The Kings of Rock DANKO JONES Celebrate The Release Of New Studio Album ‘LEO RISING’

The kings of no compromise rock, DANKO JONES, celebrate the release of their critically-acclaimed, twelfth studio album Leo Rising, out now through PERCEPTION. Produced to perfection by longtime collaborator Eric Ratz, the trio’s new studio offering Leo Rising is a masterclass in sweat-soaked, no-nonsense rock. Packed with razor-sharp riffs, thunderous rhythms, and infectious hooks, the album reaffirms that DANKO JONES are keeping rock alive by doing it better than anyone else.

John Calabrese laid down bass tracks from Finland, Rich Knox flew to Toronto to record drums, and Danko worked with producer Eric Ratz in the same city to capture vocals and guitars. Despite recording separately once again, the band’s chemistry is unmistakable. The result is pure DANKO JONES: tight, loud, and built for the stage. Leo Rising may be their most electrifying and uplifting record yet, a jolt of high-octane rock made for packed clubs, open highways, and everything in between! Danko Jones himself talks to Hi Fi Way about the album.

New album Leo Rising is fantastic did you have a plan in mind about how you wanted the sound, or the direction that you wanted it to take?
No, we just wanted it to be another album that has eleven good rock songs on it and make it sound very much like the last album. We don’t live in the same city anymore, so for the last three records, we’ve written all our albums sending files to each other. This was written that way. We did manage to go into a rehearsal room while we were on tour for a couple of days in Zurich last summer, but that only yielded one idea that made the record. So, all of it except for that one idea was written apart from one another, sending files to each other.

Does that present its own sort of complexities in its own right, just sending files back and forth, and keeping control of versions and ideas? Not sort of getting lost in translation?
There’s pluses and minuses with both, doing it in person and doing it apart from one another. When you’re in person, we’ve ended up jamming on something for forty five minutes that was a waste of time. When you’re apart from one another, you can trim all the fat, all that fat that you would have wasted jamming, and just cut to the chase and send the nubs of what the ideas are, and it lands quicker. Sometimes you get stuck on an idea, or you’re trying to explain something that an email doesn’t quite explain properly, so that could bring up some snags. But we’ve done the last three records like this, so we’re pretty used to it by now.

Do you all get together in the studio and start piecing it together, or do you still work separately?
What happens is I’ll come up with a couple of riffs that I think are good enough, and I do a loose arrangement, and then JC arranges it properly, our bass player, and then Rich will add his drums at the end. I’ll do the vocals over that, with maybe some lyrics and that’s kind of like a loose demo now. That’s what we go into the studio with, in terms of a demo of a song, and it’s worked for us for the last three records. I think it yielded the strongest songs over the last three records compared to the first nine.

Does that create a whole lot more satisfaction when you see these songs start to come together and take shape?
Yeah, I mean, if it doesn’t, then it never sees the light of day. But if it manages to come together via files and remotely, then you really know you’ve got something. Sometimes when you come up with an idea in a room, it sounds great in the moment, and even the next day, but listening back in the studio, sometimes it really sucks. So this kind of helps expedite that.

It must take a lot of the grief out of it, by the time you get to the studio, everyone knows what they’re doing, and there’s no arguments or disagreements of opinion?
We go into a recording session with the songs pretty much demoed. The arrangements are pretty tight. There might be two or three little tweaks that maybe Eric, our producer, might suggest, but for the most part, we’re not sitting in a studio writing music or coming up with a part that needs to be written. It’s all written by the time we get to the recording studio.

What was the meaning behind Leo Rising? Is there any special significance behind that?
Not really. It’s our twelfth album. Our first album was called Born a Lion. This is Leo Rising, so astrologically, you could say the first album is your sun sign, the last album is your rising sign. There are twelve signs in the zodiac, twelve months in the year, twelve is just a good bookend number. It’s a solid number of closure, and because the next album is number thirteen, this kind of bookends it with Born a Lion, Leo Rising, and then the next album’s number thirteen. I don’t know what that’ll be called, but it’ll sound pretty much like Leo Rising.

What was your reaction when you played the album back for the first time in full?
Oh, I mean, there’s no reaction. I’m there from the beginning of the session to the end, so by the time it’s all done, I’m relieved. There isn’t a big pop, I’ve heard these songs a million times by the time it’s all done. But it’s still nice to listen to it in the car, driving around, or walking around. It’s a nice feeling, just to be able to experience it as an album, rather than as a day of work.

What are your thoughts on AI and how that’s impacting the music scene?
I don’t think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s very good either, from what I’ve heard, but that’s only because it’s early days. I’m sure it’ll get better. I don’t know how it’s going to affect music. There are so many grassroots scenes that real music will continue to thrive, but bigger musical entities might have a problem. The same way that when downloading started, and people weren’t buying hard copies anymore, it really affected bigger bands more than a band like us. We weren’t selling even a hundred thousand copies, so it didn’t really bother us. We were more like a live band anyway, so we kept touring. Much can be said about AI. I don’t know.

I can sit here and say you’ll never be able to recreate the live experience, but maybe you can. I don’t know. The stuff I’ve seen from AI I would never have bet on two years ago, and it exists now. So I don’t know. But we’re just gonna keep touring, that’s all we know. And making records. That’s all we know. We’ve been able to weather all the storms in the music industry, whether it’s downloading, three sixty deals, COVID, and just being a band. Putting out records on a regular basis is an oddity and a rarity. It just doesn’t happen. So we’ve been able to do it.

Are there any plans to get to Australia next year?
The plans are always on the table, it’s just a matter of promoters believing in us enough to sell tickets to bring us down here. There’s twelve albums, and we’ve only been to Australia for three of those albums. But for all the other nine, I’ve always wanted to tour Australia on that record. Nobody ever asked. That’s the thing, people ask me all the time, do you have any plans on coming here or there? It’s not up to us, it’s up to a promoter to make an offer that’s worth our while to get down there. If you offer us ten bucks to play, like you offer your cousin’s band down the street, well, we can’t get there. You know, the airfare alone will be too much. But if it’s enough for us to cover our costs, yeah, we’ll be there in a second.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Leo Rising is out now through PERCEPTION, order HERE