Meet Good Terms, your new favorite easycore band (interview)

Bands tend to take themselves seriously, so when Good Terms hit my radar, I was entertained by their silly video for single “Light at the End.” Instantly, I loved their sound, blending pop punk with some heaviness in the vein of early Four Year Strong/ADTR while maintaining the modern emo weedly-guitars. Just starting a few months ago, I got to ask the band some questions to get them acquainted with the music scene:

The New Fury: You’re brand-new – what do you have in store after this debut single?

Good Terms: Yes we’re basically a newborn right now lol. We announced the band this past September, and we’ve actually released three songs so far! “Wither Away,” “All I Can,” and our most recent one called “Light At The End.” We have a ton of stuff locked and loaded that we’re in the process of rolling out soon. Don’t want to give too much away yet, but you can expect to hear a lot more music from us coming out in the very near future!

The New Fury: How easy is it to write when everyone in the band is the best of friends?

Good Terms: It’s honestly a dream scenario! We’ve all been involved with each other creatively in some way in the past, whether it was previous bands, hired gun gigs, co-production gigs, etc. On top of just being best buds who love being around each other, doing all of that really built a nice foundation for how we create together. Like most functional relationships, we’ve also figured out a pretty healthy way to fight with each other and argue for the ideas we feel strongly about. We all have enormous respect for each other’s talents and voices, and we all keep a super open mind for everyone else’s opinion. We don’t follow any majority rule. If three of us agree on something, and one of us doesn’t, we work on the issue until we’re all stoked on it. Plus, every final result that’s come from a situation like that always ends up being the best anyway. Our general consensus around those kinds of situations is that one person heard room for improvement somewhere the rest of us didn’t, and we can’t settle for anything less than our best. Also, we really trust that any success for our band will only eventually come from being an energized group of creators excited about making something uniquely us, rather than having some hyper focused vision or genre combination gimmick that it seems like some other unknown artists rely more heavily on. Most importantly, everyone has the same goal in mind, which is just trying to make something special that flows out of us organically and feels uniquely us. We all recognize that we’re on a journey together to try and collectively create the dopest possible music that 4 of us can.

The New Fury: I hear bits and pieces of Four Year Strong, Tiny Moving Parts, and much more in “Light at the End” – how do you combine the variety of influences into one concrete sound?

Good Terms: That’s dope that you picked up on that! We love both of those bands, FYS especially. Honestly, we don’t put too much intention into chasing a specific direction to achieve the overall sound you mentioned. Early into writing, we gave ourselves a limitation that the only tools we were allowed to use in our songs are the instruments that we would be playing on stage: drums, bass, guitars, and our voices. We knew we didn’t want to play along to backing tracks live or add filler production/electronic elements. If the song isn’t good at it’s core with our instruments, then it probably just isn’t good. A layered synth part doesn’t often make a bad song good. The final product of all our songs didn’t end up 100% exactly in line with our initial limitation, but beginning with that foundation gave us a lot of mental clarity and allowed us to be super free and adventurous within the confines of that filter. Any super heavy idea was on the table, as was any super poppy idea, and any weird vibey idea, etc. We all share a lot of the same influences and we’re all songwriters. Everyone contributes lyrics and brings riffs and ideas to the table. I think that’s how every song sounds similar and yet somehow completely different from each other. Mostly, we just try to follow what’s inspiring us during the early flow states of each song as we create together. For example, with Light At The End, it was written right after we saw Every Time I Die live. We noticed that literally every single song in their set for that show ended with a tempo change breakdown. It was insanely fun and just felt comically heavy every time it happened, so we just chased the feeling we felt being in the audience and ended up with the song’s hilarious breakdown. On the other hand, another song we haven’t released yet began after a long drive listening to Julien Baker’s album “Turn Out The Lights” on repeat. We tried to emulate the way that she makes her very notey guitar parts feel like a drone where the specific notes kinda disappear. To most people, those two artists are nothing alike, but to us, they’re both completely within range for us to draw inspiration from for the same band, and sometimes the same song.

The New Fury: The video for “Light at the End” is goofy and comical – is that the general mood when Good Terms comes together to write, record, practice, etc.?

Good Terms: Definitely! We take our art seriously, but we’re really doing all of this to have fun together. In all the visual content we make, we want people to feel like they’re getting to know us as friends and like they’re a part of our community. Filming the Light At The End was a blast too. The location we rented didn’t have very quality A/C, and we filmed it during the most recent heat wave in LA, so it was roughly 90 degrees in the room the entire time we were there. So instead of being actively miserable, we just decided to make the best of it and try to turn our misery into some funny bits for the video. That of course led to all the shots of the fan blowing our hair Fabio style during all the drum takes, Geo wearing the silk dress, Ivan not wearing pants for half the video, etc. That video definitely encapsulates what it’s like when we’re together!

The New Fury: Who’s on the list of bands you’d like to tour with once it becomes safe?

Good Terms: Oh man that’s a tough question, there are so many! A somewhat realistic dream tour for us would be us, Origami Angel, Heart Attack Man, Mom Jeans, & Hot Mulligan. That tour package would go so hard and also seems like it would have the best vibes. Opening for a super heavy band like Knocked Loose or a crazy hardcore band like Drain would also be a blast! The 1975, TSSF, and Underoath are some of our all time favorite artists, being able to play with any of them at any point in our career would be an absolute dream!

Thanks go out to Good Terms for going so in-depth! We hope you enjoy this ambitious new band, check out “Light at the End” below: