Ohio Metalcore Stalwarts The Devil Wears Prada On Tour With Alpha Wolf
‘It’s kind of a sort of metalcore devastation type of tour’ Jeremy DePoyster of American metalcore band The Devil Wears Prada exclaims about the forthcoming, hottest ticket in town, of his bands tour with Alpha Wolf, Invent Animate and Thrown.
‘It’s awesome. I mean, I knew the tour was going to be good. Obviously Alpha Wolf in their home country, those guys are killing it right now. I love the guys in Invent Animate, they’re awesome and Thrown, just has a lot of hype. I didn’t think it would sell out before we even got there. That part is awesome. I literally just got an email today that the Brisbane show is sold out too. So I think the whole tour is sold out. If it’s not, there’s a few tickets left, but that certainly adds to the hype. It’s like we kind of have a mantra of no bad shows ever. That’s just our kind of thing. But I’ve definitely never had a bad show when it was sold out ever. So I don’t think this will be the case now.’
It’s been seven long years since TDWP graced these shores, something that DePoyster is embarrassed about however the shows he promises are worth the wait.
‘There are quite a few new songs that we really want to play just because we’ve never been there on them and they’re kind of our favourite songs to play right now. But there’s also just a bunch of – we have, I don’t know, eight albums and three EP’s or something – so it’s like we definitely need to throw it back a little bit. So it’ll be kind of a career spanning set list, if you will. But it should be fun. It should be fun. We’ve got some good stuff planned.’
Having good stuff planned is commonplace for a band that is constantly evolving, constantly creating and constantly pushing its own boundaries. Recent song of the year contender release, Reasons, started as an EDM track with Excision and Wooli, and has morphed to now include YouTube sensation Lola.
‘We had a couple of remixes that came out on our deluxe album, and one of the guys who did one of the remixes was at this EDM festival with Excision and Wooli, and he was showing them the song that he had done, and they had been trying to find someone to sing on this new track they had, and they had tried a few people and it just wasn’t what they were looking for. And apparently they were like, yo, that’s it. That’s the voice we want. Cool. So they reached out to us and they were like, ‘Hey, would you guys be interested in collaborating on a song?’ And we were like, yeah, obviously that sounds awesome. So they sent us the song, we wrote a bunch of vocals to it. We gave ’em a bunch of guitars and real drums.’
‘We wanted to play the song live and it went over really well, but we kind of changed it up. It’d be kind of boring if our keyboard player just hammed through everything digital. So we thought it’d be fun if we kind of remade it with the whole band and hit those guys up and they were like, hell yeah, go for it. So we actually have a few other ones kind of in the works right now, but it’s just finding the time.’
‘We wanted to do a feature just to give it something interesting and have it not just be another rehash of what we had done. So we wrote that other verse, and then she was actually the first person that we reached out to. Someone had turned us onto her and she has a really cool voice and seemed like a cool, fun person, and she was keen to do it and she killed it. And then we actually ended up meeting up with her at So What? She was awesome, and she’s a really cool person. So I like having someone that has a really distinct sounding voice that’s different than myself and Mike’s to kind of just give it some atmosphere in there.’
Within that you may have noticed that despite the bands constant touring, there is a desire to keep creating new music. This is, after all, a band that drops a new album virtually every two years.
‘We’re actually working on tracking some of the stuff that we have right now. We’ve been writing a lot. Pretty much anytime we have some downtime, we’ll put a week or two into writing some stuff, so we’re going to kind of piece that together. But it feels a little too early to set a timeline for an album. We’re so busy and even the rest of our year is probably pretty much filled up. So I would say we’re definitely going to be releasing some more stuff before the end of the year, but I don’t know, maybe we’ll put out a record next year. Maybe we won’t. It just depends on if we get a body of work together that feels like it is complete. I’d say probably cause we work hard.’
Not that any of their bands releases sound similar to previous works, band member changes changed musical dynamics however now with a settled line up, where does that place the band.
‘I guess my mentality has always been an album is sort of a perfect encapsulation of a moment in time. I always have people asking me that are starting a band or trying to get into making records and stuff, and I’m like, just print something, man. You’ve got to commit. You can only make the best record or write the best song you can right now. And sometimes it’s better than others, but that’s always been the mentality. So I think the changing up of stuff is more just an extension of that, of just saying, what do we want to make right now and what kind of songs are we interested in writing right now and how do they fit together?’
‘I also think it’s just getting bored. Maybe it’s just an attention span thing or something, but it’s like I definitely don’t dread playing old music. It’s fun. I’m proud of everything that we’ve done. So even a song that’s like nineteen years old, I’m not like, yo, this song sucks. I’m like, dang, that’s kind of crazy. We wrote that. It’s more removing yourself from the process and you’re just so consumed by making it. By the time it comes out, you’re like, well, that was a year ago. I’m already onto something else now. I already have new ideas.‘
Interview By Iain McCallum
Catch The Devil Wears Prada on tour with Alpha Wolf, Invent Animate and thrown on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…
