Music

Titus Andronicus are working on a rock opera and movie

by Tyler Munro

Photo by: Stephen McGill, AUX TV

For Titus Andronicus, 2012’s straight-faced Local Business was a bit of a departure from The Monitor‘s grandiosity, but the band’s poised to get their ambition back with their next album. According to frontman Patrick Stickles, its follow-up will be a 30-plus song rock opera with an accompanying movie.

Stickles tells the Missoulian that the plot is inspired by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire and will serve as a metaphor for his own experiences with manic depression.

He says that the plot revolves around a depressed, sad guy who doesn’t have much hope after experiencing a socially crippling trauma until he meets his doppelgänger. The main character is revealed to have been part of a superhuman ancient race of cursed humans, which Stickles describes as being “self-destructive” and “doomed to destroy themselves.”

And then he falls in love.

“It’s all a way of questioning, would you want to live your life in the middle… or would you accept the lows because they’re the price of the highs?” explains Stickles.

As for the music, you can expect it to be “punker” than Local Business, with faster guitar parts and more distortion. There are no details on what this beast will be called, what its film will consist of or when it will all be released, but fans can hear the band play some new songs off the as-of-yet unrecorded new works at any of the band’s upcoming gigs.

There’s obviously a lot to this, so read the entire interview with Stickles here.