Stayin' Sharp

The just about laid-back-to-the-point-of-being-comatose Kyle Shutt is drinking an afternoon beer on his porch in Texas. He's back home taking a rest in the middle of the band's headlining American run of dates supporting album number four Apocryphon and is happy to get the moment of down time. The guitarist kicks off our conversation by reflecting on how the tour has been going for The Sword.

“Going out and playing these shows, it kind of feels like Sword 2.0. With all the new material there's a lot of new stuff for us to try around onstage… and we're all singing back-ups now, so there's a lot going on.

“The tour has been going really well. We had the highest chart debut we've ever had in the States and the album has been number one on the college radio charts for the last three weeks… It's pretty wild, we've never had this kind of success before so it feels really good.”

The Sword in 2013 are riding high on a success that many thought might never again befall the band after their 2010 space rock concept record Warp Riders. After generating a tremendous underground buzz with their first two albums, the delightful, Middle Earth-referencing stoner metal powerhouses Age Of Winters (2006) and Gods Of The Earth (2008), …Riders was met with a decidedly mixed reaction due to its scope and ambition. With the benefit of a couple of years hindsight, Shutt has no regrets about what the band did on their last record, even though it inadvertently put them through a rough patch.

“Warp Riders was kind of a response to a lot of the bands that we were on the road with over the couple of years leading up to that record,” he reflects. “We'd be heading out with bands like Machine Head, Fear Factory, Lamb Of God, Down, these really extreme bands. So the songs we wrote after we got home from that tour were all real different, and kind of light-hearted, so that's how Warp Riders got its sound. But then after being on the road for Warp Riders and going through all the things that we went through – our drummer just bailing on us in the middle of the tour, shifting our business around, getting a new label and a new manager – that made us really question ourselves and consider what we wanted to do and where we were in our lives and Apocryphon were just the songs that came out.”

The songs that eventually did come out are some of the band's finest to date. Marrying the doom-adjacent rumblings of their early fare with the psychedelic flourishes of Warp Riders and bringing an entirely new boogie to the whole ordeal, Apocryphon has been a major triumph for the Texas four-piece. All the other stuff leading up to the record – having original drummer Trivett Wingo walk out on the band, finding themselves without a label – seems pretty inconsequential now.

Shutt doesn't want to dwell on any of that negativity, however, be he admits that during all the madness that occurred between Warp Riders and Apocryphon he feared that The Sword might have fought their last battle.

“I've thought that the band could be over multiple times,” he admits. “But I think that's a natural thing. Being on the road is a crazy lifestyle dude, it will drive you insane and will make you think crazy things… It's like what Charlie Watts said about being in a band being 99 per cent waiting around and one percent playing the show. The show makes the waiting worthwhile, but that doesn't mean that the waiting doesn't take its toll. But then you come home from the tour and you decompress and then you want to get back out there and do it all again.”

Now that they're back out on the road with Apocryphon, have they managed to bring that record's layers to a live arena? There's a lot more going on there than standard guitar/bass/drums/vocals four-piece rock'n'roll.

“Brian's got his Moog and he can do all the keyboard parts and Jimmy, our drummer, has a sample pad so he can do some things with that, not very much but something here and there, just the flourishes that mean we don't need to have a fifth member playing with us,” Shutt tells. “Because we'd rather be badass, and doing it all yourself is totally badass.”

On the deluxe edition of Apocryphon, The Sword take on the seminal sleaze-n-cheese rock staple Cheap Sunglasses, originally written by fellow Texans ZZ Top. Shutt confirms that the song has already become a summer festival favourite, and is hoping the band might get a chance to educate any uninitiated cats that happen to find their way over to The Sword's Soundwave set.

“ZZ Top are the little biggest band from Texas, and we're the second little biggest band from Texas. I think that's an important part of being in a band and playing shows, that sometimes you need to pay homage to the greats by playing some of their songs,” he smiles. “When we were writing the record we knew we had a lot of summer festival shows coming up and so we were thinking about a song that everybody could sing along to, and with Cheap Sunglasses, even if you don't know the words you can sing the chorus. People have really been loving it at the festivals too man. We might even bust it out at the old Soundwave festival if we have more than half an hour to play.”

Given the circumstances of their last visit to the festival, Shutt sounds pretty pleased about how everything is shaping up for their return to the Soundwave stages. They're sharing the bill with their old friends Metallica and a crop of their hard rock/heavy metal peers. Discussing the festival, Shutt suggests that the camaraderie between the bands is one of the things he's most looking forward to experiencing.

“Being in a band that's on the road all the time it's this situation where the people you get closest to, guys from other bands and whatever, you never see again. So whenever you cross paths on tour it's always a rowdy good time, so I can only imagine the shenanigans that are going to be going on around this Soundwave.”

Our conversation with Shutt is quick, he's got beers to drink after all, but before it ends he promises that fans of the band are not going to want to miss what they do at the upcoming Soundwave festival.

“We're not going all that way for nothing. We're going to throw down and it's going to be a rowdy good rock'n'roll time, so you better not miss it.”

The Sword will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 23 February - Soundwave, Brisbane QLD
Sunday 24 February - Soundwave, Sydney NSW
Monday 25 February - Billboard, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 28 February - The Metro, Sydney NSW
Friday 1 March - Soundwave, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 2 March - Soundwave, Adelaide SA
Monday 4 March - Soundwave, Perth WA