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Young Men Society Credit: Ken Leanfore

Photography: Ken Leanfore

Young Men Society: Owning the night

12 June 2012

by Victoria Lucas

"We’ve been getting a lot of people asking, ‘Are you guys a gimmick?’ We want people to walk away from our shows seeing us as real artists. We really sing and we really dance, and we do both with a passion.”

As the three members of Young Men Society were all too aware when they first entered the television talent search X-Factor, exposure on the show can act as a double-edged sword. The boys are sitting in TMN’s offices, where they discuss their projected career trajectory, and their reasons for entering the competition.

“We just really wanted to take it to the next step,” explains Nate. (He, along with Andi and Josh, make up Young Men Society. As with all good pop acts, no surnames are needed). “We’d been pushing R’n’B music at the start, and we were finding it really difficult to push through. X Factor came around at the right time for us. Obviously we combine singing and dancing and we thought it’d be a perfect opportunity for us to showcase both those talents. We thought, ‘Let’s go in there as the group we want to be seen as, let’s go in there with the song that best represented us at the time and just give it our best shot.’”

After receiving a standing ovation after their first audition, the trio felt that X Factor may provide the career breakthrough they’d been seeking since forming three years earlier at a hip hop dance class. Producer Israel Cruz–who has co-written tracks with Ricki-Lee, Jess Mauboy and Stan Walker, among others–worked as an early mentor to the group, bunking down with them in the studio and helping them build both their songwriting and production chops. However, by the time the X-Factor audition had swung around, the group began to feel they were banging their heads against a brick wall. Not long after, the weather broke.

“After the first episode aired, our Facebook and Twitter went insane,” explains Nate. “We had three friend requests,” continues Andi, “then I woke up the next morning with over one hundred friend requests on Facebook. “I thought ‘What the hell is this?’”

Despite this instant adoration, the group still found that once the program had ended, their top eight placing didn’t exactly lead to a flood of record company interest. Regardless, they kept building upon this exposure, self-recording a single and creating their own accompanying video.

“Some of the [X Factor] artists got given everything on a plate, in our case we created the plate,” laughs Andi. “After the show we actually didn’t have any kind of [label] options, there was a point in time where we were really down, but we just told ourselves, ‘Let’s just keep going, let’s make this track, let’s just keep recording, let’s do a video for it,’ and that ended up being We Own The Night.

The track piqued the interest of Sony, who put the band on tour with dance pop act Justice Crew. “When Sony heard the song they loved it,” recalls Nate, “and we said, ‘We’ve actually made a video for it’, and they loved the video, so they pretty much just dove straight onboard.”

“We’re really proactive,” adds Josh. (Evidentially the quiet one; although later he describes the group’s goal as “to take over the world.” He is only half-joking.) The group’s hard work with Cruz, and the way in which they secured their deal with Sony means they are now in a privileged position for a pop act. “We can go away and create the material, and take it back and go, ‘These are the ones we’re feeling’ – we get more creative control than most,” explains Nate.

With the group currently in the studio, working on creating a batch of “strong singles,” there seems to be no cap on their ambitions. “We want to be big,” Nate confirms. “We’re in this because we love it. It’s not a hobby for us, it’s our lives so if we are gonna do it, we might as well go hard.”

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