How To Focus On The Positive, Rather Than Depression Or Alcoholism

"A year ago we were all ready to give up," Brett Anderson of Buried In Verona says straight off the bat. It's the type of statement that in most cases would be followed a resigned sigh and a protracted explanation of what comes to be the beginning of the end. But Anderson is sounding positively cheery.

That's because he's reflecting on the process that resulted in the Sydney metalcore outfit's fifth album, Vultures Above, Lions Below. Beleaguered by a litany of financial and personal problems, the band managed to slog through to arrive at their most passionate, and powerful, album to date. 

"Yes, we've been through some shit. And we've written songs about that shit."

"We were at the end of our ropes," he continues. "Then I was writing about these experiences. But it wasn't until we put it together that we realised this whole album was kind of about this massive transition, personally and as a band, that we all had to go through to be where we are now. So that was an awesome surprise at the end of it. That one big fluid story could come out of Buried In Verona's personal battles that we had to deal with. Depression, alcoholism, all that sort of stuff that came about as a direct result of the hardships Buried In Verona had to face."

Those hardships gave Anderson and the band a machine to rage against. And rage they did. Vultures Above, Lions Below comes across like a visceral gut-punch, and fans have immediately responded. Since its release, the album shot up the ARIA charts and critics have fawned over it. Which raises the question: if all this hardship led to such a great album, does that make Anderson and his cohorts kind of appreciate everything that went down?

"Yes, we've been through some shit. And we've written songs about that shit. One hundred per cent, if we weren't there, we couldn't be here. But you can't look at it like that. Because then it becomes this revolving cycle and I have to go through more shit to write the next album."

That's why Anderson's approaching the band's upcoming tour with a positive mindset. "I'm going to use this tour as my version of therapy. Obviously I'm going to be thinking about these situations — it's impossible not to relive a lot of the negativity when I'm singing these lyrics — but I'm going to try my best not to focus on what happened, but me expressing myself and getting those feelings out there. And using it as a positive thing to get it all off my chest... Me and the band, we just want to make things positive from now on. We want to take these negative and heavy songs from our personal lives and get that out as a means of moving forward from all this shit.

"We've had enough negatives," he adds cheerily. "We've gotta move on from all that shit. We can't deal with any more negatives, we've lived it a little too long. We've gotta focus on the positive."