Dead Calm’s ‘Keep Moving’ is a motivational nostalgia record

With a discography spanning more than 10 projects, and some viral songs like “Better,” “Think Of Me Once In A While, Take Care,” and “Bleed,” Liam McCay is back with a new record under the project, Dead Calm, called Keep Moving. 

What sets the Dead Calm apart from the rest of his projects, McCay said, is its sound. But it’s also the first time he’s had any features on a record. He had four features on Accept, and three on Keep Moving. McCay said he liked having a project be a bit wider in terms of input since he does most of his work alone. 

While Dead Calm has some uniqueness in the features, genre, and acoustic tracks that set it apart from some other projects, McCay said “there’s no proper answer” as to why he has multiple projects. 

“When I started out, I was gonna do one project, and that was gonna be that. But when I was done doing it, I was trying to come up with a release schedule and got bored. So I said I’ll do a side thing here while I’m waiting. And then that one sounded better than the one I’d spent five months working on,” he explained. 

And from then on, he just kept on making side projects. A benefit of the many different projects, McCay said, was the range of music he could make since each sound has its own place. 

Communal nostalgia and “Bleed”

Throughout September and October, “Bleed,” the opening track of the first Dead Calm record, Accept, was doing the rounds on TikTok. It was going viral as being part of a trend of people talking about their nostalgia. And interestingly, Keep Moving is the record about nostalgia. Not Accept. 

“My friend Dorian put on his story one day ‘nostalgia’s gonna kill a lot of you people.’ And I said ‘it’s true … nostalgia baiting is getting worse in every sort of media,” McCay said. But Keep Moving doesn’t fall into bait territory. It’s a personal reminder from McCay to himself, to keep going. 

He explained that this last year was the first time he himself began to feel nostalgic, and he’s understanding it now. And that’s found within the recent record, and its title. “I’m just trying to tell myself ‘keep moving, don’t get stuck thinking about nostalgia and all the shit that’s already happened.’ Because you’ll find yourself just being like ‘wouldn’t it be class to go back,’ but you can’t think like that. You’ll get stuck, you just have to keep moving,” he said. 

Mouthing off and backing it up

Keep Moving features cultural icon Dennis Rodman in its cover, and a sample of his hall of fame speech on “We Love You Dennis Rodman.” The track’s title being a nod to the audience’s response to his speech.

“[Rodman] was an asshole, but he was also so amazing at basketball and rebounding. He found his own fucking lane, and he was the best at it,” McCay said. “He would get a lot of hate because he would mouth off all the time, and some of the hate was warranted. But he was himself, he would never apologize for being himself. And he had the game to back it up.” 

McCay said he relates to Rodman to some extent. “Sometimes I go mouthing off and bullshitting about whatever, and I want to have the game to back it up as well,” McCay explained. “It’s not Rodman levels, but anytime I go on any sort of slow core communities, a lot of the sentiment is that I’m not a good artist or a good musician.” 

The main project criticized is Sign Crushes Motorist. “They haven’t really given the other stuff a chance, so their perception is that I’m lazy, not adding anything artistically. And all I want to do with that hate is use it to fuel making more music to the point where you can’t fucking deny that I’m not doing something new. I made Sign Crushes Motorist at 17. Obviously it’s not gonna be a fucking masterpiece,” he said. 

“I want to make my own lane,” McCay says

That motivation is being put to making something new. “I just want to be ahead of something, not catching up. I want to invent some new shit and make my own lane,” McCay said. 

The main goal, is to keep growing and not to fall into one sound. “My manager said he was talking to Matty Healy and was like ‘how’d you come up with this idea for the new 1975 record?’ Matty says, ‘I just asked myself what Matty would do.’ And I never want to fucking do that. That’s how you get stuck in the past making shit that people are going to stop caring about. If you ever hear those words from me, fucking shoot me or something,” he joked. 

As a whole, McCay wants himself and his audience to “keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, and [not] stop.”