Deadiron
Hope Is Essential

14.04.2016

I got to know the U.S. band Deadiron at Wacken Open Air. First I watched them onstage, and then I came across Alex van Ness, the band’s frontman, in the press area, and we started talking. We agreed on doing an interview right there, and in a while I was reaching out to the U.S. via Skype to have a chat with Alex and guitarist Tyler J. Harvey. The band is obviously not very big in Russia, but this interview can actually be of interest to a pretty wide range of readers – it doesn’t happen very often that musicians are so open about both good and bad aspects of living in the States. So, turn up "Into The Fray", Deadiron’s second full-length album, pour some bear or any other spirit in your glass, and follow us to the world of the U.S. Rust Belt, that you may find strangely familiar...

How are you, guys?

Alex: Good! We have me, I’m Alex, and Tyler is also here. It’s a very warm day here in the sunny old United States, at least in Cleveland. We have a ceiling fan going and a room filled with amps and guitars, it’s a nice place to be. (laughs)

Since your band is a newcomer for most of our audience, could you please introduce it and give a sort of history lesson about Deadiron?

Alex: Sure! Deadiron are – for those of you who have never heard or seen us – a sort of melodic heavy metal band, a lot of very melodic-style death metal guitar playing, maybe crossing into some power metal, I guess, but lyrically and vocally it comes off of classic heavy metal and punk rock, maybe Metallica-early-days-ish, that kind of era thrash. I don’t really know how to describe it other than it just kind of is its own thing. We don’t fit neatly in any specific package. The songwriting tends to be fairly unique in my perspective, I think all of our songs tend to have their own flair and feel to them, it’s not like they’re cookie kind of Deadiron songs that all sound this way. We definitely are driven by the very heavy and melodic guitar section with fairly modern sounding drums and whatever the vocals are, but I’m repeating myself, I guess.

Tyler: You’re pretty much there. The only thing I’d like to add in that respect is that we have such a strong punk and hardcore feel and influence in some of our music. Guitar-wise we are definitely Swedish melodic death metal plus maybe our favorite hardcore band Wisdom in Chains - it kind of sums up the feelings of living in a Rust Belt city. We mostly play fast aggressive good guitar solos, some clean vocals, and occasionally we do our punk rock vows every now and then. Lots of melody and harmony and generally catchy stuff.

Alex: Like In Flames and Wisdom In Chains. And also Warmachine.

Tyler: Wisdom In Flames! (everybody laughs) I don’t know if that explains that. But a history lesson, let’s see… We’ve been around since… a while. The band’s been a concept for a while, but the line-up as is has been around since 2012. We have two albums out now, our first one was called “Out Of The Rust And Ruin”, which came out in 2012, and then our current album, which we just released in March, is called “Into The Fray”. It’s out on Auburn Records, our awesome homegrown label run by the one Bill Peters.

Alex: I came up with the idea with my friend Sunny K (guitar), who is on our first record, but not on our second, in ’07. We just wanted to mix a kind of punk rock/hardcore with At The Gates. It was really fun, but we weren’t fairly good at it. Some years went by and it never really went anywhere, and so we met Tyler, and Tyler’s guitar playing really made all the difference in the world. In September ’10 Tyler joined, and his guitar playing is so memorable and inspiring that it launched Deadiron to what it would become. We took a bit of our time to find the right drummer until we landed Tom (Walling), I think he was the next member to join. We had done a demo in ’11 that we used to get Tom with, and Tom was a great addition. I played bass at the time, but together we determined that I was not a great bass player. (everybody laughs) I could play the basic punk rock stuff, but the music was evolving, it was getting so complicated and so technical that it was beyond my skill and interest. So we came up with this wisest plan to find a really awesome melodic kind of Steve Harris / Cliff Burton-style bassist, while I would sort of step away and just be a frontman. We scouted for a while until we found J. Bennett, who is amazing, a great performer and a fabulous guy, so I stopped playing bass and started being a frontman for the first time ever. I always would do both. It turned out that I was really good at that, and it worked.

