Davey Havok has always straddled the line between pop star and poet, theater kid and punk lifer, Bowie disciple and basement screamer. On Bodies, the latest AFI record and their eleventh (!) studio release, that duality feels sharper than ever. “I feel so much like that kid,” he tells me, reflecting on the band’s 30-year run. “And I know I can speak for all of us—that our passion for the music is the same that we had when we were younger.”
That’s not the sort of thing most artists say after three decades and double-digit albums. But Bodies doesn’t sound like a band running out the clock. It sounds like a band that’s just found the gas pedal again. “We’re constantly trying to create something that inspires us and makes us go, ‘Wow, that’s fun,’” Havok says. “Something that makes us feel something new in the context of what we’ve created as AFI.”
Part of what makes Bodies a fresh spin in the AFI discography is the presence of co-writes for the first time ever—most notably with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins. “Dulcería” came out of a session between Corgan and Jade Puget, with Havok writing lyrics afterward. “The melody tells the story,” Havok says. “And when the lyric found itself on that song, it really took it to a special place for me.” He even breaks new vocal ground on the track: “It allowed for the first instance of me singing falsetto in AFI, which was really fun.”
That theatricality—the sly falsetto, the slinky hooks—isn’t an act. Havok doesn’t write songs as character studies. He writes them as mirrors. “I’m not really getting in character,” he says. “I’m just accessing facets of myself that I feel are appropriate to the tone of the work.” In other words, it’s still a performance, just not a mask.
Performance itself, in fact, is baked into his writing process. “The song is a cheat sheet for the audience to know what their roles are and what our roles are when we get down to business,” Havok explains. “The live show is the moment we do it. Those moments of connection—everyone singing, everyone united—it’s very powerful. Very transcendent.”
Which might explain why Bodies doesn’t feel like a band laboring through the motions. It feels like a band still writing for that cathartic moment when the house lights go down and strangers become a chorus.
Havok also waxes poetic about Duran Duran, whose lyrics and experimental production have long served as quiet blueprints for AFI’s more melodic forays. He’s been co-hosting a Sirius XM show dedicated to the band and sings the praises of Nick Rhodes’s sound design and Simon Le Bon’s lyrical darkness. “They do not get the artistic credit they deserve,” he says. “If you just take Simon’s lyrics alone, you can see there’s more to it than your average pop song. There’s poetry. Gorgeous poetry.”
He recalls the influence of MTV’s early days—not just as a music delivery system, but as a cultural monolith. “We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost a common point,” he says, lamenting the collapse of the monoculture. “As bad as we thought MTV was, it still gave us a place. They gave us voice.” He didn’t even have MTV at home growing up. He had to sneak over to friends’ houses to catch videos and piece together a dreamworld from the shadows.
The theatricality of those videos helped shape his vision. “I was enamored with music and performers and pop culture,” he says. “The fictitious stories created in those narratives—the layers added to the music—it was just presented to me as: this is happening, this is a world.”
That world inspired him to build his own. And now Bodies is inspiring others. Havok glows as he talks about the online fan gallery where listeners can upload art based on the new album. “To create anything that inspires anyone else to create is very surreal to me,” he says. “We made this little virtual world to showcase that art. It’s wonderful. People take pieces of our work and make greater works from it.”
AFI may not be the cultural monolith that MTV once was, but they’re still offering something just as vital: a shared signal in the noise. A duet between artist and audience. A body in motion, still moving forward.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
