Frank Carter and The Rattlesnakes are about to kickstart February with the Dark Rainbow World Tour, travelling across the UK, Europe, and the United States. I was lucky enough to secure a chat with Dean Richardson and Frank Carter to gush about the brilliance and authenticity of their album before their Record Store UK Tour concluded in Sheffield.
After asking the dynamic duo how they felt about their upcoming headliner shows, Carter instantly surged with enthusiasm: “I feel really comfortable in it… while it’s wild and it’s a lot of work it’s actually one of the only times I can ever relax […] I’m really grateful, it couldn’t come sooner.” He then summarised his passion with “I’m so excited, I just want to sing.”
Despite their range between “heavy, older songs” and the “new tenderness” they have accumulated, the “formidable” band have managed to attract a myriad of loyal audiences from all ages since they formed in 2015. When asked which cities they are most excited to perform in, Richardson did not have an ounce of hesitation in his response: “Manchester, the only answer, surely?” Carter continued: “Manchester has just always from the beginning been an amazing time for us […] I think there was a moment where every time we would announce a show it would sell out.” The band is returning to Manchester Academy early this month after just over two years, and they are just as excited as we are!
I then asked them why they felt Dark Rainbow was a fitting name for their album, to which Carter promptly responded, “I don’t think it could have been called anything else.” Richardson took over by saying “The other names that were the early contenders were also nature-oriented, I found an old playlist of what the album was called at one point […] I think the nature element is at its core.”
He and Carter then hinted at the irrefutable closeness within the band, and how it makes their work “So organic:” “You get the feedback in you, does that look right? Does that feel right? […] It needs to just feel good, and it felt right.” Carter then resumed with “We don’t even need to converse about it, we’ll just send each other a message: ‘I changed the playlist to this’, we trust each other implicitly, so much of our communication is done without words.” Referring back to the name, he said “As soon as it was called Dark Rainbow it was unwavering for me […] well done, you’ve just found your album, now you’ve just got to find the songs.”
Dark Rainbow is an extremely thematic album, yet exhilarates great variety – ranging from songs like ‘Brambles’ that burst with sentimentality, warning about the “stickiness and spikeyness of love”; to the erotic essence of ‘American Spirit’ and ‘Honey’. Carter himself said that some of the songs “were a gift from the future, more like a guiding light from far away, and you’re not supposed to be there yet.” Here, he was referring to an archive of songs, some of which they worked on for this album: “We used to have a folder called ‘The Graveyard’, if a song wasn’t quite right or it was a bit of a struggle we’d put it in the graveyard […] then we realised, every song we put in the graveyard, to come out of there has to be a zombie, this is the wrong energy. We changed the name of the folder to ‘The Garden’ and now everything that goes in there is just a little seed that needs a little longer to grow […] they need a little more nurturing.”
‘Brambles’ is more than just a single; it is a personification of the inescapable nature of love. “You can find yourself tangled up in it, and once you’re in that kind of love it takes a little bit of you and you leave a little bit of yourself with the other person – doesn’t matter if you manage to get untangled, part of you is forever intwined.” Carter’s emotive dialogue was followed by a comical expression from Richardson: “’Brambles’ for me now represents lying very still in the middle of nature in a massive ghillie suit, that video definitely changed my relationship with the song.”
“With a video you’ve got the opportunity to embellish a song and to help people’s understanding of it.” When asked why the titular track ‘A Dark Rainbow’ did not have a video, Carter said that there are “bold decisions on what should be a single and what shouldn’t be a single, ‘A Dark Rainbow’ has a fucking chorus and a half, but it could never be a single, and from that it just means that it doesn’t stand in the running to have a video made. If I had my own way I wouldn’t make videos for singles, I’d make videos for songs that just really touch me, and I’d let them just live in their worlds as they are.”
“On one hand we give no fucks, on the other hand we give all the fucks, we care more than we ever have you know.” ‘Man of The Hour’ serves as a single of self-reflection and criticises what it means to be a man of the rock genre, when I asked if they felt the album fit into the punk-rock category, which they’re known for, Carter said “I think that our previous albums never really fit in that genre, but for whatever reason people really wish that they did so they said it as if it was fact […] I think arguably this one fits in more than the rest, I think it’s the most punk-rock record we’ve made because it’s a moment of being true to ourselves and not being defined by a genre which is ultimately to me what punk-rock is.”
In their previous album Sticky, released in 2021, the band had features from Joe Talbot, Lynks, and Cassyette who also accompanied them on tour. However, Dark Rainbow was more of a “collaborative process” in their team: “This record just didn’t need any […] well it didn’t need any from a lyrical perspective as far as I’m concerned, what it did have was that we collaborated with a lot of musicians. We had saxophone on it we had violinists come in, you know, every member of rattlesnakes was playing different instruments.”
Even the more energising tracks from the album have brief, ethereal interjections of instrumental bliss, providing a sequence of unskippable tunes that you can’t help but replay. Although it’s hard to choose a favourite, I asked the duo which tracks they are most excited to perform on tour – to which they both had similar responses. “’Can I take You Home’ I’m excited to play a lot […] that’s been Frank’s favourite for like most of the process and we’ll ask this question and he says, ‘Can I Take you Home’ and I have to go for my Second favourite.” ‘Superstar’ was another favourite, Richardson said. “It’s the first time we’ve felt that big sonically without feeling like we’re running at a hundred miles an hour, and to find the balance felt like a huge key unlocked […] ‘Superstar’ in my opinion matches the weight and the scale of so much of our old songs but it’s slow, and brooding and atmospheric at the same time.”
Find tickets to The Dark Rainbow world tour here.