Tyler: Then we had a little bit of a revolving door for guitar players for a year. Sunny left, we got another guy, then another guy, and now we finally have our current guy, his name is CJ (Langmack), a young dude, and it’s been fun watching him grow and get his teeth at the metal scene and all the fruits and benefits that come with that.

Alex: Wacken was like his fifth show with the band, and he’s amazing, he’s a fabulous guitarist. We’ll see how far he goes in the next couple of years, and he definitely is the right guitar player and the right person anyway. Did that answer your question? (laughs)

Yeah, definitely! It is said on your website, "Dire economic conditions, line-up changes, and a political climate ripe with tension have torn apart many a band, but those elements only forged members Alexander Van Ness, Tyler Harvey, J Bennett, and Thomas Walling, into a unit bound and determined for musical domination". What do you mean by political climate here?

Tyler: He’s hitting a nerve! (laughs) Let me bunk this, if I will, by saying that being in a band is a lot like having multiple relationships with multiple people. The joke is that it’s like having four different girlfriends at once! (everybody laughs) You have to be really considerable of everybody, especially understanding the fact that a band is everybody’s baby. It’s our project for all of us. Even though I write a song or I feel one way about something, someone puts their input in. You have to be able to let go a little bit. It’s like a ship that everyone steers at once. Sometimes your conflict is gonna be natural ‘cause everyone’s got a direction, and everyone’s got at least something going on. Of course, when the members are coming and going, there’s a variety of reasons why those situations arise, but usually the main theme through all that is that it’s for the band, and whatever needs to get done will get done. We had to let some of our friends go from the band who we’re still friends with now, but where we needed to be as a band wasn’t particularly where that person was in their life or something. Most of the time it’s a pretty good mutual decision. (laughs)

Alex: The neighborhood we live in is currently in this very interesting pocket between a very upper-class-ish neighborhood and a very low-class area, so you have a lot of culture clash that goes on. The U.S. in general is a bit melting pot of different cultures and politics. Cleveland is a weird place. As the world who gives a shit turns its eye on the 2016 presidential elections, almost undoubtedly in the end they will come down to either Florida or Cleveland, it’s specifically the community where we live that will decide it. You have all: crazy conservative redneck idiots, great people who totally have good ideas but are perhaps delusional, and you have… I don’t know. The U.S. political scene is just fucked up, and it causes a lot of tension. A lot of it is social, a lot of it is economic. The right wing, for example, has some good ideas on personal liberty, but at the same time they’re all just crazy religious fanatics, and they want to blow up everyone else who isn’t American, they’re just crazy as far as I can tell. And the left wing is like, on the one hand, wants to move in the 21st century socially and economically, but they are mired down by business contribution. As far as I can tell, the whole thing is a giant scam, and the poor American populace is stuck in the middle of 1 percent of rich assholes who make up all this political bullshit. In the middle of that you have the black and white agendas, all these different religions, all these people from all these different countries, who all live together. When you’re living in poor areas, it comes out in your community, and sometimes the neighborhoods can be rough. It’s just a weird place and time I feel sometimes we’re living here.

Tyler: It kind of comes out in my music.

Alex: It does. I, for one, am really interested in the undercurrent of life – where people live, how they survive and get by, and I hope it comes across in our music. When we were in Germany, I went to visit Hamburg, and it was really especially to go to Reeperbahn, where prostitution and all that is sort of legalized, just to see how people live and feel and behave. It was great, it like being in Manhattan in the 70s. One-eyed homeless people, squatter punks pissing in the streets, prostitutes – all are miserable in their lives. That comes across in my writing. My family was very lower-class, it had a good background, but it had fallen into that post-hippie poverty. And then you have Tyler, his family comes from Philadelphia, old east, a good family and whatnot. I’m kind of bridging back to what Tyler said about relationships – we’re trying to find our values in each other and our commonalities and letting our differences strengthen us as a group instead of peaking on what’s different. It’s one of the things that I think makes our band and hopefully people of different backgrounds great. Tyler’s having a really good head for finances, social, economical and development has really helped Deadiron. For example, we have really good gear, it allows us to have a good sound, because Tyler expects nothing less and he makes it happen.

