Neotec: True Believers.

Neotec play the B Lounge on Thursday.

“Being in a metal band’s not an easy thing,” Neotec drummer Scott Wade explains. Fair enough too. You don’t get a lot of airplay, there’s not a lot of gigs going around, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to stay a part of the underground.

But there are rewards to be had; Neotec found themselves on the podium with the best song at last years Queensland Rock Awards. Since then they’ve had a reshuffle in the line up, and their debut disc was finally launched a couple of weeks back. One thing that has remained a constant is the band’s dedication to cranking out the finest metallic tracks the possibly can.

“Basically our old bass player and vocalist left last year,” drummer Scott Wade explains. “We weren’t going to release anything because we though the band might change it’s style. But what happened is the sound got better, but we’re still true to our original style. We just called the disc Burn…True because we stayed true to hat we were.”

“Two tracks are actually from our first recording, Elements. The other tracks were done for Burn after we won best original song at the Queensland Rock Awards last year’ We just kind of combined the two and released them as an EP.”

Were the tracks re-recorded after the line up change?

“No, they weren’t re record, but we’d like to record again with our new singer, because he’s about 100 times better than the old one. We still sell the disc at gigs and people really seem to like it. It’s just about getting together enough funds to get back into the studio. We’re working more on gigging at the moment.”

The band have been gigging almost every weekend for a couple of months now, are you writing new songs?

“Yes and no. We’ve kept the same songs in the set, and we haven’t written new songs, but we’re re working a lot of the old ones. We wrote an instrumental before Rick (new vocalist) joined the band. We’re actually working on some new songs with Rick, where he’s playing some keyboards as well. It’s kind of a Dream Theatre / Yes kind of song.”

Are you guys into a bit of prog rock?

“We’re into our prog rock. Most of what we’ve done so far has been pretty metal, but you can tell there’s bits of prog rock starting to bleed through. Since last November we’ve been getting more into things like Dream Theatre, and it’s kind of exciting, because we don’t know what we’re going to be writing next. We haven’t sat down and said ‘we’re going to write this next’. I think a lot of what we write is influenced by what we’re listening to at the time. Things just end up telling a story, we just let it happen.”