Alkaline Trio Return To Australia And It Starts Tonight In Adelaide…

In more than twenty five years together, ALKALINE TRIO have delivered urgent punk blasts with a dark, driving edge that helped them remain commercially viable without sacrificing their raucous spirit and created their own little universe in their songs with a few short steps away from Armageddon. Their music has been a reliable black mirror of reality. Slowly ascending through the Warped Tour ranks into the early 2000s, they reached the Billboard Top 20 with 2003’s mainstream breakthrough Good Mourning. They hit a peak with their seventh set This Addiction, which topped the US rock, alternative, and indie charts in 2010.

They kicked off the year with the release of their monumental tenth album, Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs. It’s been five years since the beloved punk stalwarts have released an album and to commemorate hitting the big ten milestone, they went back to basics stripping their sound down to the bare essentials of the sonic identity that endeared them to a generation of punk fans. They enlisted Grammy-winning producer Cameron Webb and spent several weeks holed up at Studio 606 in Northridge, California, the private recording space owned by Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters. With more than two decades and ten records under their belts, ALKALINE TRIO’s legacy in the rock canon, as well as their influence on their genre, is undeniable.

2024 will undeniably declare punk rock is not dead – be sure to see DROPKICK MURPHYS and ALKALINE TRIO who start their tonight in Adelaide when they bring their explosive, high energy live shows down under. Dan Andriano talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

It starts tonight in Adelaide are you looking forward to it?
Oh yeah, we’re super excited. We’ve been cranking along doing a lot of touring here in the States this year, over in Europe and England as well. Now it’s time to get back down to Australia and we’re stoked to be with Dropkick Murphy’s, it’s going to be awesome.

Does anything prepare you for that long haul flight down to Australia?
I don’t think there’s anything that can prepare me for that. I’ve been meditating. I’ve been talking to shaman called a priest, and no one’s got any answers. I’m just, I’ll be all right. I got a lot of movies downloaded. I can sleep in weird positions. I think I’ll be okay. I’m trying not to get too anxious about it.

Ten years is a long time between drinks and a lot of things have obviously happened for everybody during that time, but was it hard getting everything aligned to be able to get back to Australia?
It’s not easy. It’s not cheap, it’s not close, but then you throw some weird shit in the mix, like a global pandemic, Matt was sharing his time, we were sharing time, you know, with Matt’s time with Blink. Um, so overall things got a little tricky and it’s turned out to be like ten years or more since we’ve last been there unfortunately. But we’re going to try to make up for it with very good shows.

As far as double bills go it doesn’t get any better than with Dropkick Murphys?
No, it’s going to be killer. We’re psyched. I mean, they put on a crazy show. They bring nothing but energy and it is going to be good. So, we’re going to try to do the same. We’re going to try to do our part and support their killer tour. I don’t know the last time they were there, but I’m sure it’s more recently than we’ve been there.

Is this tour going to be mostly focused on new album Blood, Hair and Eyeballs?
Well, uh, we’re definitely proud of the record and we’ve been touring on the record, and it’s something we want to showcase, but I think we also realise that we haven’t been to Australia in too long. We’ve made a few records since the last time we were there, but we, you know, we’re going to try to do a little bit of everything as well as we can in our allotted set time. So yeah, we’re not just going to play a bunch of new songs. We’ll play a few and see what happens.

Have you been blown away by the fan reaction to the new album?
One hundred percent blown away. It’s been so positive, and people have been so nice about it, and it feels really good because we felt like we made a different record. We spent more time on this record and tried things differently than we ever have with the only intention of trying to do something a little different and trying to do something really, really good. It feels nice to get, overall a pretty great response.

With six years between albums, does that create its own pressure as well in some ways?
You certainly don’t want to come out with a bunch of bullshit. Yes, but I think the pressure really only came when we realised this was going to be our tenth album, and the only pressure that we felt, I wouldn’t even call it pressure, but it was like, okay, ten is a lot of records, and if we’re going to make a record like we want to do, what do we really want to do? Like we wanted the three of us to be psyched. We didn’t want to just go back and say, okay, we’re going to make another “Goddammit”, or what did we do on “From Here to Infirmary”? We just wanted to make a record and see what happened and write together. That was the one goal that we’re going to write this together and see what happens. I think just naturally taking that approach, it ended up sounding in some ways, more like some of the older stuff that we had written together before we got away from that model.

I was reading quite a few interviews leading up to the album saying that you wanted to be different and special. Was that a hard thing to do?
It was tricky, but we just hope that no matter what we try to do, at the end of the day, it would end up sounding like us. If Matt and I are writing the songs, and if obviously we’re not actively trying to write a country record or something, you know what I’m saying? If it’s just Matt and I and we’re writing like rock songs, we felt like we had to just put faith in the fact that it would end up sounding like us. But we weren’t trying to do anything in intentional necessarily.

Were your influences significant on this album at all?
Significant, yeah, I guess so actually, I was listening to a lot of three pieces I love and listening more to the way those records sounded than I have in the past. Even records that I’ve heard, like thousands of times, like Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Police, Nirvana, just really getting into the technical shit, like is this pretty much a stripped down three piece, or actually how much of this is overdubbed and where are the overdubs and what are they doing to blow it up? Things like that. A lot of times it’s just the simpler shit is the stuff that we all gravitate towards with those bands. That’s something I found interesting. It wasn’t necessarily writing around that, but thinking about it a lot as we were making the record for sure.

Was this album actually recorded in Dave Grohl’s Studio?
The drums and the bass were recorded there. Most of it was written there in those couple weeks. We did a lot of the musical writing and obviously to be able to get that shit tracked. We were kind of writing and tracking as we would go for a couple weeks, and then a lot of the lyrics were written, but a lot was also at that point just melody. Then as we did overdubs and guitars and things, a lot of the lyrics ended up changing and some of the shit ended up changing a little bit, but for the most part it was written there.

So what did you think when you were able to put the headphones on for the first time and listen to the album start to end?
I was just so happy, I could hear that studio, it was one of the first things I thought actually was it really brought me back to that live room. There was a lot of shit happened in those two weeks, to be honest. A lot of songs were created in that room. I thought it was a pretty special room, the control room, the board, that live room that Dave built with various intentions, in the live room, in the control room and it’s all pretty perfect for making the kind of record that we were making. It’s like he nailed it when he built that studio. It’s like, oh, you want to make a loud rock record? You do it there. That’s the place to do it.

Does it kind of feel like a new era now for Alkaline Trio?
It does! It would be hard to say it isn’t because we feel like we’re full speed ahead right now. We made this record that we’re really proud of. We’ve been touring on it like crazy, we have a new drummer who came in like right after the record was made. He’s been a big, a big factor in us being able to tour and do as much as we did last fall. A lot has to do with the fact that Adam jumped in, fit in so seamlessly and has such a great energy and drive to him that pushes Matt and I to be able to do more to bring a better show. So, it definitely feels like a new era. I mean, we’ve always said that we’re just going to keep doing this band until it’s not fun anymore and it’s fun. Things are going well and we don’t have a lot on the books for next year in terms of touring, so we’re hoping to be able to find some time to get back into a studio situation and do some writing with Adam for the first time. Who knows, we’re either going to come out with one or two songs or a whole new record. We’ll see what happens.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Alkaline Trio on tour with the Dropkick Murphys on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…