Tyler: It doesn’t hurt working at a music store and buying everything at a great discount.

Alex: Right! Had it been up to me, all of our gear would have been like crap, and we would have sounded like a tin can being cut open by a chainsaw, and I would have thought that was wonderful. (both laugh)

Tyler: It’s indeed a melting pot. It’s funny that the politics came up, but America is an ultimate party, very much in the same way that our band has become one. A good way to describe the whole history of the band is simply looking at our influences. Alex is in his mid-30s, he’s into punk and hardcore, he used to be in a punk rock band. I’m in my mid-20s, I love all the Swedish melodic death metal, some power metal, a lot of stuff out there. I was guitar-born. Our bass player J. loves old goth/industrial stuff, he’s a 40-year-old dude now, he’s still kicking…

Alex: He’s awesome!

Tyler: He’s great! And then the new guy, CJ, he’s 21, he’s just like a classical kiddy playing his guitar, and now we kind of threw him in this metal world.

Alex: He’s really into Bach, Mozart-style.

Tyler: We grabbed him right out of the music school. (laughs)

Alex: And then Tom’s right in the middle, he’s 29.

Tyler: I don’t know what a typical drummer might seem to you, because they’re all pretty crazy, but his favorite metal band is Iced Earth, I’d say, and probably Megadeth, but then he loves anything that is very beat-driven. It doesn’t matter if it’s rap, it doesn’t matter if it’s metal like Sepultura, it doesn’t matter if it’s some crazy obscure drummer band he’s found out about. If it’s interesting and different, then it’s usually what Tom is on top of. All these influences turn into what the band is.

Alex: The combination of economic strife – this is not a well-paid area, and most of us are not making great livings, especially with the amount of time we’re investing into the band – and personal relationships with the other band members –losing a number of rhythm guitar players over a couple of years, losing Sunny initially, because he just wanted to move on with his life…

Tyler: We’re very “On The Line”, on our first album we have a song called “On The Line”, and it’s basically about being a slave to the grind, working your 9 to 5, not really seeing any hope, and that’s not even just about your job, it could be about the band or about personal relationships.

Alex: How can you exceed and move on to something great instead of letting yourself be so mired down? That’s kind of what it’s like.

Tyler: That’s Cleveland in a nutshell. And our band.

Alex: Cleveland is an old industrial town, but after the American industrial explosion ended, it’s way more cost efficient for companies to send their jobs to China or Mexico than it’s to hire people here. A lot of these old mills closed down…

Tyler: It’s great for abandoned photoshoots – you go to a crazy old warehouse and take your band pictures.

Alex: The blue collar lifestyle is pretty much done here, maybe if you find a job in a hospital or something… I sell guitars now.

Tyler: I have one!

Alex: I sold you! (everybody laughs)

Let’s now address more closely the lyrics on "Into The Fray". The song “In Memorium” – is it a personal one, and to whom is it dedicated?

Alex: Ten years ago Lenny died, and Lenny was a punk rocker. The first time I ever met Len he was sitting on a street corner in Coventry and just bumming a change and trying to get some beer. He was one of these squatter punk homeless who just travel on trains and go from town to town, and Coventry, the village we live in, was always a sort of breeding ground for hippies and punks, it was one of those pastries. It didn’t matter, we became friends. Lenny was pretty entrenched in the local punk rock scene. He was one of those characters that are incredibly charming and charismatic; he was very loveable, but he was deeply disturbed and had all sorts of problems with drugs and alcoholism. I don’t know him ever to not be homeless or be a traveler. There was a number of times when he would act so weird that you would think, “Is he trying to kill himself? What’s he doing?” I remember he drank a bottle of bleach and he survived that somehow. That was amazing! But he was very beloved to our community, and one day we got a phone call that he had shot himself. He had a six-shoot revolver and only one bullet in the chamber…

