Silverstein On Celebrating 25 Years Of Noise In Australia…

Canadian post-hardcore band SILVERSTEIN are bringing their 25 Years of Noise Australian tour with special guest, Real Friends (USA) this August celebrating a career that spans eleven albums. Silverstein enters its twenty-fifth year with two full-length albums set for 2025 and continues to innovate and inspire on forward-thinking records and at crowd-embracing live shows.

Discovering the Waterfront (2005) remains a touchstone classic. A Beautiful Place to Drown (2020) earned a Rock Album of the Year nomination at the Juno Awards. Antibloom (out now) and Pink Moon (August) are stunning reminders of why the group is a vital subcultural force. Silverstein songs like My Heroine, Smile in Your Sleep, The Afterglow, and Infinite are postmodern anthems for a devoted following earned with passionate performances and authentic artistry. Shane Told talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Celebrating twenty five years of Silverstein in Australia, it’s going to be great, how much are you looking forward to it?
Fuck yeah, I’m excited, dude. We’ve been itching to come back and headline Australia for a while. It’s been too long. And to be able to do it right now with this great set list planned, bringing that down to you guys is very, very exciting.

Is Australia right up there as one of your favorite places to tour?
If you listen to any interview I’ve ever done, I bring it up. It stems from twenty years of coming there and the people being so welcoming. The shows are awesome. It’s such a beautiful country with everything. Every time we come back, it’s a great experience, even though we get there tired as hell and jet lagged and only just getting over it when we leave. It’s still always an awesome time. We weren’t sure if this tour was going to happen this time, but we worked hard to make it happen, and bringing our friends and Real Friends along too, it’s a great package. It’s gonna rock.

Is that just the complexities of organising a big tour?
Yeah, it’s hard. Any tour is hard to work out with scheduling, budgeting, and all that boring stuff. That’s part of why it’s taken us a long time to come back. It’s sometimes very difficult. We toured with The Amity Affliction about a year and a half ago, which was an amazing tour. Much love to them for bringing us over to support them. We were hoping to come back way sooner, hoping that maybe some people saw us on that tour and would come to our headliner. It’s just taken this long, but luckily, it’s happening, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Does it make a huge difference touring with mates like Real Friends?
It’s funny, I don’t know them too well yet. We’re about to tour with them in a week. We’ve never played with them before, though maybe done a couple of festivals here and there. By the time we get to Australia and we’ve had an entire US tour under our belts, I’m sure we’ll be the best of friends. I don’t know their touring history in Australia, how much they’ve been there or if they’ve even been there, but I have a feeling they’re going to be very excited too.

With a tour like this, do you start getting nostalgic, reflecting on the ups, downs, and in-betweens?
Absolutely, man. That’s one of the themes of this whole tour. We start out with a video, about three minutes long where I narrate a slideshow of different eras of the band, talking about our history and how this all happened and continues to happen. Not only is it emotional for me, but I see people in the crowd getting teary-eyed too. Then, we celebrate all the different eras of the band, playing at least one song from every album. It’s a really cool journey taking people in the “motherfucking emo time machine.” We’re really enjoying it. Some days, especially the last tour, I was feeling a little tired and burnt out, and some songs hit extra hard emotionally. But it’s always in a good way, even when nostalgia kicks in, at the end of the day, you still have a smile on your face.

For fans who have followed you from the beginning, it almost feels like they’re living their lives through the band too, riding the highs and lows.
Oh, for sure. Everybody coming to see us, our fans, they have a story about us. Whether it’s the first time they heard us, the times they’ve seen us before, or something personal. It’s always something deeper than just “you guys make cool music.” People have told us things like meeting their spouse at our show, having their first date there, or going to a concert with a loved one who’s no longer with them. Stories like that make our music mean so much more than just another song on the radio. We’ve also heard from people we’ve saved from depression, or even stopped from taking their own life. That kind of impact means something, and it’s something we shouldn’t shy away from reflecting on when the time is right.

