound, that digs deep. 

“Big Vibe is the record we have been working towards our entire careers,” the band said.

The title track, “Big Vibe” takes all the fun, nostalgia of Fallout Boy and Mayday Parade paired with a new sense and perspective with a sound that is only reminiscent of pop-punk, and instead provides a detour to alternative and pop.

“There was an early demo for this song and parts of it were thrown around for a while, but it just simply wasn’t hitting,” guitarist Andrew Eichinger told American Songwriter about the title track. “Finally, near the end of pre-production when we basically had all the songs mapped out for the album, we decided we should do one more. Once we really started diving in, the song just came together so organically and instantly became everyone’s favorite. It immediately felt like an all-encompassing song for the record and everything the band has done up until this point.”

“We definitely decided to draw from a lot of different influences to create what we think is a pretty dynamic record,” he added. “There’s more rock, there’s more pop. It’s harder, it’s softer. But I think at the end of the day, reaching for new influences that we may not have felt comfortable doing in the past, has really paid off.”

Seaway’s new recipe for what makes a great song was born from fictional stories as much as their personal lives. “There was definitely growth,” Eichinger said. “Naturally, a lot of the songs are personal, but we also explored concepts having to do with fictional stories, fantasies and other things happening in the world.”

Songs like “Sick Puppy,” described as one of the most depressing and outright miserable songs the band has written to date, is the band’s sincerest attempt to show another facet to their creative personalities.  And with lyrics like, friend of a friend, gambled with a bad hand again, trying to fill the hole inside his heard, from a smoke stained Vegas bed, followed by the chorus, but I love it, cause I’m a sick puppy and I need some love, shows the band as serious songwriters, who write about real issues experienced by many but often ignored and overlooked.

“Brain in a Jar” opens the album with a lighter essence and presents Seaway adhering to their new approach to writing, while seeking to devise a song that is not crafted from one inspiration or influence but many. The song offered an expansion of styles and technical song structure.  “It was one of the earliest ideas for the record and we just wanted to make it an upbeat rocker,” Eichinger said. “I think the chorus extension/B chorus is what gives it a bit of a modern pop feel and that was added fairly late after the song was pretty much done. Adding that bit was a game changer and really completed the song.” 

In the past Seaway has leaned heavily on their pop-punk roots, making albums like Hoser in 2013, Colour Blind in 2015 and their previous album, Vacation, all of which fit well into that genre. But they wanted to put their best effort forth to make a record that wasn’t so much planned, dissected or written for an audience.

“We definitely went into this album with more of a care-free attitude than we have in the past,” Eichinger explained. “Not in the sense that we didn’t care about what we were doing or about what the songs were going to sound like, but more a sense of laid-back creativity and an anything goes kind of mentality. There was no worrying about how a song might sound too different for Seaway, or how some people might not like this or that. Instead there was just a focus on writing good songs and at this point in our musical careers, that’s all we’re really worried about.”

Seaway is excited to release Big Vibe on October 16 via Pure Noise Records and you can order a copy here. They are always busy and are currently writing new material for their next project. Stay in the know here.