Modestep Return with Middle Fingers for EDM, Their Former Bandmates, and Fame

"We just have no self control," admits the smirking Tony Friend, guitarist and DJ of heavy UK bass band Modestep. "I always do the same thing on the first night of a tour:'Oh my God. Tour! Tour Bus!' and then get so wrecked I don't remember anything and I'm trying to recover for the rest of it," he laughs.

"That happens every time," confirms his brother Josh Friend, the band's singer. The siblings, covered from chin to toe in tattoos of morbid imagery, are clad in total black inside the diner at The Standard Hotel in West Hollywood. They speak with a rugged, fuck-the-world assurance that suggests the two have always had one another's backs.

After spending their formative years juggling parallel affinities for hardcore punk and garage, Modestep formed at the tail-end of 2010 on a lark. By February 2011, they were stars in their native UK thanks to the lightning success of their first single, "Feel Good," which rode the wave of the ballooning dubstep (or brostep) zeitgeist. To most, Modestep's ascent is the tale of a dream come true, but to the brothers Friend, it was a poisoned chalice.

"'Feel Good' and 'Sunlight' were the first electronic music songs I've ever made in my life," explains Josh. "None of us particularly had the skills to make anything half-decent at the time. Most people consider it a super lucky start––our first ever song went Radio 1 A-List. I worked in the Apple Store one day, and six weeks later we were playing here in Los Angeles, the Music Box [the Fonda Theater], sold out. That one song got us there."

After their follow-up tune "Sunlight" enjoyed similar success, Modestep became the poster boys for the tsunami of a new brand of in-your-face dubstep that went from underground London basements to Justin Bieber tracks and candy commercials within the space of a year. There was only one problem: Josh and Tony hated the scene of which they had become inadvertent champions.

"It wasn't a pigeonhole we wanted to be in," Josh explains. "The scene we first fell in love with very quickly went sour. The kind of dubstep we love is not the kind of dubstep that became popular. We were into the Caspas and Ruskos. It was an amazing thing to witness and be a part of, but it lost its soul very quickly."

"Machines," from Modestep's freshly released album

London Road.

Without the time to sweat details like whether or not they actually liked their own songs, the Friend brothers hit the road. For three years straight, they toured the tunes from their debut album, Evolution Theory, around the world, despite feeling more creatively detached from their music with every performance. Before long, the situation began to take its toll.

"I can't describe the feeling of going up every night on tour and having to play tunes that you don't like," says Tony. "It fucking sucks! My DJ sets didn't even have any Modestep in them for a long time. It was like: 'I don't even want to hear these tunes!'"

The tension began to spill outwards. "It's fucked to say it," begins Tony, "but the worst thing is you start to resent the people who come to the show."

"We knew they weren't there for the music," Josh elaborates. "A small percentage were, but the rest were be there because of the YouTube hits. They had seen our video and it's cool to be a part of it, you know? We were out in Toronto a couple of years back and I conducted an experiment. Steve Aoki was on the main stage. I went out to people wearing his t-shirts and asked them to name their three favorite Steve Aoki songs and not one of them could name a single song."

"After seeing that set, I wanted to quit electronic music," Tony says firmly. "There was legit conversation about it. I didn't want to be associated in the same bracket as these people. For us, it was time to bite the bullet. Either we quit or we just fucking do what we really wanna do. If it goes well, it goes well. If it doesn't, fuck it, we were gonna quit anyway!"

As evidenced by their new album, London Road, out last week on INgrooves, Modestep bit the bullet. In fact, they had a good chew on it, turning their backs on the bright lights and holing themselves up in the studio for almost two years, intent on reinventing themselves. Very quickly, though, the brothers ran into a problem. The other two members of Modestep, Nick Tsang and Matthew Curtis, were on a completely different page.

"It's always been me and Tony doing absolutely everything," says Josh. "Those guys would show up for the live sets, make a lot of demands, get really fucked up and be quite annoying. We came to start writing the second record and they wanted to do the whole EDM thing, so we all just went our own ways."

In their stead, the brothers sought out Pat Lundy of emo-core band Funeral for a Friend. "He's probably one of, if not the best, drummers in the UK. We've been super fucking lucky to get him on board," says Josh. "The funny thing is, we didn't even really have to ask him. His first show with us was supporting The Prodigy in front of 20,000 people at the O2 Arena [in London] and after that it was sort of unspoken."

