Finding Form

Since forming in 2008, Against The Tide have supported huge acts within metal and hardcore including Oh, Sleeper, Buried in Verona, Thy Art Is Murder and plenty more. Naturally you'd expect a progression to the next stage, releasing a record, but it seems that was a difficult process for the group. “There were a lot of factors that came into play,” Long explains. “We'd written it fairly quickly; we did it in the real old-fashioned, traditional way, where we just sat in the jam room, threw out all of our ideas and then started to cram it all together in a sort of rough skeleton form of songs. There wasn't really any concept behind it, just trying to get material together that we thought sounded good. Releasing it was the really time-consuming part.

“It was our first time putting together a record, so it was a pretty big learning curve, and there was a lot of juggling between working and schedules. We'd only meet up once a week for practice and to sort everything out. It was a bit of a trial-and-error period for us because we were releasing our first one without any help. The biggest challenge was how we'd manage to support it financially. We're all in positions where we're growing out of our teens and into adulthood so we're all finding new jobs and, like, one of the guys is looking into a house, so it was difficult in that respect, putting together money for artwork and the CDs and getting the printing done and things like that. It was tough.”

Thankfully they were helped with the record, Formless, by producer Shane Frisby (The Ghost Inside), who played a huge role in shaping the tracks and acted as a brilliant mentor and guide for the group. “We were with Shane every day, we were actually staying at his house, which was fun,” Long laughs. “Throughout recording he'd basically just throw ideas at us, like 'I kinda want to take this out of/add this into a song.' He was really flexible with us and if we or he had an idea he would sort of stop everything and start playing around with a song, so he was a huge influence. A lot of things were taken out and a lot was put in so when we listen to the record back, it sounds a lot better. We looked to him a lot for opinions throughout the process.”

Wanting to make the most of their ongoing momentum, the band has huge plans underway once their album launch run in WA comes to an end. “We want to stay out of Perth for as long as we can because we've been here for ages and there's only so much you can do. We really need to be outside of our comfort zones, so when this is released, we're going to get out of here. We talked about doing some Southeast Asia shows, Europe shows, and we're also hoping to look for a label soon.  We just want to play as much as we can for people, that's all.”