After the longest hiatus of a career that has seen them sell almost a million records and carve out a niche for blood-splattered punk anthems with choruses that grip like pincers, Chicago natives Alkaline Trio are ready to paint that the town red…and black, the colours of the morbid aesthetic that runs through their work.
Bassist Dan Andriano explains the band are “very excited” about the impending release of sixth album Agony and Irony and “ just going to get back into the swing of things after not really being on tour for a couple of years.” There’s been “a really nice response” to the new songs they’ve played on the first shows of the two-month US tour they have just embarked on. The group was confident of a positive reception, Dan says, explaining that “we’re proud of the record. A lot of people ask me if I’m nervous because the record’s coming out here, but I don’t really feel nervous at all because I know we’ve made a great record.”
Said record includes Matt Skiba’s Help Me, a song inspired by the remarkable biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis which may match previous record Crimson’s Mercy Me for sheer catchiness. Then there’s Dan’s In Vein, which he explains has been misinterpreted as about an ailing relationship, but was actually inspired by some friends he made growing up “that just made some bad choices, and ended up unhappy the rest of their lives.”
Further unhappiness is played out in Love Love Kiss Kiss (“Do you find you like to fall in love with people you’re never gonna meet/ It’s easier than breaking up and crying in the street”). Andriano says the song came about with the realisation that “everyone goes through a point in their lives…where you just want to go ahead and say that you’re done with love and trying to date and all that shit that goes along with it, because it can be a pain the ass and it often leads to heartbreak and depression and unhappiness.”
Love Love Kiss Kiss was also the at the centre of an innovative contest the band ran, where fans were provided with sheet music of the then-unreleased song and invited to send in their own interpretations of it. Impressed by the calibre of entries, they’re currently sifting through them to find a winner. For Andriano, finding such new ways to interact with the fans is vital. “Fans are the reason we’re still doing what we’re doing. They’ve been really great to us, and we like to have more of a communal feeling with us and them doing it together.” Fans have also been able to suggests songs for the set-lists for the current tour and have put in more than a few requests for the songs from first LP Goddamnit, which was re-released earlier this year for its ten year anniversary.
Andriano has been delighted by the response to that re-release. “People have been writing a lot of nice things about the re-issue of that record, saying that it was an important record, and that record changed what a lot of people were doing musically. I don’t know about that, but it’s nice to hear that kind of thing.” He feels he has cut out a lot of the “unnecessary shit” from his bass-playing on that record, and Agony & Irony takes this stripped-down approach even further, scaling back the production from their previous record and recording it more quickly than in the past.
Overseeing this new song cycle was producer Josh Abraham, who Andriano describes as “very relaxed, very mellow”. The band chose him not for his past work (which includes Slayer, Unwritten Law, Limp Bizkit and, err, Pink) but for his people skills: “He really focuses a lot on just getting a nice vibe in the studio while you’re making the record, and that helped us immensely, you know, creatively. [Choosing him] had everything to do with his vibe and the way he presented himself.”
Andriano signs off with a message for the band’s many Australian fans: “Please be patient with us, we’re trying to get down there as soon as we can. I feel bad that we’ve only been out there a couple of times.” Australia is a long way from the Windy City they still call home, but pencil in early next year as likely.
Agony and Irony is out 30 June through V2/Cooperative.
