Fallujah Are Set To Shred At SHRED FEST!

Prepare your necks and brace your ears — SHRED FEST 2026 starts tonight! The renowned travelling metal festival will storm across Australia and New Zealand, delivering an unmatched celebration of technical excellence, intensity, and musical precision. This year’s edition features two of the most acclaimed names in modern extreme metal Obscura (GER) & Fallujah (USA). FALLUJAH are a visionary force of progressive and atmospheric technical death metal, set to unleash their transcendental soundscapes across southern shores. Kyle Schaefer talks to Rob Lyon about the tour.

Touring with Obscura, Ashen, and Anoxia, that’s quite a line-up, you must be really stokedto be part of such a highly esteemed line-up?
Yeah, totally. We know the Obscura guys, we’ve known them for a long time, but also toured with them just a few months ago in Japan, so this’ll be kind of a reunion for us, within the same year. The other bands I’m less familiar with, but I checked them out a little bit, heard good things about him, and will definitely be seeing them live every night. The whole Shredfest production is tvery much Obscura’s project, a yearly recurring tour in different places every year. So yeah, the bands are all hand-picked by Obscura, including us, so we’re happy to have gotten the offer from them to be a part of it, but Obscura’s the one putting together the bill, for sure.

Is Australia one of your favourite places to tour?
I’ve only been there once before. Fallujah has been there twice total, once before I joined, probably around a decade ago now and then once in 2023. We had a great time there last time. I’m sure any band that goes to Australia will almost certainly tell you that a good time there.

Is it a tricky balance, trying to get a balance of the old and new, of Fallujah, or are you looking to focus more on the new album, Xenotaph, on this run?
With the whole non-stop back-to-back tours this year, we have the luxury that we’ve played these songs so many times this year that we don’t really need to get together and rehearse, we rehearse separately and because of that, we can put it off the set list until the last minute, and just say I want to play this song, I want to play that song, then we’ll just agree and show up and play whatever. This will be our first time playing the new songs from Xenotaph live in Australia, so I’m sure you can expect quite a bit of that. It’s probably a safe bet to expect maybe fifty-fifty of old songs versus new because we love doing the old stuff, the new stuff is exciting, but love playing the classics, genuinely, we always try to squeeze as much as we can into the forty minutes or whatever we get, and then we’ll see where we end up.

Is the muscle memory that strong that you can just literally, pull any song out of a hat, and away you go?
Well, sometimes. There’s are a good number of older songs that we haven’t played live, certain songs that somebody might request, there’s a lot that we wouldn’t be able to just pull out of our back pocket like that. But, there are quite a few that we do have ready to go. I mean, for me, I like to run through stuff a couple times, I honestly have an easier job than some of the guitars and stuff. I could rehearse the vocals in my head on the plane if I needed to, right? Just make sure the lyrics are still in there and everything. Guitars, there’s a little more physicality involved, I think, I don’t know if they can get away with that as much. But, yeah, I mean, I would say it is pretty deep in the muscle memory by now. Especially anytime we’re playing something new for the first time. I rehearse the hell out of it to memorise it. I try to get it so deep into the muscle memory that I can be totally distracted and having an off day and still have all the lyrics come to me in time.

Have you been stoked with your reaction to the new album?
The response to the record itself has been great, and it’s been a lot of fun playing the new songs live, too. Again, it’s our first time playing them live in Australia, but we’ve had plenty of other US, Europe, Japan tours since the album came out to kind of test out the material live. The response has been great. No complaints at all.

Being a year on do you still feel just as proud, more proud?
Anytime I hear the record now after a bit of distance, I’m reminded of how much I genuinely like it. Most of my experience with these songs is from the performance side, where you’re locked into your own role, thinking about which vocal parts are coming up, which notes are tough, all that stuff. When I put it on and listen purely as a fan, I remember how stoked I am on the whole package. I’m like, oh yeah, there are all these other things happening that I don’t normally get to appreciate because I’m so focused on my job. I’ve always been able to enjoy my own music if I’m proud of it, and I know some artists don’t feel that way, but for me, if I spend that much time making these songs, hell yeah, I better be able to enjoy them.

