Texas’ Corusco have just dropped their excellent debut album Wake – its an emotive journey through autumn coloured chords and bellowing yet vulnerable hooks that tell the tales of life and love.

To celebrate the release, and get a little more acquainted with the band, we got them to pick five bands who helped inspire the incredible record.

Watch Corusco’s ‘New Year’:

In some ways, I think it’s surprising that we’re able to write songs as a band. We each like bands that the others don’t necessarily care for, or just happened to miss growing up. So writing a song is a little chaotic, with everyone’s combined ideas that all come together & result in whatever the heck kind of style we ended up with. That being said, the bands below aren’t necessarily reflective of all of us collectively, but I think you can see range of influences that we all have and how we met somewhere in the middle.

Bright Eyes

I’ve always admired the way that Conner Oberst writes lyrics. He’s amazing at writing concisely without getting lost in a metaphor and he can instinctively pack really complex ideas into like 5 words at the end of a phrase. I studied philosophy so I tend to be unnecessarily wordy and stuck in my head. So in writing the lyrics for this album, I tried to push myself to say what I needed to say and let myself be as vulnerable as I needed to be for the songs. You can hear it in everything from Stranger to Wake.

-Aaron

Paramore

When I finally got my own kit at 17, I basically played nothing but Paramore songs as loud as I could for 6 months until my neighbors would call the cops. I was (and still am) in awe of the way Zac Farro plays drums. He plays just what the song needs, but he plays it like he means it and shines through in fills when it’s appropriate. When we were writing and recording Wake, I tried to follow that model. You can hear it throughout the entire record, particularly in Better Off, which is my favorite song to play live.

-Carlos

Dawn Golden

Okay, this isn’t really a band, but I’ve gotten really into those really chill piano driven electronic artists in the last year or so. I don’t know what to call the genre, but artists like James Vincent McMorrow, Sylvan Esso, James Blake, etc. I really like the dense, close feel and how they emote through that medium. For a solid year, I tried to make Leaves of Grass into an electronically driven song, but ultimately it worked way better completely stripped down.

-Aaron

Silverstein

When I was just starting to play music in my hometown 10+ years ago, knowing how to play Silverstein songs was almost a prerequisite to starting a band. The drums on their first few records were a huge influence on me when I was first developing my style of playing. I’ve had a lot of time to expand my style since then, but you can definitely still hear the influence in our faster songs, particularly in The World We Know.

-Carlos

Foo Fighters

Foo Fighters is one of the bands that we all can come to a consensus on. Phil and I actually were at the same Foo show in 2008. They have the perfect balance of raw, aggressive rock and intimate songwriting. In terms of just how their songs feel, they are the closest to how we want our music to kick people in the face. Whether its soaring choruses like The World We Know (which almost started to feel like Everlong at one point) or the chunky bridge of Daughter, we’re always trying to channel our inner Foo.

The article was originally published on Don't Bore Us