The Used evolve with less screaming, more rockiní
By KELLY WILSON
Get Out

“This is not a scream-o record,” drummer Branden Steineckert says of the Used’s sophomore album, “In Love and Death,” which was released in late September.

“It’s just a rock album and I hope a lot of people can just get into it and not be close-minded,” he says. “And I hope that things like (Bert McCracken, the band’s notorious lead singer) screaming less or us playing a song with stand-up bass and brushes aren’t things that scare people off. I hope those are things that will open peoples’ minds.”

Steineckert says that The Used — which also includes guitarist Quinn Allman and bassist Jeph Howard — are hoping to avoid a sophomore slump with the follow-up to their 2002 self-titled debut.

“A lot of bands’ second albums tend to suck compared to the first ones, and the band always seems to be the last one to know that,” he says. “And then there’s the other problem that bands kind of tend to roll with the familiar formulas and do more or less a carbon copy of their first record because they know what worked and what didn’t.

“So it’s like, ‘Oh, ‘Taste of Ink’ (their first single) was a hit, let’s write nine more of them.’ For us, this time, what kept us (from) falling into one of those ruts was that we didn't put any thought into any of that,” Steineckert says.

The Used, who are in the midst of a headlining tour to support their new album, shared a bill with Korn, Linkin Park and Snoop Dogg during this summer’s Projekt Revolution Tour. And it helped keep them in check, says Steineckert.

“We did the Warped Tour the first year and we were like the tiny, no-one-heard-of-us band and we were playing for the few diehard kids that managed to stumble over us,” he says. “By the second year, the word had spread so much that we were one of the headliners of the Warped Tour and it just felt like it was our tour along with the other big bands of the tour.

“You start to feel like, ‘Hell, yeah. We’re doing good. We’ve got a gold record. We’re headlining the Warped Tour.’ We were getting really caught up in all of this and suddenly we go out and tour on this and we're playing with multi-platinum artists and superstars like Snoop Dogg.

“It was like, ‘Wow. OK, wait a minute. There’s a whole world out there who doesn’t even know who The Used is.’ Every day walking out onstage, kids didn't know who we are hardly. It just goes to show that we have a lot more work to do.”