AFI vocalist Davey Havok has opened up about the complicated legacy of “Miss Murder,” admitting that it bothers him that the song has become so closely associated with the band despite his belief that much of their later material is stronger.
Released in 2006 as the lead single from “Decemberunderground,” the band’s platinum-certified debut for Interscope Records, “Miss Murder” became AFI’s biggest commercial hit by a considerable margin. However, Havok says he never viewed the track as the band’s definitive song and even opposed including it on the album initially.
Speaking with Metal Hammer, Havok explained why the song’s enduring popularity is somewhat bittersweet for him:
“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’.”
Havok has also pushed for the song to be removed from AFI’s live sets, recently succeeding in doing so. The vocalist explained that the band will still perform “Miss Murder” when playing festivals or markets where they expect a larger number of casual listeners.
“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.”
While “Decemberunderground” represented a major commercial breakthrough for AFI, Havok recalled the album’s creation as a particularly difficult period for the band. The group had originally signed with DreamWorks, only for the label to be sold to Interscope, putting them under the watch of executives who were eager to find ways to push the band further into the mainstream.
“The writing of ‘Decemberunderground’ was a miserable period. We had signed to Dreamworks, but they sold it to Interscope. Bummer.”
Havok recalled that the band’s A&R representative was determined to get Jimmy Iovine, then the head of Interscope, interested in AFI. One of the ideas floated was a collaboration with 50 Cent, who was reportedly one of Iovine’s major interests at the time.
“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?!”
The situation became even stranger when the label’s focus shifted toward the ringtone craze that was dominating the music industry during the mid-2000s.
“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?’”
Despite Havok’s complicated feelings toward “Miss Murder,” the track remains by far AFI’s most successful song on streaming platforms. As of publication, it has surpassed 385 million Spotify streams, while “Girl’s Not Grey” sits in second place with more than 87 million.
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