Drowning Pool On Tour With Alien Ant Farm…

February is looking awesome with the combination of Alien Ant Farm and Drowning Pool who are now joining the tour. Since reuniting with vocal powerhouse, Ryan McCombs, Drowning Pool have gone from strength to strength, blowing away audiences at some of the world’ premier festival – Aftershock, Nu Metal Revolution, Louder Than Life, Sonic Temple, Blue Ridge Rock many others. They will arrive in Australia in February at the peak of their power and looking to lay down a market. Ryan talks to Hi Fi Way about returning to Australia.

Great to be talking to you, you must be pumped to be touring with Alien Ant Farm?
I am and we are, the, the whole band. Since getting back together, the demand for the band has been amazing but at the same time it’s kept us so busy in the States with all the festivals and everything and building tours around those festivals. I moved to England about seven years ago and at home right now for about two weeks. I’m in the midst of about a two week at home period and this is the longest home stay I’ve had this year. 2024 has been a very busy year, which has been wonderful, no complaints. At the same time we were telling the powers that be like our booking agents stuff, in 2025 we want to get overseas as much as possible and get over some of these territories and be with the Drowning Pool family in these other areas that have allowed us to be who we are and has supported us through all the years, that we haven’t been to in a while.

Australia was at the top of that list. I’m not excited being an Australian Summer. I was leaning more towards, you know, get me over in the Australian wintertime because I hate the sun, but you know, we’re just happy that it’s happening because you never want to turn down something like this because the next thing you know, it might be December and you’re like, we didn’t get over. So, the email came asking us if we’d be interested in this, we jumped on it because Australia was at the top of the list of places that we wanted to get back to this in 2025.

Is it hard stopping for two weeks when you come off tour?
No, one of the hardest things for me personally is that 2024 has been a very Drowning Pool packed year. I have had a US, a European, and a UK Soil tour. That’s where it’s been a little mind game for me is when those rare occurrences have happened is usually where I only have a few days in between and I’m talking like two or three days when switching gears has really become tricky here and there trying to get the old grey matter up here in the shoulder boulder to remember, I haven’t done it yet, but I’m waiting for the day that I walk up on stage for a Drowning Pool show and I start singing Halo or I get on a Soil stage and I start singing Bodies or something. It makes me wake up at night in a cold sweat worrying about that, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Have you toured with Alien Ant Farm before?
I have with the other band that I perform with. I did a UK Europe run with Alien Ant Farm a few years back with Soil. Other than that Drowning Pool were in the area and it just lined up to when we were in Nashville, Tennessee doing a show, they jumped on the bill and did that show with us. We’re all very familiar with the guys and looking forward to coming over and doing it up. I look forward to staying away from the sun!

Is it true that you have been writing some new material on the road as well?
Since we got back together, it’s really opened up the floodgates to all of our Stevie, Mike, C.J. and myself. It’s really just lit the fire under us, the creative juices have been flowing big time and we’ve got so much new material that we could probably release a double album at this point in time. But, finding the time because of the demand for the band, thank goodness, has been awesome, we haven’t been able to record. We just released the song Revolution (The Final Amen) wasn’t necessarily the first song we wanted to throw out there, but it just happened to be the first song that we got completed because of how sparse our time in the studio has been recently. We actually had to have our producer fly out and spend like five or six days on the road with us on the last us tour that we did, just so that we could get a few steps ahead on the recording process.

We want to release another song, ideally we’d release another single before we come over to Australia and then another one before the Godsmack POD tour in Europe and the UK. So, this year we want to have an actual release, like an actual album or EP depending on how much time we get in the studio and get these songs out of our heads. I’m on fire for that because as much as I like “Revolution”, it’s some of the songs that we haven’t had a chance to get finalised in the studio yet is some of my favourite material. I’m chomping at the bit to get it done.

It sounds like it’s a really exciting time for the band and that dynamic between the band is as strong as ever.
It is, it’s crazy. It’s great that we are in the position that we are in our lives as individuals. I mean, we have been given the opportunity by the people out there that have given us the time of day that have allowed us to still be doing this twenty years later. I mean, number one, I didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance to do this professionally and people allowed that to happen, which has been an amazing gift, but then they’ve allowed us to be around twenty plus years later and that’s amazing. So, to be sitting here and to be able to be back with the guys and working on new material, and just in a business sense and in a band sense, you’re absolutely right we’re enjoying it. We’re enjoying writing, we’re enjoying being on stage together again, and we’re all in a different place in our lives.

A lot of times you don’t quite understand it when you’re young and you hear somebody say, you can’t sweat the small stuff, but you learn that, you, especially in any kind of career type where you’re dealing with industry types and so many different factions within the music industry. In the early days, you get so consumed by so much stuff that you can’t do anything about as to where we’re all in that area in our lives now. We’re all more settled down and we’ve all realised through the years that there’s a lot of it you can’t do a damn thing about. So, you concentrate on what you can affect and what you can have a hands-on approach with and affect the result. Concentrate on that stuff and let the other stuff that you can’t do a damn thing about slide off your back the best you can and just enjoy the fact that we’re still able to do this years later.

With so much depth in the Drowning Pool back catalogue it must make it a bit of a challenging process to come up with a tour set list?
It is, but then again, it isn’t, it’s exciting because the discography for the band is really extensive just the different eras when you pull in and we’re very mindful of the fact that not every Drowning Pool fan is going to be a Drowning Pool fan across all the eras. You’re going to have people that are fans of this era and even though Drowning Pool’s always been C.J., Mike and Stevie, it’s no secret that there’s been a few singers and it’s easy to break up the band’s time into the different eras regarding the different singers that have been involved. When I talk about the different eras, that’s what I’m getting at. We’re not stupid, we realise there’s people out there that are not going to be fans of every era.

There’s going to be people out there that have their favourite era of the band and so we try to be mindful of that when it comes to putting the set list together and make sure that everybody leaves having heard something from that album that pulled them in originally, whether it was Sinner, whether it was Full Circle, whether it was Hallelujah, whether it was Desensitized, something that we want everybody to leave happy with what they’ve heard. With the musicianship of this band, what’s really cool is there are days where we’re sitting around talking about the set list and we’re like, what about this song? Well, we’ve never played that song together, how about it? Then later that night we’re putting it into the set list and we haven’t played the song, the musicianship of the individuals in this band allows us to be creative like that.

At the beginning of this, the guys had never played the song Mute from the album Sinner. They had never played that since Dave passed and going into the very first show back together, I was like, man, I’ve been listening to the songs when I rejoined, when we got back together there was only like two weeks before our first show, so I was concentrating on the set list, but in the process I kept hearing Mute. I kept hearing the song Mute and I was like, what do you guys think about throwing Mute in? They were like, we haven’t played that in years! Awesome, so there we go. We’re playing Mute that night. The musicianship of this band is really cool as a singer, to be a part of something that is free form as that, and they understand where I’m coming from, I understand where they’re coming from, and we’re just having a good time with it.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Drowning Pool on tour with Alien Ant Farm on the following dates, tickets from The Phoenix…