Hot Water Music bassist Jason Black has discussed the band's decision to sign with Rise Records in a new interview with Absolute Punk.
When asked about the decision, Black said:
"We definitely talked to a few other labels. We’ve worked with a lot of other people – we’ve done releases, or Chuck [Ragan] has done releases, with Epitaph, Side One Dummy and No Idea. As a band, since we started this we’ve always been interested in working with as many different people as possible. Doing something different definitely factored in, but Craig [Ericson, owners of Rise Records] really wanted to do the record more than anyone else. That’s the number one deciding factor for us, whoever wants to do it most will probably do the best job. When we signed to Epitaph, people freaked out. When we toured with Sick Of It All people freaked out. At this point we expect that reaction from almost any decision we make.
To tell you the truth, they just have it going on right now. They’re selling more records than anyone else – not that that’s a giant goal of ours, but it’s not something we don’t want to do. Craig’s a good dude who has been best friends with some of our best friends for a long time. They’re just kind of killing it right now. They’re still kind of fearless with their attitude. A lot of other labels are scaling back and trying to re-evaluate their gameplan where Rise is just trying to keep going and going. For us that’s super important – they’ve weathered the storm when it comes to music sales and they’ve actually managed to get bigger in that time. We sort of just realized that this was such a wild choice we should probably do it. Another thing, like I said earlier, we like doing different things. If we release the record on Epitaph or No Idea, we pretty much have an exact idea of what would happen. We really have no idea what will happen with Rise."
The band will be releasing a new two-song 7" ahead of their UK tour with Make Do And Mend, and then releasing a new studio album through Rise in 2012.
