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One of the latest Tooth & Nail bands to experience some measure of mainstream popularity in recent years, Thousand Foot Krutch forges ahead with The Art of Breaking, their most progressive release to date. Once part of the nearly extinct rapcore and nu-metal fronts, TFK has had to readjust its sound to appeal to a wider audience and stay relevant in the ever-changing musical climate. In this interview, frontman Trevor McNevan explains this progression, how they go about relating their faith to the rock listening audience, and why rapcore still does it for them.

Trevor McNevan (second from left) and his band Thousand Foot Krutch have come a long way from the rapcore of their earlier albums.

In earlier albums, Thousand Foot Krutch had a very distinct rapcore, nu-metal feel. On your new album, you move away from that. Why?

Trevor McNevan For a lot of reasons. I think your taste changes as you grow as an artist. You start evolving. I'm still a big hip-hop listener, but I think musically, we were trying to do something to stretch ourselves—something to challenge us as musicians, something to challenge me as a songwriter, something to try to keep it interesting and try to reinvent ourselves. Overall, I also think hip-hop was being abused and overexposed. People were fusing it with rock, classic rock, even country. People were taking advantage of it to sell records, and it became polluted, from my point of view. So we wanted to do something that was different and fresh.

What do you mean by "polluted"?

McNevan I refer mostly to the transition between Set It Off and Phenomenon [their first two albums], where it was kinda like everybody was imitating Limp Bizkit, nu-metal or whatever you want to call it. When I say "polluted," I mean artists who clearly had nothing to do with hip-hop were using it in their songs just for getting with the trends. I'm not dissing any of those artists, because that's always going to happen in music. But everybody and their mom was using hip-hop and the rapcore thing, and it became so played-out. People who had never touched a microphone were all of a sudden rapping and rhyming. It was very dishonest, and hip-hop lost its integrity.

But your band was somewhat caught up in this rapcore thing. Your band did catch flak for trying to be trendy. How did you field that criticism?

McNevan It's tough as a band because, for instance, a lot of the bands doing it at the time were considered as just coming out, but we'd been working at it for ten years. It's just life. For me, I did go to sleep at night knowing that I was honest with what I was doing, and the fact that we were doing that even before the Set It Off record. The only people that have been fusing rock and hip-hop on a popular level [at the time] were bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, Rage Against the Machine. That was when I thought the genre was still fun and it was very creative. Not to say that we were in any way reinventing the wheel, but I don't feel we were in any sort of bandwagon.

You have a lot of young fans. Do you think they're somewhat uneducated when it comes to the music that paved the way for their favorites?

McNevan I think so. You break it down into different groups. Music itself has changed so much. Even during the '90s, bands that came out like Nirvana, some really staple groups as far as rock goes. But in hip-hop as well, there were groups that really made a difference as far as sound. There aren't a lot of those acts at the moment. I feel like music has changed that way.

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