So how are you enjoying Sweden so far?
The weather could be better…
A bit cold maybe
No, I’m used to the cold. It’s much colder than this where I live.
Oh where do you live?
In New Jersey and also Minnesota and Minnesota is like the coldest place in America so. The last time we were here it was much colder and a lot of snow, I just thought that it would be some sun and I could go down to the beach, or I don’t know if there’s a beach in Gothenburg, it’s close to the ocean at least, I wanted to go on a walk.
It’s too early in Sweden, you got to go in like June. What!? You’re wearing flip flops you must think it’s kinda warm?!
Nah I always wear flip flops, even in the snow. It’s kind of a thing.
What is it about touring that make you love it so much? Because I read in some interview that CJ said that you tour alot..
Yeah we’ve toured more than any Australian band in the last five years so we like touring I guess. Mostly it’s because we’re all big grown up kids. We don’t want a normal job or go home or whatever, so if we keep booking tours we don’t ever need to go home and face reality. Last year I think we went on tour from May and we went home three days before Christmas. Non stop. So we like touring, we’re pretty good at it I guess, we’re really good friends so it makes it easy you know.
I guess that’s important
Yeah we had the longest time we had off this year and it was uh January, February, March..most of April. Three months off, back to back like no rehearsal, no writing, no touring, and everyone went crazy. We got back together a couple of weeks before back in Germany to start rehearsing and everyone had the same story like ”yeah I went home and I couldn’t sleep and I was bored” and we all missed our friends so it’s good that we’re touring again.
Yeah I guess you kinda need to be really good friends with each other to be able to live in a tour bus together
Yeah definitely, I mean before we could have a bus or anything we had a small van so it was even worse, but yeah we make it work.
What’s your favorite song to play live?
I don’t know. One of the new ones, we’ve been playing it at soundcheck so I guess if it’s someone coming to the show that were standing outside at soundcheck you’ll hear new stuff. They’re the funnest ones I think, maybe because it’s exciting and we haven’t played them sixhundred times but I guess in the current set … I really don’t know they’re all so… I’m gonna say Defective Breed, that’s probably why we ope with it because it’s very fun song.
When did you know that this band was going to be successful? Like you were going to be able to make a living?
Before I even joined the band I knew that it would be successful I think that the band had an x-factor and I could tell that CJs voice was capable of doing some crazy things. So as soon as I joined the band I wanted to make it something bigger than what it was and help the band grow. I don’t know, I guess, I don’t want to sound arrogant but I think in this industry there’s a lot of arrogance so it’s very easy to mixed up with it but it’s the music and what we’re creating it’s something we believed in and it’s not that we knew that it would become a popular band or do something, we just knew that what we were doing was good and that we loved it and so regardless of what else happened we loved it and we figured out that if we loved it so much that other people would as well and luckily they did and it did everything we thought that it would and then it did some more as well.
How was it recording the new album?
Very easy and very fun.
How come it was easy?
Because recording is easy, you just have to do it over and over again, you don’t have to jump around and preform or drive for twelve hours and preform, you can just wake up and sit down and drink a coffee and play some guitar. It was a little bit ore stressful because the last album no one knew the band so much so there was no expectation but this time around the record label was wanting to hear a good album, and we knew that the fans were writing on our facebook everyday ”put out a new album, put out a new album” and we’re like ”yeah sorry , we’ve been touring so much” but no, we did it with the same producer that did Hate, Will Putney, who’s one of my best friends personally and also a great friend of the bands and working with him is the easiest thing ever. When we first went to start recording me, Will and Sean decided ”fuck this” and we got on a plane and went to Florida for five days and got drunk and wasted a week of recording because we were hung over for days and days. So we ended up recording for two weeks instead of a month, that’s how easy it is you know, the hard work was the pre-production, the preparation, the song writing…and Sean worked really hard writing a lot of songs and a lot of riffs, you know building to an album, and I guess that wasn’t fun for him because we would be teasing him like ”write a better song” and we would be sitting there like ”we don’t have anything, we don’t have any ideas”, we probably spent six weeks writing the records I guess, maybe four weeks, I don’t know. We were at the studio even before we started recording and writing, and I guess that was stressful, once we started recording it was just like building a house with lego, you know once you have the plan on how to build it then it’s pretty easy.
So what song is the best one of the new album?
They’re all good. Honestly I couldn’t tell you. I think Holy War, one of the…the title track is pretty good I mean it’s very catchy kinda like Regin of Darkness, my favorite is Emptiness though. It was the first song that I wrote lyrics for on the album and they were very sad lyrics so you know it’s my favorite one to listen back to, CJ did very good on the vocals.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen o tour?
I don’t know, how long is a piece of string? I guess you see nudity all the time. Actually we were on the same bus three years ago I think of tour in Europe in the downstairs lounge and everyone on the tour except for me and the tour manager Kris that brought you here because we’ve been touring together for a long time, we were the only two guys that had our clothes on everyone else had no clothes on and they were chanting that they had formed the naked brotherhood and that they were the shrimps or something, and CJ actually has a tattoo on his leg of a prawn, like a shrimp that says N.B.H that means naked brotherhood, that’s how seriously they took it. So that’s pretty weird. I mean Lee sometimes will take a photo of his shit in the toilet and send it to me and I probably see that all the time, I don’t know it’s crazy, there’s even some things I can’t say because I would get in trouble from the other guys for saying it.
Well it sounds like fun as well haha
Yeah it’s pretty fun.
Yeah and I had a fan question also, he wondered what you think of Slaughter to Prevail from Russia, have you heard of them?
I have actually, I haven’t heard their music. A friend of mine runs a record label in Australia and he asked me what I thought because he was thinking of putting the record out in Australia and he sent me the link and I haven’t listened to it still and he sent it a couple of days ago actually, but I know that the singer is this guy called Alex the terrible from Russia who’s like a youtube sensation , he’s meant to be really cool. I’ve heard his voice once, I think he did a cover of a Thy Art Is Murder song, I mean he’s got a really good voice, but I haven’t heard the music so maybe his voice is awesome and the music is shit or maybe it’s awesome I don’t know.
Do you have anything you want to say before the interview is over?
We have our new record, Holy War coming out in Europe sometime in the end of June I can’t remember, the 26th…or the 29th…I don’t know, I’m in charge of that and I should know! Pretty sure 26th in the UK, 29th in Europe, 30th in America, it’s very good, we put a lot of time and effort into it and we can’t wait to get back to wherever it is that you live and play it for you live, not on a CD.