I went to his funeral, and most of us did. His family wasn’t really there, if he had ever had one, but we were all a kind of punk rock extended family. It was really funny watching all these kids with Mohawks and dreadhawks and skinheads and shit sitting around in suits, and his girlfriend put this oldschool 80s boombox down on the ground, it was a beautiful sunny day on a little hill on a small graveyard, and she pressed “Play” on the cassette tape that was in it. It was 2004 or 2005 when it happened, why she was having a cassette tape at that time I don’t know, but she made a mixtape and it opened up with Dropkick Murphys playing “Amazing Grace”. The next thing I knew we were just dancing on Lenny’s grave, circle-pitting and skank-dancing. It was probably my idea, I probably started that. I remember his girlfriend came up to me and said, “I don’t think there’s anything Len would have liked more in his life than that”. Maybe that seems callous to someone who wouldn’t understand, but to the culture it was good. Lenny was gone, and we moved on. The day I got the phone call I was at work, and I remember I wrote most of the lyrics to “In Memorium” there. This was in 2004, I wrote the lyrics on the back of a piece of receipt paper in red pen. I stuck it in a notebook and I didn’t look at it again for 10 years.

While we were recording the album, “In Memorium” was the last song written for that record. I didn’t have any lyrics ready for it, I tried writing something real quick and went into the studio to record and showed our studio engineer Dave the lyrics I had. He said, “This is garbage! Take it home and start again!” I was like, “Oh shit, we have like two weeks to record the album! I only have two more weeks so I have to be in the studio”. He was like, “Well, I expect you’ll come up with something great”. So I was looking through all lyrics that I had, and I found the lyrics to “In Memorium”. I sort of planted it on top of the music, and it fit perfectly like I have written it for that set of music. It all kind of came together, and I was finally able to say goodbye to an old friend of mine. You know, I just talk about loss, and maybe there’s somebody who would understand it.

Speaking about punk rock, one the most outstanding songs on the album, in my opinion, is "Travisty" due to the punk rock feeling so I wasn't suprised when I read that it's not a Deadiron song. Who are Brazen Rogues and why did you decide to pick this song for the album?

Alex: Brazen Rogues were a skinhead punk / oi! band, they were really playing from 2000 to 2005. I was the bass player and one of the vocalists in the band. Me and my buddy Vicks recorded our first album on a four-track that we bought from a guitar store knowing that we couldn’t afford it, so we had a 30-day period during which we bought the four-track, recorded the album and returned the four-track as soon as it was done so that we could get the money back. We then used the money to get the CDs printed. “Travisty” was on that album.

“Travisty” was about… I had been watching a really famous movie here, a kind of subcult movie called “Taxi Driver”, and that’s what really inspired the track. At that time my girlfriend had just recovered from heroin addiction, and to close out living that kind of lifestyle I wrote the song about drug addiction, about heroin, and how many friends I knew had died of heroin at the time. It has a line that goes “Marlin is dead and gone”, and Marlin was another one of the super-charismatic street kids. He was on heroin, and he always had 15- or 16-year-old girls fall in love with him, and he’d get them to do heroin, because he thought it was great, and they’d die, and he’d be fine. It was awful. I remember we were playing the Grog Shop the day when I got the call that Marlin had finally O.D.’d and died. I was like, “Oh shit, Marlin really is dead and gone! Fuck!”

It was such a striking song, and Vicks and I always wanted to re-record it, but Brazen Rogues kind of faded out before that ever happened. With Deadiron, we wanted to play a kind of fun cover, and I brought it up to the guys, “Hey, why don’t we redo an old Brazen Rogues song and record it?” They were like, “Oh cool!”

Tyler: It’s always been my favorite Brazen Rogues song. Like I was saying, I’m not from Cleveland, I moved from Philly when I was in college, and I’ve only seen Brazen Rogues play once. It was still a great show! I don’t know if you’ve heard “Travisty” in the original, but I’m sure Alex will send it to you after this. Brazen Rogues was a very good band, not quite as refined or tight, but that was not what punk rock was about. I don’t know if it started as “let’s do it as a cover”, or “let’s make it a Deadiron song”, but I think it was a natural progression for it to be essentially both. Thankfully Alex mentioned Vicks, he was the other vocalist and guitar player in Brazen Rogues, and he gave us his full support…

Alex: He actually came in and sang on the track!

