Felicity recently celebrated their debut full-length album Dear Universe (out now on Adventure Cat Records) with a hometown album release show at The Abbey in Orlando. Recorded over a 30-day span with producer Andrew Wade (A Day To Remember, Neck Deep, Wage War), the Adventure Cat Records-released album follows a trio of EPs – 2019’s Old Habits, 2016’s Brace Yourself!, and 2015’s Felicity.
Just months after forming in 2013, the Orlando-based alt-rock newcomers were invited to perform at their hometown’s stop on the 2014 Vans Warped Tour and shortly thereafter, a slot at The Big Orlando Festival alongside Fall Out Boy and Weezer. as well as songs placed everywhere from Fox Sports to MTV’s The Challenge, cemented that they were onto something big. The band would later go on to headlining their hometown House of Blues and appearing at South Florida’s Fort Rock Festival to setting sail on the Warped Rewind At Sea cruise alongside legends like Good Charlotte and The Starting Line.
Music Madness Magazine caught up with Andrew Rapier, the band’s guitarist, a few days prior to the band’s anticipated album release party to get a state of the union on their new music and what fans can expect from the band in 2021.
Music Madness: Congrats on the new music. How stoked are you guys about the band’s debut album?
Andrew: It’s an incredibly exciting and amazing experience for us. We had to sit on the music for like all of 2020 because no one was really releasing music during that time for obvious reasons. And it feels so amazing for us to finally get it out there and have people hear it and get their reactions because we’ve had these songs just sitting there for so long. So yeah, it’s been amazing. We’re super excited. This week, we have our album release show for it and we will see what happens from there.
This is the first time we have put out a full-length record and it was our first time writing something from start to finish, like 10 songs that we wrote at the same time and it represented a place that we were in life when we recorded this back in 2019.
Music Madness: Do you feel like it’s been difficult to get that momentum back after sitting on the sidelines for so long? How has the band handled it?
Andrew: No, absolutely. I mean, you nailed it, we kind of went dormant, we started recording this album in the spring of 2019 and finished it during the summer of 2019. Then we played a couple of shows in the fall of 2019 and ended the year with an amazing show at the House of Blues where we opened for the band Issues. It was the first time we’ve been asked by the House of Blues here in Orlando to be local support for a tour package, which was a huge moment for us in our career.
And then, 2020! We originally felt that 2020 was going to be our year. We’re going to release this record and everything’s going to go our way. It became a year of hurry up and wait, we really weren’t sure what to do. We had this record, but we couldn’t show it to anybody. We did one live stream concert and figured we would just need to retool and gear up for 2021 or for whenever the world did start opening back up. We filmed six music videos for the record over the quarantine and just tried our best to keep our heads up.
Rolling into 2021, we were finally able to announce our new record. We signed a record deal and we got to start releasing some of those music videos and building up the hype. It definitely felt like we were kind of starting almost from scratch again, like building this snowball, rolling it down the hill, and letting it pick up traction. In the first six months of 2021, we were working basically non-stop setting up this album release, planning campaigns, and doing more music videos. It has finally come to a head now where we can kind of enjoy the fruits of our labor and see everyone’s reactions to it.
The fact that we were able to come through the other end makes us feel like we’re stronger than ever right now. We realized that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, you know, at any point this could shut down again. So we’re just trying to make up for lost time, hit the ground running, and build up that momentum as much as we can with the time we have this year.
Music Madness: The big release party is coming up at the Abby on Friday. Are there any plans to tour between now and the end of the year?
Andrew: We are trying to figure out something to do. We have a festival in September so that’s super exciting and then we have some stuff that will be lined up towards the end of the year, but what’s been really difficult is that most of these tours were actually booked in 2019, so the whole touring schedule for most of the country is like a year behind schedule. Things are finally getting caught up so if you’re trying to get on a tour now or trying to plan a tour, it’s probably going to be booked six months out. We are gearing up for 2022 to be a huge year.
Music Madness: Which festival will we be seeing you at in September?
