Exclusive Interview: Dear Mother talk “Bullet Proof”!

A hugely successful crowdfunding campaign for a band who had release no prior material followed by a trio of singles that blew any form of expectations out of the water ahead of the champagne bottle smashing on the side of the the ship that is Dear Mother before it set sail on the voyage “Bulletproof” has to be the kind of situation that other bands are envious of. But hats off to David Pear (Vocals), Merel Bechtold (Guitar) and Joey Marin de Boer (Drums) who took their ideas and ran with them having left some already going places bands to do so. We had the pleasure of a chat with them about their debut record and how it call came together…

Between singles “12 Years In Exile“, “Satellite” and “Symbolise” you have clocked up over a million Spotify streams before your debut album has been released. You must be very happy with the reaction from listeners? “Yes we are! We can’t believe it ourselves…”

You crowd funded “Bullet Proof” and raised an incredible €30,000. Did raising that bring any kind of pressure with it? Is it a route you’d choose to go down in the future? “The funny thing is that the crowdfunders had no idea what Dear Mother would sound like since we didn’t release any music beforehand. So there were no expectations from that perspective. We definitely didn’t want to let the crowdfunders down and we had our fingers crossed that they would enjoy the music. That was a scary thing… What if they don’t like it? So I would say a healthy kind of pressure? And yes there is definitely a possibility that we would go down this route again in the future. A crowdfunding is basically a pre-order campaign, so a good starting point for a production”

You’ve talked about creating music with out limits, so how would you sum up the style of Dear Mother for “Bullet Proof“? Do you see that changing dramatically in the future? “Yes we agreed that we only want to create music that we are proud of and enjoy listening to. That’s like our foundation. So regarding genres and musical styles, we don’t like to limit ourselves. We all have a pretty broad musical taste, but metal would always be our favourite genre. At this point we have no idea what we will be writing next, but we’ll see what will come naturally this time.”

When it comes to playing these songs live, which bands would you like to share stages with? Given that you’re two parts Dutch and one part Russian, how much more of a challenge does that make touring? “We had this question before and if I remember correctly the guys said Bring Me The Horizon, Architects, Avenged Sevenfold and I said most definitely In Flames. David lives in London, but with a Czech (European) passport so I don’t see many challenges for touring right there. The only challenge we’re facing now is covid and the travel ban. I can tell you that we miss David dearly and we can’t wait for borders to open up and see each other in person for a change.”

Who are your influences and what inspires you to create music? “Personally, as a teenager I used to exclusively listen to Scandinavian metal. So I’m most definitely inspired by many Swedish bands in my songwriting and as a guitar player. They are so good with their songwriting! Creating music is one of the best things in the world and puts me in a happy place, especially with Dear Mother. Writing comes so natural with these guys it’s amazing!”

What’s next for Dear Mother? “Right now we’re looking for a fitting European support tour to promote Bulletproof in 2022. Also we’ll be starting writing new music very soon, but we’re not quite sure in which format we would like to do that. Most likely we’re going to write a couple of singles and put them out one by one”