The band has started talking about their new album, An Ocean Between Us, and has declared it their heaviest and most brutal effort to date. The album, due later this year, is in its final mixing/mastering stages.
The band was interviewed by Blasting-Zone.com and they had some interesting things to say about the new album and being a Christian band.
Concerning the sound of the new album:
It's really intense and it's very fast. It's not as mid-tempo as our last one. Even though our last one was pretty fast, I think this one is a lot faster. In fact, we're gonna have to practice thesesongs pretty hard before playing them standing up, ya know? When you're in the studio struggling to play a riff, you're sitting down doing it, so standing up is a whole other story (laughs). It's good though, because I think we really pushed ourselves.
Sounds good, though it would be amusing to see a band falling over because it was too difficult for them to play their songs standing up.
Oddly, concerning the whole Christian thing, they seem to think they're better than the bands who cater to the Christian market:
It's hard because a lot of the bands that are vocal about being Christian bands tend to cater to a very Christian audience…by pretty much playing every Christian festival under the sun and only playing with other Christian bands. All of us in the band are Christian dudes and we're vocal about it and I think our lifestyles and our lyrics reflect that. But at the same time, we also tend to opt to play in the normal music scene because that's what we love doing. I think it's just easier to give yourself that label and succeed in a Christian market than it is to do what every other band does and play in the real world.
Interesting, on some level... but I'm not sure why they'd rather do it the "hard" way, or why they'd choose to isolate themselves from a scene that wants and embraces them and their beliefs.
The band went on to say:
At the end of the day, we're just a band, but if you really get into it… we're vocal about what we believe in, I guess. Everyone has their own beliefs, but you don't necessarily label someone that type of band just because they believe that. I would say we're just a straight-up metal band that just happens to believe in all these things. I don't care about being lumped into a category. It seems like the harder you try to disprove something, the more you just kinda get thrown into it. We just focus on writing and recorded albums that we're stoked about and then just touring off of them. We leave the menial stuff to whoever feels like handling it.
Okay, then.
The band is currently finishing their album, and will be joining up with the Warped Tour on August 4th in New York, through the end, before heading to Europe for a brief tour.
