Story Of The Year Celebrating Twenty Years Of ‘Page Avenue’

‘The cool thing for us is when we come to Australia, we can actually dip into some of the heavier stuff. I’ve always felt when we come to Australia, we can be heavier for whatever reason. I’ve always felt that outside of the United States, people and fans don’t care if you’re one record or the next.’ Josh Wills, drummer of Story Of The Year reminisces to me as he, and they, prepare to arrive in Australia for a twenty year anniversary of debut album Page Avenue a year after being on Knotfest here.

‘We played Knotfest and it was rad. I thought we were the weakest band on that tour as far as how heavy we are. But it worked. Everyone in the fucking crowd knew ‘Until The Day I Die’, and it was just like, oh, okay. Nobody gives a shit down here. If we would’ve played Knotfest in the States, we would’ve got booed, shit thrown at us. I can guarantee it. So I like coming down there. doesn’t always have to build this set around all ‘Page Avenue’ songs plus stuff that sounds like Page. It doesn’t matter.’

The tour will be about Page Avenue however much like the ten year anniversary, don’t expect the songs played in running order.

‘We’ve done it in order and it’s not a cool show. I just think the way that record is built, it goes cool, and then there’s the middle section where listening to it? Great. Live? It doesn’t work as well. We’ve done it and you are playing, ‘Anthem’ ‘Until The Day I Die’ second and third. Anybody that didn’t want to see anything else can go home now. So we’ve kind of figured out a way to make it so we will play all of ‘Page Avenue’, obviously, and then there’s probably five other songs that we mix in into set. We have a new record too. It just kind of coincided with the twentieth year of ‘Page Avenue’.

That new record, 2023’s Tear Me To Pieces was lauded by this reviewer as one of the albums of that year as it’s displayed all facets of the bands style, including its speedy run time. For Willis, it was the culmination of six albums refined.

‘There’s two songs on the record that are over three minutes. The whole record is thirty two minutes long or whatever, it is real quick. So we just cut out all of the normal fat that we would normally keep just to play something cool or whatever, and just made good songs. Whether they’re heavy, acoustic, poppy, it doesn’t matter. We like to do all of it. So it was just very like, let’s just do something rad that we love. But we did it with the producer who was a fan. He grew up as a fan and loved our band. So you have that fan perspective too, of somebody who’s extremely talented as a musician himself – and a songwriter – to go as a fan, I can tell you what your fans want to hear from you now after all these years’.

Page Avenue obviously set the career rolling, and while Tear Me To Pieces features the same falling man logo, it’s interesting they never felt record company pressure to do Page Avenue Mk 2.

‘It wasn’t like that on the second record, as you can tell, because it’s an obvious complete departure from the first record. But I think after the second record it was like, I think there’s certain times where you try to force something that isn’t necessarily there to try to recapture something instead of just kind of going in and going, whatever happens happens, let’s just make good music. You do try to force things from time to time.

I think that happened probably on the third and fourth record, definitely the fourth record. We weren’t in a great place as a band anyway. Not that we were mad at each other. We were just artistically just not maybe on the same page anymore and just kind of burnt out with it, that was 2008/9. Record sales were piss poor by then for sure, just in general, not just us, like everybody streaming and illegal downloading, all that stuff was kind of in that five year span. And so when we went to make our fifth record ‘Wolves’, I don’t even think we thought about it. We were doing it ourselves anyway. We did a crowdfunding thing, so that just wasn’t even a thought. Then when we did ‘Turn Me To Pieces’ it was thought about, but not in the same way of trying to do ‘Page Avenue’ again.

Which leads us back to Story Of The Year playing in Australia for the second time in as many years.

‘Australia is tied for number one with Japan for my favourite places to go outside of the United States, and it’s actually probably better than the United States to me most of the time. Everyone in Australia I’ve ever met is always in a good mood, smiling, nice. It’s such good vibes down there that I love it there. I wish I could move there.‘

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch Story Of The Year on the following dates with Senses Fail, tickets from Destroy All Lines...