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Last year was a trying one for the Walk the Moon guys. Just when they were riding high on the success of their smash hit “Shut Up and Dance” and were ready to embark on their first-ever headlining tour in the summer — frontman Nicolas Petricca’s father’s Alzheimer’s worsened and the band knew it had to cancel the tour.
In addition, Petricca broke up with a longtime love and bassist Kevin Ray suffered a shoulder injury that was potentially career-ending. With all of the hardships and the canceled tour, the Walk the Moon members — Petricca, Ray, guitarist Eli Maiman, and drummer Sean Waugaman — suddenly found themselves drifting apart.
“When you’re on the road doing that daily arc where you get up and you kind of grind through things that you have to do to get to that glorious moment at the end of the day when you get to play in front of people,” Maiman explains to Billboard, “when you’re getting crushed every day like that, you don’t really have time to assess or level with each other about stuff that can be getting a little twisted.”
But when the guys reunited at Ray’s wedding in Austin, Texas, in October 2016, their memories of playing music together came rushing back, and Walk the Moon was back in the studio doing what they do best. “That was a magical week,” Petricca recalls. “We came together and made that conscious choice to move forward. I think it had to do with accepting that they weren’t gonna be the same, but that we could be better.”
The result was an eclectic 13-song album, What If Nothing, which finds the guys getting more raw and real than ever before. And because of that, Petricca insists that they’ve never been more proud or sure of anything before. Ahead of the album’s release on Friday (Nov. 10), Petricca and Maiman chatted with Billboard about their brief hiatus and how what they went through in the last year and a half created their most prideful work yet.