Photo by Bartholomew Cubbins
(BROOKLYN, NY) -- Thirty Seconds to Mars comes to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Saturday, August 17, 2024. The band is touring in support of their latest album, It's The End Of The World But It's A Beautiful Day. Showtime is 6:30pm.
Tickets range from $25-$215 and are available for purchase online. Barclays Center is located at 620 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.
“I definitely don’t have the ability to show up and keep things simple,” Thirty Seconds To Mars’ Jared Leto says when asked about the process of making the group’s sixth album, It’s The End Of The World But It’s A Beautiful Day. “I always like to make my life, and everyone else’s life, as interesting as possible. I want to take advantage of every opportunity and make it as rewarding, creative, and special as I can.”
Indeed, It’s The End Of The World But It’s A Beautiful Day is a triumphant musical offering from Thirty Seconds To Mars, which Leto co-founded with his brother Shannon and has been driven by their intuitive creative interplay ever since. The siblings wrote hundreds of new songs remotely over the last several years and specifically carved out these 10 for the album, inspired by the gamut of emotions and experiences through which they’ve navigated in the five years since the release of their chart-topping previous album, America.
“Shannon and I wanted to make an album that speaks to who we are now,” Jared says of the project, which is led by the propulsive single and opening song, “Stuck.” “The connective threads are a sense of optimism, celebration, vulnerability, and simplicity too. We didn’t want to return to something we’re familiar with, and I think we did that.”
It’s The End Of The World But It’s A Beautiful Day is focused and concise, with no songs longer than three-and-a-half minutes and an emphasis on Jared’s emotive, straight-from-the-heart vocals. “There’s very little fat,” Jared emphasizes. “We’re a band that used to have 12-minute songs, and not doing that is a new experience for us and takes a lot of restraint. We’ve done the anthemic arena-rock thing. It was interesting to take a step back and look at songs to find out, how little can we do here? How minimal can things be, and what’s the most important aspect of a given song? My brother also took a big position in terms of producing songs in addition to drumming.”
Throughout the album, the songs here explore new feelings and colors while taking solace in the elemental: love, seizing the moment, heartbreak, and transcendence. Among the highlights are the strident, hook-filled “Seasons,” which is enveloped in the reassuring warmth of acoustic guitar and effervescent synths; the roof-raising, arms-in-the-air tracks “Life Is Beautiful” and “Avalanche”; and the artfully produced gems “World on Fire” and “7:1.” Says Jared of the latter, “It has a sense of mystery and atmosphere. It’s melodic and has some darker undertones and a really strong rhythm. It feels like Thirty Seconds To Mars – it doesn’t sound like anyone except us.”
The band’s commitment to getting out of its own comfort zone extended even to song titles. To wit, Jared says “Life Is Beautiful” was originally named “Misery,” until he realized “the world has a lot of misery in it already. There are more days in life where I look out at the sky here and acknowledge the beauty of life, so I’m glad that’s where the song ended up.”
And after singing and co-writing “Remedy” on America, Shannon again takes the mic for a rare lead vocal on the new album’s “Midnight Prayer.” Jared smiles, “It took me 20 years to get an arena to sing my songs back to me, and he stood on stage at his first fuckin’ performance and an entire arena was singing his song back to him like it was an anthem. He actually sang in a really vulnerable way that I think people responded to. That has always been a bit more challenging for me, but I discovered a different part of my voice from hearing him sing that song — more intimate, vulnerable, and maybe more revealing or truthful.”
Thinking back on his earliest musical memories, Jared marvels at how instinctively he and Shannon gravitated to playing instruments, even if, in Jared’s case, it was a cheap guitar or a beat-up old piano his mom retrieved from the side of a road. “Shannon was a drummer and would play in the local neighborhood heavy metal band. I knew a few chords on the guitar, but I was the younger brother, so I was never invited into their band,” Jared says. “If we weren’t brothers, there wouldn’t be a Thirty Seconds To Mars. If there wasn’t a Thirty Seconds To Mars, who knows what the relationship would be between us as brothers. It’s so much more than just a band or a business or creative outlet. Man, what a journey.”
Despite the deliberate and lengthy process involved in creating their latest record, the band intends to release their next album in a shorter time frame. “My god, it would be nice to put an album out and not wait five years every time,” Jared says. “It’s really just because we’ve been so meticulous, but I think we’ve gotten faster, finally. We do have a lot of other songs that are pretty realized, so I’m hopeful that this new chapter includes more music, and more music sooner.”
For now, Thirty Seconds To Mars is overjoyed to share the wide-ranging It’s The End Of The World But It’s A Beautiful Day with fans, especially after the tumult of the recent past. “If you’d have asked me when I was a kid if I’d release a single album, I would have told you you were crazy,” Jared says. “I’m an art school dropout but I was a musician first. In fact, there’ve been these funny times in my life when I was just a musician and didn’t make a film for six years. Now, it seems to have all come full circle.”
