Stirring The Pot

30 October 2013 | 5:30 am | Lochlan Watt

“I’m not too strongly against [drug use] in that sense. I’ve got friends that are recreational users, and that’s fine."

More Saviour More Saviour

Saviour have toured with almost every successful Australian band of their ilk: I Killed The Prom Queen, Northlane, Make Them Suffer, Dream On Dreamer. With a new record deal with UNFD and a headlining tour just around the corner, they're certainly on the right track. It wasn't always going to be this way, however, with the band having apparently “piss-farted around” for a couple of years prior to getting serious in 2009.

“One day we were like, 'Man, what if we actually made a proper band?' Our first goal was to just play a show in Perth, and the couple of weeks leading up to that was the most nerve-wracking time in our band's history. All of a sudden that was no longer a big deal and we moved on to bigger and better things.”

Heavy and melodic, emotive and aggressive, the five-piece deliver dynamic music that traverses a wide spectrum. With their second album, the band expanded things further and tried their hand at a conceptual release. The album title works on multiple levels, First Light being the point of birth and Deathbed being, well, you know, but Best reveals that it's also “a concept album about a couple going through drug addiction”.

“I've had a few friends go through it pretty bad. It was one of those ones that I felt quite strongly about. I wanted to portray a message through it. Leading up to the writing of the album I was watching a lot of films as well. I was influenced [by] movies like Requiem For A Dream and Trainspotting, just those sort of films to get me into the feeling and into the mood of the gravity of the situations I was writing about. It was awesome writing like that – I was able to really connect with the characters I created, even though they weren't necessarily about myself.”

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

Does this mean that Saviour is a band that has a stance against drug use, or is the album more from an objective angle? “I'm not too strongly against [drug use] in that sense. I've got friends that are recreational users, and that's fine. With this I was just trying to… it was more about the people that are really stuck in the rut. This album was more just telling a tragic tale of what it can do to you, and how it can affect people around you.

 “This album compared to our last is a lot more polished. We had more direction with where we were going with it. We had the storyline set before we even started writing the first song. Musically we knew what we wanted a bit more. Just writing around emotion as well, we kind of came up with the saying 'emotion is the potion', and if we weren't feeling anything from the song we'd ditch it.”