Tyler: Yeah, he’s actually recorded on the track, so it’s got both singers of Brazen Rogues, which is good. We kind of made it our own a bit too. We played it at Wacken, and it went over great. Everyone loves doing vows with the band. It was an easy decision to do a song we like. We love that punk rock sound in our music, and Alex is really the main force that brings it.

Alex: I came from an influential punk rock band, and for me as an outside perspective seeing that a metal band, Deadiron actually supports the punk scene was really cool. Watching the new life that Deadiron breathed in it, with guitar solos and a bass breakdown and some lyrics that weren’t there on the original recording was really cool, too. Getting to see that song come into fruition that had never happened was kind of a dream come true for me. And then to see it played at Wacken was, “Wow, this is amazing!”

Tyler: It went from punk rock gutter song, if you will, to digital production on a stage for a ton of people.

Alex: I think that song was also the first single we ever released with Brazen Rogues years and years ago. It’s a good one, man.

Tyler: When you listen to Alex’s voice, you can almost hear that he’s in his 20s. (laughs)

Alex: Oh my God, I’m old now. I’m old as dirt. I’m not sure how old dirt is, but that’s how old I am.

Tyler: He’s getting there!

Alex (laughs): Wait, you’re next!

Tyler: I know. We have CJ, the other guitar player, he’s 21. We have one thing that’s remained constant aside from ass-kicking guitar players –it’s the fact that we really have a wide age rage. I was 21 when I joined the band, and we had the range from 21 to mid-30s. Then we got rid of a guy, and I found myself in the middle, now CJ is 21. We’ve always had a big age range, it’s like 19 years now.

It seems you have lots of personal lyrics on the new album. Could you tell me the story behind “Lady Red” and «Прощай»?

(Alex cracks into laughter)
Tyler: “Lady Red” was a great song. It’s got one of my favorite guitar solos I’ve written on it. The story, for all you people out there, is the fact that I had a relationship with a very sexy Russian girl. I’m sure a lot of you Russians out there can relate to it. Sometimes with the very sexy ones things get a little crazy.

Alex: She was from Moscow!

Tyler: What else to say about it other than… this is a heartbreak song, if you will. (pause) It’s a long story involving some pretty crazy details.

Alex: There’s definitely a love triangle.

Tyler: Maybe a square. (Alex cracks into laughter) It really depends on who you’re asking, this whole situation. (laughs) “Lady Red” is a great example of why they call the blues the blues. When you’re at your bottom emotionally, you can come up with some pretty great material. That song kind of just wrote itself, Alex and I wrote the lyrics together about what was happening, kind of the way I felt, and maybe the way certain other people felt in this triangle and/or square.

Alex: It’s definitely from a man’s perspective, but which man’s perspective, the question so be?

Tyler: The other one, “Proshay”, as you know, is “goodbye”, the ”very final goodbye”. I like writing instrumental pieces to the album, the last one had one in the intro, maybe by the next album we’ll write a full-length instrumental. This one had very repetitive tones in certain melodies that were, to me, kind of drony, because that’s what it felt like being in this up-and-down relationship with this girl. That song itself was my tribute to the final getting over it, the final moment of feeling like, “I don’t care anymore”. “Lady Red”’s been a great song, there were times when this particular girl came to the show and we played it, it’s had its unique story by itself, but thankfully it’s gone from being the current topic to more of a Deadiron lore, which is where it should be. (laughs)

So are you familiar with Russian culture?

Tyler: Actually a bit. There’s a good bit of Russian immigrants that have made Cleveland their home. Me and Alex know quite a bit of Russian people in Cleveland, particularly the East Side, and I can say that all of them, every single one we’ve ever met, has been very kind and very caring, and has always gone pretty much out of their way to help their friends. Very loyal people, maybe to a fault, but sometimes people are like that.

Alex: Yeah, the Russian community here has really supported us, so we’ve been very grateful for that.