It must be humbling to see that impact, especially when people sing the songs back to you with just as much energy and intensity?
Yeah, no doubt. The appreciation we have for people who make the effort to come out to a show, it’s huge. We realise that sometimes it’s a real effort, especially as people get older. They’ve got kids, they need a babysitter, they’ve got work the next day. There’s a lot of sacrifice involved, and that’s why when people come out to our show, we are going to put on a good show. We’re going to give it our all and make sure everyone walks away excited, so much so that they can’t wait to do it again, even if they have to wake up early the next morning.

With such an extensive back catalog, it must be tough trying to condense it down into a ninety-minute show?
Totally! For a while, we played longer shows, almost two hours. But honestly, it feels too long. There’s an art to crafting a set list, balancing the hits and expected songs with a few surprises. We always make sure to throw in some unexpected songs, ones that make people go, “Oh my god, I didn’t think they were gonna play that!”, ones we haven’t played before. We talk about this constantly, making sure the show flows well and people leave feeling stoked rather than disappointed.

You can’t play all the songs. We’ve got eleven albums or something, and we just try to do a great job of mixing it up, playing something from every era. Even if you don’t know some songs they’ve still got the right energy to them. Next time, we’ll definitely do songs we haven’t done before, and switching up the set list from what we did two years ago is part of that.

Having a double album worth of new material makes things harder again?
This tour is about celebrating our entire catalog, and we’re only playing two new songs so far this year, that might be all we’re going to play this time. We’re super proud of the new record, and if it were up to us selfishly, we’d probably play a lot more of the new stuff. But we realise we don’t come to Australia every day, and people need to hear the classics. It’s not just about us stroking our own ego on stage, we want everyone to have a great time.

Fans coming out should expect the classics, the hits, the bangers, and a few twists and turns, some surprises they might not expect. We didn’t want to overwhelm them with new songs they hadn’t had time to absorb yet. But if we come back for an Anti-Bloom tour, then yeah, we’ll do more of the new material. This time, it’s really about encompassing our career, and we think people will be excited to see and hear this set.

Was there always the intention to do a double album, or did it just happen because of a creative streak?
We entered the studio expecting to make a single album, around twelve songs. But when we went through the demos, we had twenty-five, and they were all good. The ones that weren’t good, we had already thrown away. Suddenly, we had twenty-five songs in the “keep” pile, and that became stressful. It gave everyone a lot of anxiety, how were we supposed to cut more than half of them? That’s when our drummer Paul had the idea to do two records, two shorter albums.

We didn’t have time to record two full-length albums, and we didn’t think we should anyway. Instead, we decided on two eight-song banger albums released in the same year. It worked perfectly, we had two great openers, two great closers, and I couldn’t bear cutting either closing song. From a marketing perspective, it also made sense instead of one album release where excitement quickly fades, we can keep momentum going.

Did the songs naturally gravitate toward one album or another?
Not really. There were a lot of different ways we could have put them together. The final track on Pink Moon is Dying Game, and we really wanted that to be the last song of the final record. Mercy Mercy had so much energy that it made sense as the first song on the first record. Cherry Coke was the other closer for the first album. A few songs had very specific spots, and the rest could move around.

Pink Moon has two features, which is exciting, extra vocal help makes those songs stand out. In fact, the song we all agreed was the best from the initial twenty-five is on Pink Moon, so I think people have a lot to look forward to. We definitely didn’t front-load this, it’s packed with bangers all the way through.

So this will keep you busy for the next couple of years?
Yeah, I think so. We haven’t planned anything beyond the end of 2025. 2026 might be a bit of a rest year, we’re going hard this year, filling up the schedule fast. We’ll probably also start working on demos again after two years of not writing new songs. That’ll be exciting too. But right now, we’re living in the moment, kicking ass every show, and enjoying what’s happening.

Looking forward to getting back to Adelaide. Adelaide is special, we have one of our best friends from Toronto living there now, and he always takes care of us when we come out. It makes it feel like home away from home. Can’t wait to be back, and hopefully, the half-hour time difference doesn’t make me miss any flights like it did before.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Silverstein with Real Friends on the following dates, tickets from Live Nation…