How has the band sound sort of evolved between albums, particularly more so since you’ve joined the band?
I think the band’s sound has evolved in a few different ways. There were certain directions I wanted to push things, and everyone was on board with those ideas, which is part of why I was brought in to begin with. One example is my background in clean vocals. I’ve been doing growls and screams for a long time, but I actually started out as a clean singer, and in the past Fallujah only used clean vocals sparingly, usually through guest features. Now it’s become a much more prominent part of the music, almost a half‑and‑half balance between clean vocals and growls, which is a pretty big shift for a technical death metal band. Alongside that, we’ve leaned further into the melodic and progressive side of our sound, putting melody and interesting chord changes right at the forefront without losing the heaviness. We’ve just tried to push deeper into the melodic territory that excites us and carve out something that feels distinct. So yeah, more progressive, more melodic, more clean vocals, but in a way that feels natural rather than something out of left field.

Did that feel like a little bit of a tough one to get the fans on board initially, particularly when you start moving more to a greater percentage of clean vocals?
I mean, it can be, but I felt pretty confident about it because it was something we talked through early on. We knew the elements we wanted to add, but we also wanted to make sure none of it undermined the identity the band had already built. We looked at other bands who made similar shifts in ways that felt authentic and natural, real evolution rather than an attempt to be more accessible, and that gave us confidence there was plenty of room to grow without losing what makes Fallujah Fallujah.

If you’re a heavy band, you don’t want to abandon the heaviness, and if you’re known for interesting rhythmic ideas, you don’t want to lose that either. So for us, a big part of balancing the cleaner, more melodic direction was actually pushing the technical side even harder, more intricate guitars, more progressive and intense instrumentation, and keeping the song structures complex. I think that’s where some bands lose people: when the structures get simplified and everything starts aiming for a big pop‑style chorus. We’re adding clean vocals, but not in a way that changes the fundamental architecture of the songs. We’re still approaching everything from a very technical, very progressive mindset.

Does that give you a lot more scope, particularly when you start thinking about what might be the next album, whenever that is?
I think so, yeah. When I’m helping write new music, there are a few boxes I always want to make sure we check. If you look at Fallujah compared to other bands in the scene, you start to see the things that make us feel unique to fans, the elements people associate with our sound. Some of those things come naturally to us, which is why they were in the music to begin with, but there are also certain choices you can make that keep it sounding like Fallujah while still giving you plenty of room to expand or experiment. I feel like we’ve identified what those elements are. With the vocals, for example, I know where it makes sense to lean into something that feels familiar to Fallujah, and I can pick the moments where that’s appropriate. That still leaves a ton of space to go off in new directions and try different things.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Fallujah on tour with Shredfest this September, tickets HERE…

Shredfest 2026 Line Up

OBSCURA (GER)
FALLUJAH (USA)^
ASHEN (WA) +
ANOXIA (NSW) #

+ Special Guests

Dates

04/09 AUS Adelaide – Lions Art Factory +^ with Tzun Tzu

05/09 AUS Brisbane – Soapbox +^ with Snake Mountain

09/09 AUS Canberra – The Baso #+^ with Blackened Dred

10/09 AUS Sydney – Manning Bar #+^ with Besomora

11/09 AUS Melbourne – The Corner #+^ with Munitions

13/09 AUS Darwin – The Ampitheatre ^+ with TBA

15/09 NZ Auckland – Whammy with TBA

16/09 NZ Wellington – Valhalla with TBA

17/09 NZ Christchurch – Churchills Tavern with TBA

19/09 AUS Hobart – Altar with TBA

# Anoxia Appearing only in Canberra, Sydney & Melbourne

+ Ashen Appearing all shows bar Darwin, NZ and Hobart

^ Fallujah Appearing all shows bar NZ and Hobart