Tyler: We have our Russian friends here, they are the ones who made sure we had the spelling and the font right on the album, when we came up with “Proshchay”. I’m sure they all get a kick out of the fact that we can out send out links, “Hey, go read about that in your language”. It should be fun for all of us.

On your previous album you have a song "Winter Is Coming". Was it inspired by George Martin's “Game Of Thrones”?

Tyler: There’s some of that in there, just a little.

Alex: I probably shouldn’t have called it “Winter Is Coming”, but I was really enjoying reading those books. I was like, “It’s so awesome! Everybody dies, and it’s horrible, and all my favorite characters get killed”, but the song actually isn’t about that. It’s really about the Western culture here in the States. I have to be careful in my writing when I talk about political topics here in the States, because every time you throw a very strong opinion in any one place, someone’s gonna have a very strong opinion somewhere else. When I do talk of those topics, I try to be a little more abstract and let people make their own conclusions, but I was really fucking pissed that were going down in what was happening around there.

Tyler: What crisis in America? Which one? I can’t even remember.

Alex: A series of laws were passed. And a lot of times in the U.S. the laws that are passed are big bills that will say, “Reform healthcare! It will be great!”, and at the bottom of it, it will say, “By the way…” It’s like an amendment, an attachment at the bottom on the bill, which will say, “Oh yeah, by the way, it’s now illegal to protest anywhere where there might be a secret service member”.

Tyler: Was it Patriot Act?

Alex: It wasn’t Patriot Act of 2003 which I think of, but there was a series of laws very comparable to a number of pre-Nazi Germany laws that effectively stated that you could be arrested and questioned and held without any one reason. That was really fucked up, and I was pissed. While reading “Game Of Thrones”, I sort of alluded to what happens to a giant country like this when it just falls the fuck apart, and when you realize that the people who’re supposedly fighting for freedom and desperately cry for freedom are in fact not. It’s when you say, “No, you’re not, you fucking cowards, you’re not about freedom at all. You’re about fear and hate mongering and bureaucracy and trying to hold on to some sort of norm that is gone long since”. You realize that world is difficult.  “Winter Is Coming” was the prelude to what I felt was happening here. The home of the average middle class American is so mired in their television and the Internet that they don’t even see what the fuck’s going on around them. And they’re not supposed to. They’re kept fat and happy, sort of stupid and weak.

Tyler: There’s a lot of that. Ignorance is pretty common, not only in our area, but the whole country. Especially with the way that the social media is, sometimes ignorance can spread like wildfire. The song is really touching on all these topics, it’s about how helpless we can feel when the system seems to be corrupt, and the question is, “Is there any hope for it not to be this way?”

Alex: And when you look at Westeros… It’s funny I draw this interesting parallel, I don’t know if it came out in the lyrics, I don’t know how well I told the story, but if you look at Westeros and all these people doing this political bickering, infighting and bullshit, dying in wars, and yet the real threat’s coming, and no one can see it, and no one cares. And it’s coming, the others are coming. The white walkers will kill you all.

As there are so many problems in the United States, have you ever thought of moving to Europe?

(both laugh)
Tyler: Yes, especially after seeing Germany. It was great experience visiting Europe. I’ve been fortunate to seeing a good bit of it, I’ve been… not all over the continent, but I’ve seen five or six countries. I have to say being in Hamburg was really nice, but what makes Europe most appealing is the fact that metal fans are incredible, and the metal scene seems much better than in America. Maybe we just had our joyride shock, and we’ve not seen the pros and the cons, but, yeah, moving to Europe would be really attractive. (laughs)

Alex: I really think everything is always gonna change. That’s a consistent thing in life. Are you really gonna find something better and the grass will be greener on the other side? Maybe. If we stay in the States, will we have experiences and opportunities that we wouldn’t have in Europe? Yeah, sure. And in Europe, are were gonna have experiences and opportunities that will be better? Absolutely. Are the problems really worse here? They’re just the ones we’re familiar with. I can’t really answer that question. I can say that we are definitely sick of the problems here (laughs), and I feel really good getting away from it. But would moving be the right answer? Maybe or maybe not, I don’t know.