"From there, Pat had a mate named Kyle [Deek] who works at Domino's Pizza who is a sick guitarist, and we were on our way," Josh concludes. "The important thing for us wasn't skill set necessarily, it was whether or not we get on with them."

"And if they have the hunger," Tony takes over, almost instinctively. "Our last musicians didn't. They were lazy as fuck! This kid is hungry, man. He worked at Domino's, for fuck's sake! He wanted to do music: live, breathe music. It feels like this is the first, proper Modestep lineup."

Released this week, the video for "Rainbow" is the third single from the album.

What followed was an intensive period of writing and recording that formed London Road, an album that finally announces Modestep as they were meant to be. The album dwarfs the creative expression of their prior works, giving nods to garage, jungle, dubstep, reggae, electro, rave, and rock in a chaotic ode to their home city of London.

"London is the best place in the world, and the album is all about the London sound," explains Tony. "We just wanted to paint all of that onto a record and be like 'this is everything that we come from.' We wanted it to come from an honest place," says Josh.

"We'd go out in London five times a week. You go out to a rave in London, the atmosphere is dark, it's gully," says Tony, with a nostalgic glint in his eye. "People have their hoods up, nobody talks to each other. You might get stabbed, you might get robbed, you might get beaten up. You don't know what the fuck is going to happen, but you keep your fucking head down and you dance. You're there for the music and the vibes."

's second single, "Machines," hurtles out of the gates with brash rock chuggery that later crashes into dark electro like Nero or Feed Me. "On Our Own," produced with the criminally under-appreciated glitch-whomp master Culprate, leads in with nimble garage, but drops into a stutter-stepped battery of bass that only the Bristolian can facilitate. The heavy dubstep tracks on the album, made with Funtcase and Cookie Monsta respectively, hearken to the golden age of tear-out, that brief window clipped on either side of the last decade.

Modestep's new members Lundy and Deek aren't just placeholders. They shine on tracks like "Feel Alive," a headbang-worthy metal stomper that sounds somewhere between Pantera and Muse and are in full effect on a final stretch of the tune that's breakneck drum and bass. "Rainbow" sounds ripped from the sweaty walls of now-defunct, but notoriously rowdy London Bridge club Cable, and album closer "Game Over" has half the London grime game spitting bars over those quintessentially detuned horns.

In the album's second half, "Nightbus Home" is Modestep's ode to jungle and the distinctly London experience of holding on for dear life as public transport gambles with your safety as you head (hopefully) homewards. "The casualties of rave warfare at the back of night busses," Josh laughs. "The culture clash of rocker kids and rudebois. You never knew if they would start singing songs with each other or start fighting each other."

That uneasy, but life-affirming balance between disparate scenes and aesthetics is a hallmark of London culture and, as London Road shows, Modestep itself.

The trailer for

London Road,

starring the band members themselves.

Shedding the albatross of their early notoriety nearly ended the band, but the process has imbued the members with a steely sense of purpose. Five years since their formation, hundreds of millions of plays and views logged, four UK Dance top ten tracks to their name, and more than a few festival headline slots notched, Modestep have finally found Modestep. "We've had to work backwards," Tony laughs.

"We could have done what a lot of EDM guys have done," says Josh. "We could have been social network whores and churned out shit. We could be making lots of money doing that. But when you tour for three years and you're not a fan of your own music, it changes your idea of what you want to do for the rest of your life."

was released last week and supported by gigs in the UK and the US at intimate venues. To go from 20,000 at the 02 Arena to tiny, sweaty basement clubs would be a shock to the ego for many, but it's just what Modestep was looking for. "It was fucking awesome," says Tony. "It was a lot smaller than we've ever done, but it was way better. The vibe was just there. People were there because they fucking wanted to be. We played over 60% brand new material and people were vibing on it. That was the best feeling ever."

"That's where it's gone," Josh adds. "The moneymakers are making the money, and the musicians are… not. They're making music, which is cool! There's a little scene brewing again, much smaller than what it was. I'm cool with that. I'd much rather play two-hundred cap rooms full of people who love the music than be Steve Aoki."

Modestep is on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter

Jemayel Khawaja is Managing Editor of THUMP and probably wouldn't mind being Steve Aoki.