Alive And Kicking

It's easier to forgive a band who sticks to a formula and churns out much of the same-sounding stuff when they've been together for 16 years, but according to guitarist Andy Williams that's not really how his band works. “We have a two-year thing; we go about and tour a record for a couple of years and, you know, the thing for us is, after 16 years, we don't write what people tell us to write – if I'm writing songs, I'm writing songs for other things that I'm doing, I'm not writing for ETID specifically. We write whatever we feel is relevant to us. At the moment, it's about writing as much new and relevant stuff as I can; we're trying to broaden our horizons. It just gets you hearing in different ways.”

Their new record From Parts Unknown was designed to showcases the band's depth and experience while retaining their traditional musical elements of heavy, frantic rhythms and chaotic hooks. The group brought in Converge co-founder Kurt Ballou, working at his GodCity Studio in Massachusetts. They also had the likes of Sean Ingram (Coalesce) and Brian Fallon of (The Gaslight Anthem) guesting on certain tracks. Williams recounts it as a pretty hectic experience.

“We were supposed to have two months off, and then we got put on A Day To Remember's tour, so we only had 18 days to write the record – it was like, 'What the fuck can we do in this time period?' – it was basically like, 'Let's just write, let's see what we got.' Jordan [Buckley – guitar] and I have done a lot of transforming as people over the last year or two, and we managed to work from one frame of mind to another with this record. Working with other artists helped too; Sean has one of the gnarliest screams I've ever heard, and he knew what he was going to be working with so he was definitely keen. The Brian thing was a little weird because he has such an interesting voice, and I didn't think it was going to work initially, but thankfully it did and now we have a track on here that adds a completely new element to the record.”

Questioned about a sense of legacy with this new album, Williams has to laugh.

“It blows my mind that we lasted for longer than two months. That's the big thing, man, like, the fact that we managed to progress further than where we did and that we didn't manage to break up. Like, we've been going for 16 years, that still sounds crazy to me. Things have definitely changed too. When we started, there was no GPS, no internet, there was no such thing as an endorsement, there was nothing. You had to hustle to make things happen. There's a lot of cool shit happening now. There are hardcore bands popping up everywhere now and they're touring the world more often than ever – it's definitely heading in the right direction and we're just so happy to have been a part of it.”