Nails: Meet the New Angriest Band in Hardcore

As angry and uncompromising as Nails’ music may be, Jones takes pains to stress that the album’s title and opening track of the same name are not intended as a raised middle finger to the rest of the world, but rather as an anthem for all of those who devote their lives to passionate pursuits.

“‘You Will Never Be One of Us,’ is an inclusive, not an exclusive, statement,” Jones explains. “Like, I’m passionate about music, I play music and I’ve dedicated myself to it. I’m not really making money off of it, it’s not my primary source of income, but I do it because I love it. If you’re passionate about something, and you dedicate yourself to it, whether it’s music or journalism or whatever, you notice it right away when you see someone come along who is trying to do the same thing but is just doing it for whatever gain they can get from it. You know their intentions are shitty and not pure, and that’s when you say to yourself, ‘That person is not me, and they will never be me. They are fake!’ I think most of us have felt that at one time or another.”

A devoted family man who makes his living trouble-shooting connectivity issues for “a company that provides Internet service to aircraft,” Jones has long been averse to touring. Nails currently has about 35 live dates booked for 2016 in the U.S., U.K. and Europe – including a slot on September’s Ozzfest/Knotfest mega-fest – and Jones says there probably won’t be too many additional gigs scheduled for the You Will Never Be One of Us tour cycle.

“I don’t think we’ll be touring a lot more for this album than we did for the last ones,” he says. “We set the expectations with Nuclear Blast – we told them exactly what we can and cannot do, and they told us what they need and what’s acceptable to them and what’s not, and we were able to reach an agreement. The record has already been received really well, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure Nails is something we could really make careers out of …

“I’ve always looked at a job as a means to play music,” he continues. “I always wanted to have a nice Gibson guitar, and a nice Marshall amplifier, and I need transportation to get to practice; and when I take time off, I need to pay my bills, so I need to have a job that gives me vacation time. We make enough money in Nails to support Nails; we don’t have to come out of pocket on airfare, van rental, equipment rental or anything like that. I’m not really thinking about the band making any money beyond that, but if it was my career, I probably would be thinking about that all the time – and it’d probably take some of the fun out of it, you know what I mean?”