Ahead of the final show on their UK tour last month at Nottingham’s Rock City Basement, we caught up with Casey vocalist Tom Weaver to chat about new record Where I Go When I Am Sleeping and what the band have in store for the future.

How has the tour gone, since today it comes to an end?

Yeah, it’s been great, we weren’t really 100% certain how it was going to go being as it is our first time doing anything really as a headlining band. We did a couple of shows for the release of the previous record but we already had a support tour booked for November and the record came out in September so we weren’t really able to do anything of any real extent, but it’s been sick. More than half of the shows had sold-out, it’s cool.

How have you been getting on with the other bands? Any interesting stories to tell?

Nothing like outrageous, but we have got on really well both of them. With Rarity we’ve hung out with a bit less because it’s their first time in the UK and first time in Europe so they’ve kinda been off doing a load of touristy stuff whereas we have to be at venues earlier to catch soundcheck and that sort of thing but yeah we’ve all got on really well. It was our first time meeting the guys in Endless Heights and there hasn’t been any sort of animosity or anything it’s all sailing.

Your new record Where I Go When I Am Sleeping came out last month. What is your favourite song off the album?

I think between us we’ve decided that ‘The Funeral’ is our favourite song of it, we were intending on playing it live but because of Max’s [Nicolai, drummer] injury, we haven’t been able to. It’s a weird one ’cause it depends on my mood when I’m listening to it and I suppose it’s a bit strange listening to it myself because it is me and my friends listening back to ourselves… but yeah, I’d say ‘The Funeral’.

How has the reception been so far, particularly in comparison to your debut?

We’ve always been fortunate, to be honest, we’ve never had a great deal of negative criticism as far as that sort of thing goes. We’ll have one or two maybe less glowing reviews and then it’s just kind of isolated to YouTube comments and things where some people have said “you don’t sound you like you used to… wah wah wah” and all that sort of nonsense, but for the most part people have been supportive and it’s been pretty much the same for this record. Lots of people on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook giving us a lot of praise and kind support which has been very nice.

What were your biggest inspirations for the record, whether that be other artists or any other relevant influences?

I mean anything we have in terms of influences from other mediums is generally subliminal. We’ve never really sat down and thought “we’ve really loved this song we should write more music like this” or “I’ve seen this film and it has made me think”, it’s always kind of been a very case by case basis and it’s just been subconsciously introduced into our mix. It’s sort of difficult to say it would be whatever we’d been listening to at the time, I guess might have sort of bled into the creative process but it wasn’t a conscious choice.

Some of your European shows for this tour actually sold-out— how do you find European crowds compare to those in the UK?

It’s all been fairly even, to be honest. We’ve noticed on previous tours that we tend to have a slight better reception in Europe on the mainland, Germany in particular, and that’s one of the other reasons why we were sort of more apprehensive about the tour. I guess ‘cause we’ve never done much in the UK, we’ve definitely played the mainland a lot more extensively than we have here and I suppose we were fortunate in that a lot of other bands we know that have slog it out in the UK for a few months or years before they’ve made the jump to go to the mainland and then go further afield whereas we were sort of playing Germany regularly. Our second ever show was in Belgium and we were out on the mainland pretty much as soon as we started playing shows, but on this tour like I said London sold-out, Newcastle sold-out, Birmingham sold-out… it has been great here and we haven’t really noticed if it hasn’t been any sort of real difference between them. It’s just been really cool.

It’s 2023— where do you ideally want to see Casey at that time?

I suppose it’s difficult ‘cause if you’d asked me that three years ago when we just started, where do you see yourself in six years or three years, I’d say we’re gonna be selling-out venues, we’re gonna be a couple of albums deep or whatever. I mean, judging by our album cycles we would realistically on fourth or fifth record by then. Obviously, we’ve got the ambition to play the States and we wanna do Australia, South East Asia, etc., so we’d like to kinda achieve that in the next couple of years but I mean in terms of reaching them and size and things it’s never really been a motivating factor really. It’s never really been like wanting to be a stadium band or we want to be selling-out thousand cap clubs and stuff it’s just a “whatever happens, happens” sort of thing.

Why do you think people should listen to Casey?

I don’t feel it is my position to tell anyone to do anything. If they listen to us and they enjoy it then that’s great and if they don’t enjoy it then they shouldn’t listen to it anymore. We’ve never done it as a sort of commercial exercise, it’s never been the case that we want to sell the band to a demographic or we want to make this group of people feel a particular way about us and like I said we’ve never measured our success by the number of tickets we sell or anything. The only objective we’ve ever had is to kind of fulfil our own creative inclinations and that’s something we’ve always been very happy in doing so it’s just the case that if people want to check us out then they can and if they don’t that is fine.

Last one— have you got anything exciting lined up for the rest of the year?

So we have two tours confirmed that are to be announced when this one has finished, and there’s still music videos and content regarding the new record. We’ll see where we end up at the end of the year really.