Andrew: We are playing at the Rebel Rock Festival and we’ll be there hanging all weekend, but we’re playing Saturday. It will be a blast…we love playing festivals.
Music Madness: Felicity has been around 7-8 years now…how has the lineup fared over the years and through the pandemic?
Andrew: Yeah, when the band originally started, it was Damien singing and I played the guitar. We started the band in the of summer 2014 and we played our first show in 2015. The first couple of years, it was very tumultuous. The lineup was Damien and I…we had a couple of drummers and a couple of bass players and sometimes Damian played guitar and sang and it was just really dependant on the circumstances. Luckily I’ve had Damian by my side here through the years and we’ve always had our eyes on the prize and said, we’re not gonna let anything deter us.
We played shows when there have been three members of this band,…Damien threw on a bass and I played guitar and we had a drummer and we played shows like that. Then we’ve had times where we’ve had our full lineup of five guys. So right now we’ve actually had the same lineup thank God since 2016 and there are no signs of that ever-changing. So we’re extremely lucky to have a group of five guys who are like-minded, who all run to put in the work and all have the same goals at the end of the day. So we’ve been going strong for five years and that’s not changing anytime soon.
Music Madness: Listening to the new album, Dear Universe, it was evident that there were some pop elements and some metalcore beats. How would you describe Felicity’s sound?
Andrew: We feel like the album is kind of like a buffet with a little something for everybody. One thing I love about this project and I love about being in this band is that all of us have extremely diverse musical backgrounds. Everyone really, we have tons of overlapping interests and influences that we love about music. We all grew up completely different, where, you know, I grew up listening to a lot of classic rock and that was like the first music that I really connected with and was in classic rock cover bands. When I was in high school, when most kids were playing the new hip and trendy music, I was playing classic rock. And then in college, I branched out and was in different metal bands and got into lots of different genres. Our drummer has been in like death metal bands in the past and our bass player grew up listening to different bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and our singer played in a cover band.
So it’s all kind of blended together into what our sound is and we definitely have this kind of diversity across our catalog where at the beginning of our journey, we kind of had two different genres. We had heavier metalcore songs and then we had kind of a pop-punk, easy core stuff. It was fun for a long time because there were a lot of times we would play shows and we’d be either the heaviest band on the lineup and there’d be like acoustic groups. But then there were times where we’d be able to play metal shows and we’d be the absolute least heavy band on the lineup, which is great because it allowed us to get in front of a lot of different faces and a lot of different fan bases.
When we went in to do this record, having the opportunity to release 10 or 11 songs instead of four or five songs, gave us the opportunity to really flex that kind of diversity that we all came up with, and we put no boundaries on the music we were making. We’ve always wanted to try so many different things and our producer was like you guys are doing a full record. You have the opportunity with a full record to take chances and do things you normally wouldn’t do because you know, most people might only listen to one or two songs on this album anyways.
You never know when one of those risks might become the biggest song you ever put out and potentially define the future of the band. So that’s what we did. We tried as many approaches as we could. We took as many risks as we could. And it was actually really difficult deciding the song order of the album because there was so much diversity and so much time and love and care that went into that.
It definitely was something we were cognizant of, however, at the same time we weren’t necessarily planning it. It’s just kind of what happened and how it unfolded in the studio and we were just so proud of the final product. The great thing is the album has been out a month and we’ve done lots of press and we ask what was their favorite song and we hear a different answer from every single person we talked to, which I think just means that we made a very diverse record when there is something for everybody.
Music Madness: What should Felicity fans be on the lookout for the rest of the year?
Andrew: We’re planning on playing as many shows as we can for as long as we can, we never know what tomorrow may bring, especially with the past year. We are trying to make up for lost time, play as many shows as we can get, in as many places as we can. Hopefully, release a couple more music videos. We’ve already been in the studio…we spent the entire month of July recording the next record while we were prepping and releasing Dear Universe, which came out on July 16. We’re working on the next record. So our goal is to hit the ground running, play as many shows as we can over the next 12 months and then hopefully turn around with another full-length record going into next year and see where that all leads us.