Tyler: As a band, we’ve always said our music sounds European. Why we go over really well back home is mostly because of our live show. We thrash out really hard, we play with the crowd, we love feeding off the crowd energy, we look at people, try to interact, get them going. The European scene, they just appreciate our music more. They will go out of the way to buy CDs, all of our CDs are going there, not too many get sold in the States. The feeling of playing in front of really receptive crowds was making my day.

Alex: Germany is a nice metal ground. We haven’t been able to get all over Europe, but Sweden - I like Sweden. I think Iceland is amazing, I’d love to live there personally, but I don’t know, I think we’ll have to fly from there every time we want to play a show.

Tyler: I have some friends in the Swedish band Sister Sin, and they had huge amounts of praise for playing Russia. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit and see, but being able to play over there would be something else, very phenomenal. A Cleveland band you might have heard of, Mushroomhead, just went and played… I’m not sure exactly, probably in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They played there 1.5 years ago or something, and they had a great time.

What are your future plans? Maybe some more festivals in Europe?

Tyler: Yeah, we have some of that in the works. The main plan right now is to focus on Europe. We take the appropriate level of steps. We have very modest backing, our label is very small, and it’s tough to sink a lot of money in that stuff. When flying overseas, sometimes it costs at least 1,000 dollars per person, and that’s just to get us there, not to mention eating and the money we’re gonna lose from working.

Alex: Touring in the U.S., we’ll play for anywhere between 20 and 200 people, depending on where you are, how well they know us, and how well the shows are promoted. We can drive all the way to California and have a really great show, but we can’t get back there any time soon, and people forget about us. So we’re really gonna focus heavily on Europe for the next 5-6 years.

Tyler: We’ll try to do the festival circuit if we’re lucky, and maybe book some small club dates around those festivals. The main thing is that we’re gonna be getting in and really doing our time right now for the third album. I think we have at least three or four songs done, and now that we’re back from Wacken, we have so much more mental willpower to dedicate to it. We’re really looking forward to it. Now for the first time we have a really solid line-up that we’re at least not gonna have any thought of changing in the middle of the studio session, like the last guys. We’re gonna write our balls off, write some awesome music, get it ready for Europe next year, and then just get back to Europe.

Alex: And next time tour around it, too. We were hoping to tour around Wacken, but Wacken’s so big, it’s like a whirlwind, like a tornado that eats everything around it.

Tyler: It’s hard to find any cool small things around it, because it’s four days long, you’re there for four days when you play it, and people are kind of burned out the entire week after. (laughs) And the week before they might already be there, they’ve got so much shit going on to get ready.

Alex: But we’re ready to play anywhere for cool people. We’ll play house parties, we’ll come play your house.

Tyler: Yeah, if you can book us a really badass basement tour of Russia, we will be there! (everybody laughs)

Alex: Give us a place to sleep and make sure we’ll eat, and we’ll come play your house.

Finally and traditionally, please say a few words for your Russian audience!

Tyler: Well, if you listen to music to feel connection, if you listen to music because your life feels shitty, I think you’ll like our band! (Alex cracks into laughter) Deadiron and our message and our sound, it’s musically uplifting, but lyrically it kind of hits you right where you wanna be hit. It lets you know that usually we are all going through the same bullshit as each other, and we all kind of deal with similar – not always the same but sometimes similar – problems. I feel that pain lets you know you’re alive, and when you play hardcore or heavy metal, it allows you to share some of that pain with some friends and maybe meet brothers from places all over the world who you didn’t know you had. I feel that hope is essential, and it’s in finding the joy and beauty in life, which is being able to see the contrast between the viciousness and the sorrows that are present in our lives as human beings and the beauty and the joy that surround us - the summer sky and the soft breeze, or the music played by your favorite band. I hope that what we bring through our shows is fun and allegiance and wonder, and our performances will make everyone feel like they’re alive and are part of something bigger than themselves. I hope that to any audience that we may have, or anyone might have, the act of just enjoying the music is the act of participating in something that’s unique to a human and really beautiful.

Deadiron on the Internet: http://www.deadiron.com

Paul Vlasov
August 16, 2015
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