Sydonia Return For Dead Of Winter Festival

When Randy Blythe, vocalist of Lamb Of God, personally seeks you out to get your band on their tour, you make yourself available. When that spreads to Jim Root of, at the time, Stone Sour also asking for, and sharing your details with Corey Taylor, to get your band on both Stone Sour and Slipknot’s tours both here and overseas, the world really is your oyster. Then it came crashing down.

Masked away by the impending pandemic a few months later in 2019, Sydonia, once Australia’s heaviest music darlings storming the world on Channel V and Triple JJJ, the band had lapsed. Crawling away into darkness and oblivion, Dana Roskvist and his crew battled wars best left unpublished. Now however, they rise again. Older, smarter and still with the fire in the belly to create musical textures with an appearance at this month Dead Of Winter Festival in Brisbane. Vocalist Dana, chats with me in readiness of storming the stage once again.

‘We’re just going to get out there and smash it. It’ll be a new one, an old one, a new one, and two old ones. I think that’s how it’s going to go. We are going to play ‘3 Tongues’, which goes for about seven minutes. So that eats into a major portion of our set, but it’s just one of those tracks, it’s just so much fun to play. It goes all over the place and then we’ll finish with something really strong off ‘Given To Destroyers’, one of the kind of catchy, heavy ones off that. It should be good.’

‘Dead Of Winter’ won’t be the band’s first foray back, a show in April at Frankston’s Singing Bird Studio gave the band a chance to stretch their legs and get match ready, something Dana enjoyed.

‘It went well and I sang quite well. That was the thing I was most worried about being so far away. That’s the thing that deteriorates as you get older as well. We smashed it. We had a great gig and the crowd were amazing. They were better than us, so this next one should be fun. We’re really looking forward to it. It’s a neat opportunity for our first gig back in Brisbane rather than just playing a gig. We can rock up to this and we’re part of something a bit bigger than ourselves and it should be good.’

Most resurrected bands dabble with live shows and if the vibes are right, work on new music. Sydonia are different and you get the impression that while being an affable frontman, Dana is more comfortable in the studio, with this year’s EP release New Low landing first.

‘Our bass player Adam came to me and he was like, ‘let’s do some stuff.’ We put it together with a different drummer and the same guitarist that we had previously. Those guys have done a tonne of work behind the scenes more than I have really done. Although I’m doing a lot of the writing, they’ve been doing a lot of the practicing behind the scenes so we can do gigs. I’m always writing, man. It’s not like the other guys don’t write either, but often the skeleton of a song comes from me and then the other guys throw in and it becomes a proper song. Sydonia has always been, to me, quite a creative entity and it would feel weird to be coming back and doing gigs without new music. It just wouldn’t feel right.’

Dana has in the meantime thrown himself into his business Glass Earth Studios, creating music for and collaborating with video game developers.

‘It’s a really different process. I mean, it’s similar, but it’s different. I’ll come up with something, I throw it at them, I like that bit, I don’t like that bit. Okay, kill that bit. There’s very little ego involved with it that and you have to be really good with notes, so it’s a different process. It still sounds like me, but it has that kaleidoscopic kind of thing you’re talking about.’

The kaleidoscope thing. In layman’s terms I’m trying to describe Sydonia’s music. Are they metal, pop, melodic prog, percussive driven? Their catalogue weaves in and out of all while maintaining hooks and melodies that are as catchy as hell. If you try and decipher their style by reviewers, you’ll get even more confused by what genre the band are in.

‘I thought one of the really good ones we had, and it was really early on in our career when we released our third EP or something and they described us as being the missing band from ‘The Crow’ soundtrack. I thought that was pretty cool because I’ll take that. I think it gets it because that soundtrack is all over the place, but it’s got its sound as well, that dark alternative sound.’

As studio lovers, you can rest easily knowing that the band are working on new music. How that will pan out and when, is still up for conjecture. It’s a different world now that the band is marketing themselves in.

‘There’s more music being released than ever before. The separation between artist and fan has shrunk, but in some ways it’s grown even further apart because you need to create viral moments now. Now there’s companies that create viral moments, what a thing! But yeah, we’re going to do an album. The way it’s shaping up is it’s sort of heavy and catchy and there’s melodic moments, but not as many as previously. It’s kind of a lot of little heavy nuggets. It should be quite different to the other two albums.’

Hopefully when the next album drops, a younger version of a Randy Blythe or Jim Root picks up on it because this band deserve greatness and the next stop for them is ‘Dead Of Winter’.

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch Sydonia at Dead Of Winter Festival on June 27 at Mansfield Tavern, Brisbane. Tickets HERE…