Orthodox Promise An Unrelenting Set Supporting Wage War

‘We have cultivated a set that is deliberately unrelenting. We don’t really care if you like it or not. Just what we wanted to do, and that’s the attitude that we’re bringing to it!’

Adam Easterling of Nashville’s Orthodox is pre-warning Australians what to expect on their upcoming tour with Wage War.

‘We are aware that we are not a band that has ballads. We are aware that we’re the more aggressive band on the line-up, and we are leaning into it. It is really that simple.’

Orthodox has been leading a burgeoning Nashville hardcore scene for some time now and last year ventured onto our shores for Stray From The Path’s final jaunt, a reward for the bands unique hardcore sound breaking the glass ceiling in the city of country music.

‘Metal and hardcore a little bit more now, requires some creative thinking and impressive musicianship most of the time if you’re gonna do it well. What’s cool about Nashville is that musically speaking, all of the best musicians are here. No matter what genre, no matter what instrument, they’re all here. The original bassist of this band now tours full-time with a Grammy Award-winning blues artist. It’s just not like anywhere else, aside from maybe parts of New York, parts of California. So, with that, you just naturally are going to have some of the best musicians because you are a product of your surroundings whether you like it or not.’

‘We got overlooked for a very long time when there wasn’t a lot of bands touring from the genre, and so people would just skip Nashville on their tour dates and go to Atlanta. We gradually started to get more tours in, started to have a little bit of a turnover in terms of the old people that were getting tired of the show, stopped coming. Now we’ve got this wave of youngsters, like sixteen to twenty four, going to every show, every venue, can’t get enough of it.’

‘A lot of it has to do with the fact that hardcore metalcore in and of itself is not a subculture. It is a counterculture. It is there to stand against something, not just separately. In a place like Nashville, you have that expectation of everything is cowboy boots and bachelorettes, so when you find that expression that is so aggressive and so counter-cultural, if you’re not meant to be there, you know quickly, and if you are, you can’t get away. That’s something that Nashville brings out.’

Easterling is passionate about his music and city, and in true hardcore fashion, quite often put his own shows on to spread the word of the local talent.

‘There’s just also so many good bands from here that people don’t know about. First and foremost, there’s a band from here called Chamber that I think is the most underrated metal core band of our time. They’re unbelievable. There’s tons of bands that you would consider local bands ’cause they play here frequently that are starting to get out. There’s one called Lethal Method, Dogpile, Officer Down, Circuit Circuit, like the list goes on and on! Every one of those bands, if I put them next to a band that we’re touring with, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference of who’s playing out of state and who isn’t. It’s a really cool place to be one of the front runners because we’ve been touring for so long representing the city to the point now where we’re able to take that exact light and shine it back on the community.’

Last year the Tennessee sound came to Australia, the bands first foray overseas.

‘The reception was really genuinely wonderful because anytime that we go somewhere that we haven’t played, even in the States where we are popular, sometimes we’ll have bad sets and I have to be like, “Yeah, guys, you gotta remember, we haven’t been to this place so we haven’t built the same foundational fan base that we’ve been doing for like the last decade in all these other places.”

‘So going to a different country after being a band for ten years, our expectations were, we’re gonna win a lot of fans over because we are good at what we do, but I’m not anticipating blowout reactions or what have you. And then night one in Brisbane was the first show we’d ever played out of the country, and it was like a hometown show. It was unreal.

‘Sydney was very similar. Melbourne was very similar. Adelaide was crazy. Perth was crazy. It was just like show after show after show, we’d have these people that are just reacting to us as if they’ve seen us one thousand times or they know what’s coming next. It was just so cool. It was very validating to be ‘oh, this works everywhere. What we’re doing catches on.’

Catching on, like fire if you will, is something many observers feel Hardcore is doing around the world. As one of the leaders in the States, it’s interesting to get Easterlings take.

‘We all know Speed. Band’s incredible, and within a couple of years they’re world renowned. A lot of that has to do with the efforts from all the bands that are touring all the time and so on, but the efforts and the breakthrough in accessibility, specifically of Turnstile and Knocked Loose. Which is funny because the more that they progress their discography, the further they get from each other, but they come from such a very similar place. They’re both hardcore bands at heart, right?’

‘Knocked Loose is, I say, the heaviest band that is touring the world currently, aside from maybe Meshuggah and Turnstile has somehow made it to where they’ve created punk hardcore music that I literally can hear in a grocery store. It’s such polar opposite things, but they work in such similar ways, and in that, they’re opening so many doors to so many different things to where Turnstile is bringing bands like Blood Orange on tour and then you have the other side of that where Knocked Loose is bringing Denzel Curry on tour.

‘It’s starting to be this thing where all of these genres that have alternative niche aggressive elements are able to turn to these kind of beacons of cool. We’ve had Staind, we’ve had Slipknot, we’ve had Foo Fighters, we’ve had all these bands that have aggressive elements at this level, and now we’re finally getting to a point where the logo bands are not the same logos on the festivals every time.’

And one of those beacons of cool are the shows with Orthodox on a bill with Wage War and Heavensgate at a capital city near you soon.

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch Orthodox on tour with Wage War and Heavensgate on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…