A recently published piece over at Metal Hammer found AFI vocalist Davey Havok expressing his conflicted feelings about the runaway success the band experienced with their early aughts output, in particular “Miss Murder“. That lead single from their seventh studio album, their platinum-certified Interscope Records debut, “Decemberunderground“, has gone on to commercially dwarf their other output.
Havok recently spoke of that song overshadowing material from the band he feels is better written, telling Metal Hammer:
“It breaks my heart that ‘Miss Murder‘ will always represent us, and that I will die and someone will look up AFI and ‘Miss Murder‘ is what they’re gonna find. I don’t dislike ‘Miss Murder‘, it’s a pretty good song! But never, even when we wrote it, did I think that it was the greatest song. I even voted to not put it on the record, but that experience really proved to me that it was all about marketing, because everything after ‘Decemberunderground‘ is better than ‘Decemberunderground‘.
I have campaigned to keep it off the setlist and recently succeeded. When we play a festival or when we’re playing a city where we feel we have a few more passive fans, we’re gonna play it, and I don’t mind it, but I do enjoy the optics of removing it from the set.”
As Havok also stated in that same piece, despite the band experiecing their commercial peak thus far at the time, not everything was well behind the scenes:
“The writing of ‘Decemberunderground‘ was a miserable period. We had signed to Dreamworks, but they sold it to Interscope. Bummer.
Our A&R guy was hellbent on trying to get [Interscope boss] Jimmy Iovine – who had expressly claimed in the press that rock is dead – to pay attention to AFI, and so it was suggested that we collab with Jimmy’s great love at the time, which was 50 Cent. I have nothing against 50 Cent, but what does that even mean?!
Even worse was this was the era when ringtones were the new technology craze. I love this man and I still see him once a month at the least, but this motherfucker says to me, ‘What if you were to be the first band to write a ringtone album?’”
As of press time, “Miss Murder” stands as the band’s most streamed song on Spotify by a wide margin, with over 385 million streams. Its closest competition is “Girl’s Not Grey” at over 87 million streams.
