Arch Enemy To Rock Australia This Week…

Delivering a maelstrom of diamond-hard riffing wrapped around cinematic melodies, thunderous drumming and towering vocals, ARCH ENEMY are unstoppable and sound incredibly energized and they are headed back to Australia to start their tour in Adelaide on Tuesday. With Alissa White-Gluz out front for nearly ten years now, the guitar wizardry of Michael Amott and Jeff Loomis, and the thundering rhythm section of Daniel Erlandsson (drums) and Sharlee D’Angelo (bass), Arch Enemy sound fresh and hungry, continually proving they are masters of their craft. Hi Fi Way spoke to Michael Amott about the tour starting this week.

How have the shows been going on the tour so far?
Really great. We started touring again after a two and a half year break, we started again in April last year which was in the States. That was fun, just easing back into it and then took a while to get back into that mode. The last thing we did was some festivals in Europe over the summer, then we went into like a big European tour that went straight into a Latin American run, so that ended right before the holidays. That was like a three month straight run where we played Europe and Latin America. It’s been great. I’m really enjoying it. The fans seem to be happy as well. I feel like everything is like a big celebration nowadays since the pandemic, you know what I mean? Just feels great so that live music is back. There’s so much like doomsday prophecies about the music business and industry, you know, the live music thing and everything, it feels awesome every time I step on stage. To me it feels great,

It’s great that we don’t actually have to hear songs about isolation and people being stuck in their rooms or stuck in their houses.
Yeah, that’s one thing early when we started writing this Deceivers album was, I remember this saying clearly that this cannot be our Covid album lyrically, because everybody’s going to be releasing one of those. It’s not really that, but I think in some ways that whole time definitely limited us in some ways. Now it’s not about being stuck at home.

Now it’s time to live now…
Absolutely. Time to live. That’s great.

Have you been really happy with how the fans on the tour so far have been getting into the new songs from, from Deceivers?
Honestly, it’s been unbelievable. I would say that’s mostly down to the way we release new music this time, we’ve done a lot of singles. I think we dropped the first one at the end of 2021 and then it just kept on going. We dropped these new tracks with videos on all the streaming platforms and all of that. Those would come out every two, three months or whatever. By the time the album actually came out in August, last summer we had dropped like six songs and those were incorporated into the live show. Fans were enjoying them and really knew those songs very well. That was a new way of doing things for us and certainly for myself.

I wasn’t really sure that would work as well as it did, you know, that whole setup was something that came together with our management and our record label Sony in Germany, they wanted to do it that way. I was kind of a bit sceptical, but I can’t take credit for it. It really worked out super well. The reactions are great and fans really know the new stuff. Arch Enemy is one of those bands that, I don’t know how it happened, but our newer newer material, the last ten years or so is our most popular material with our fan base. I don’t know how that worked, but it’s pretty great that we can focus on moving forward and we don’t have to rely on too much on our past.

Have you been surprised by reactions to certain songs from the new album when you play them in different countries?
Oh yeah, every country and sometimes each city has their own flavour as far as the fan reaction. It’s always really strong. We have an amazing family that’s all over the world. One of the things that I personally enjoy the most about Arch Enemy is that we do get to play every corner of the world and we have fans there waiting for us that know the songs. That’s a huge deal, and something I definitely don’t take for granted. We use a lot of traditional heavy metal elements in our song writing, you know and there’s a lot of old school Maiden, Judas Priest or that kind of vibe in the music, but the way we jam it out, it comes out sounding a lot more modern I guess. The original seed of inspiration might be something from the seventies or eighties, just the vibe, musically the first scene of inspiration. Then to see something that I felt was this mid-tempo, fist banging song, but then you see the mosh pit and the audience is going off. The reactions are just not what you expect all the time, which is cool. I love it!

So what do you love about touring Australia?
Um, Auckland’s the best ? The first time we came over was unbelievable because we had never been there. I think when you come to a new place and it’s so, so remote for us, so far away from Europe, Sweden, where the band is based, when we came down there and we had great audiences and really strong fan reaction of course. Everybody was super excited to see us that first time. That was a really memorable experience, something we’ll never forget. Every time we come back, our understanding of the scene, the cities and the country is greater. Now it’s been five years, like I said I’m looking forward to everything now. What I like about touring in Australia the most is, what is it? What could it be? It’s just the whole experience, it’s kind of exotic for us to play Australia. It’s not something we do every year and it’s a nice experience, the fans are great and that’s the number one. I have to say that because that’s the truth. If you go somewhere, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the country is or how great the food is, if the fans suck, the fans are great in Australia, that’s what keeps us wanting to come back.

Have you started thinking about what might be the next album?
We’ve ended up in a weird situation now where Deceivers was actually written and conceived. during 2020. It’s like, wait, hang on a minute!. The album isn’t to that new to us even though it was released in 2022. I’ve already got a ton of ideas for new songs, there’s a lot of demos of little bits and pieces. I don’t think a new album is going to take five years until we put out another new one. If anything, gets in the way, if we get offered to tour with Metallica for two years, we might do that, possibly ! You never know what’s going to happen.

I’m eager to get back into the studio. But the same time, we do have a lot of touring left to do on this album cycles. We’ve already done the States, we’ve done European festivals and we’ve done a big European arena tour in the fall, then we did Latin America right before the holidays and now coming down to see you guys followed by a big tour of Japan as well. It’s exciting stuff. Then we have a huge summer schedule in Europe. Europe is the bread and butter for Arch Enemy and for a lot of metal bands. After that we might start fiddling around with new songs again. That would be fun. It’s like a combination, going back and forth between playing live and being creative, writing new stuff. When you’re playing live, you’re just repeating what you’ve done, what you already have. It’s repetitious in the way, but it’s doesn’t feel repetitious because it’s so exciting with the fans there and everything, the audience reaction. At the same time, there is this the desire to create new music sort which creeps up again where you start thinking about new songs and stuff like that.

Safe travels to Australia and we look forward to your tour.
Thank you very much. For us it’s a huge deal, like I said, it’s been five years and hopefully it’s not going to be another five years before we come back, but you never know nowadays too, the world isn’t as predictable as it used to be.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Arch Enemy on tour with Valhalore, tickets from DRW Entertainment and Metropolis Touring…