



Some might say that Manchester Orchestra are underdogs, but they don't mind. Although they fly under the radar, the Atlanta rockers use this to their advantage, doing things their own way and making unexpected moves that surprise and delight their loyal fanbase. One such move was to release their most recent album, Hope, which features stripped-down, mostly acoustic recreations of songs from their critically acclaimed, more rockin' album, Cope. This is not something you'd necessarily expect from the hard rockers.



"The idea was to do something unique that I hadn’t seen done before," says frontman Andy Hull says of Hope, which came out in September last year. "With Cope we were making something pretty full-on with the pedal down, and the whole time we were thinking it would be nice to do something stripped-down. When we were writing the record, we were trying out different versions of the songs. When we decided we wanted it to be really fast rock music, we had already tried it in different forms. [Hope] ended up working even better than we'd imagined."



The gamble paid off, and Hope offers a more intimate glimpse of Manchester Orchestra and spotlights Hull's introspective lyrics and skill as a songwriter, proving that he's come a long way since his band's earliest incarnation when he began writing songs just over a decade ago while he was still in high school.



"If you keep doing stuff, you hopefully get better at it and you figure out how to get your vision clearer in whatever medium you're creating," says the 28-year-old. "[The band] has been a huge part of my life since I was 17. I've grown as a person and a songwriter. It's been my job forever. I'm always changing."



Manchester Orchestra recently weathered a sizable blow – the departure of their rhythm section, drummer Jeremiah Edmond and bassist Jonathan Corley. "You have to deal with it," Hull says of coping with losing nearly half of his band. "They were looking to do other things. You don't want to be in a band with people who don’t want to be doing it, but we're still really close with them."



Bassist Andy Prince and drummer Tim Very joined Manchester Orchestra in their place, and Hull thinks it has made the band even stronger. "We were lucky to find two guys who forced the other three remaining members to step up our game," he says.



Fans seem to be loving this softer, more intimate side of the heavy alt-rockers. "These are diehard fans and it's cool for them to see us in slightly smaller rooms," Hull says of the mid-size clubs the band has been playing on this tour.



As for being an underdog, Hull says it motivates the band to keep their nose to the grindstone and do whatever it takes to succeed. "We have a chip on our shoulder, but in a good way," he says. "We've never really had a big break and every year we've gotten continually bigger. We have to work harder than bands that have that popularity given to them. We really appreciate our fan base that's really into what we do. We have the mentality that nobody is gonna help us out so we have to help ourselves."



























