“You spend so long on this daily basis with each other that if you talk about all these deep, emotional things, it’s so draining. “I think trust is a big part of it, trust that each member of the group is focused on making the same thing for the same reason or at least the right thing for the right reasons,” Ray says. And for all four band members-Petricca, Ray, guitarist Eli Maiman and drummer Sean Waugaman-stepping away from music prompted them to face some important questions that had been hanging over the band unanswered up to then. Petricca was dealing with the death of his father and other personal issues. What started as a canceled tour soon grew into a hiatus. “For me personally, it was a strain, because I saw what we had built with ‘Shut Up and Dance’ just sort of lingering in limbo and not capitalizing on it,” Ray says. Pulling the plug on the tour, as necessary as it might have been, meant the band wouldn’t be able to build on the momentum that had been generated by their breakout hit. “Shut Up and Dance,” the single from the second Walk The Moon album, Talking is Hard, had spent seven weeks in summer 2015 in the top five on Billboard magazine’s all-genre Hot 100 chart on its way to becoming a triple-platinum hit. It’s all the result of a period of considerable uncertainty that began in summer of 2016 when the group canceled a tour so singer-guitarist Nicholas Petricca could be with his father, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.Īccording to bassist Kevin Ray, the unplanned stoppage came at a bad time career wise. The band has come back with a whole new level of understanding about the kind of music they want to make at this point in their career and what being part of Walk The Moon means to them. With their current album What If Nothing, Walk The Moon haven’t just returned from an extended gap between albums.