Leigh of Pop Evil Talks New Album + More with GRD in Grand Rapids

It's always awesome to welcome West Michigan's Pop Evil back home! May 9th the band will be rocking GLC live at 20 Monroe with Devour the Day and Oni. In addition, Pop Evil's new album is out this Friday, March 21!

Ahead of the new album and show, Pop Evil frontman Leigh Kakaty stopped by GRD to chat about it all!

👇LISTEN TO GRD'S FULL INTERVIEW WITH LEIGH KAKATY OF POP EVIL BELOW👇

Janna, TSM

Drummer Blake Allison officially joined the band in August, but as Leigh explains both Blake and Joey Walser (bassist) have a long history with Pop Evil:

People might not know Blake and Joey are in the band Egypt Central and Devour the Day as well, so on our very first tour they brought Pop Evil out with Egypt Central, their first band. I want to say this was around 2007. Ever since we've been really really close, so it was kind of like when we had these transitional moments with band members and they came into the band, or into the project, it just made that progression so much easier and so much quicker... What he (Blake) has been able to do to grow Pop Evil and to help prepare this new album and this next chapter for us is just incredible. Absolutely love Blake, if you haven't seen him, wait till you see next lineup of Pop Evil, it's amazing, and we feel it's the best version of us yet, so here's to the future.

Photo courtesy Live Nation

Leigh talks about the upcoming album "What Remains" being sonically and thematically heavier than previous records:

There's a lot of personal struggle and mental health issues, depression, that I didn't even know I was dealing with. I just think when you really take up the 20 plus years we've been in this business, you go through a lot. When you're the leader of a project, family, not only your personal family, but family of brothers, of your band, you don't have time to be depressed or show anxiety, or to show any kind of weakness, you're just on to the next, the next tour, that next album. So, obviously I think the pandemic shook a lot of musicians up... We were the first to go away, the last ones to come back. So I think for any musicians fear is that to get off the bus and not play anymore... that was something that was really evident that flashed before all our eyes... So I think that this healing process, just naturally when a musician, when an artist like me anyway, you sit down to right another record and you close your eyes and you just kind of listen to what your soul is trying to tell you... I like to write a lot putting myself in other people's shoes, it's harder sometimes to write about yourself and what you're going through and it just seemed like 'I am What Remains', 'I am on my Deathwalk', 'I am Wishful Thinking'. It just seemed like as I took a step back away from the first half of the writing of this album, I had no idea I needed to let this out. And then with the support of this lineup and the band members, Blake, Joey, Dave, and Nick, the way they kind of lifted me up and were like Leigh you need to pursue this, let's just keep going down this road, and once you have the support with your band and people behind, you know, off the stage it lead to a healthy atmosphere where I felt like it was OK to keep going down that dark path, and just seeing if it could help someone... When it was all said and done, to be able to put together a collection of work, certainly it's dark, it's heavier themes as well, not just musically, but lyrically... when you can put out some music where you can help one other person, that's what it's all about... We really feel responsible at this point in our career to pay it forward, if we can help someone as well who might not be able to understand what they are dealing with, but they hear that song and they're like 'oh my gosh, that's how I feel', that's something we take very serious.

Leigh and I also talked about Pop Evil's latest single "Wishful Thinking" and its music video:

With Wishful Thinking, our new single, you think about the voices in our heads that are constantly talking. Some things are good, some things are bad.... people let you down. When you are wishful thinking there are those constant voices in your head... I wanted to really depict visually, and Sam Shapiro our music video director did an incredible job to kind of say those are those voices are whispering around in your mind. That's why this video is isolated on me personally.... And if you look at the song you get those isolated kind of whispers in the verse of the song, and then of chorus hits you get that real familiar Pop Evil vocal... just taking that, putting it in a box and trying to harness and cage those voices and that bad energy that is around you internally sometimes, it's important and you'll notice at the end of the video they're in the box, I'm out.