INTERVIEW: Trevor Phipps – Unearth
For the last few years UNEARTH have been tearing their way through the world on a huge touring spree but the time draws near for the release of their long awaited seventh studio album Extinction(s) which is due on November 23rd via Century Media Records. We caught up with their iconic frontman Trevor Phipps to get the lowdown on their recent stint on the final Warped Tour, what the fans can expect from the new album and more!
A couple of months ago you were involved in the final Warped Tour, how was it? I can imagine it was a bit strange having different set times every date?
Trevor: It was a great tour, it was massive! Almost every show was sold out. It was our first time doing the whole Warped Tour. When we first started touring back in 2001/2002 we did just three shows close to where we are from but this was the whole North American run. It was awesome man, it’s a huge undertaking. There was like 60 bands and like a dozen stages, all the production crew and all the bands were really friendly and everyone was just great.
Excellent, did you find you had a good reception from the crowd?
Trevor: Yeah, we didn’t know what to expect as it’s not really a metal festival but we just attacked the stage every day. We played the Monster Stage which is a bit more heavy music leading so we definitely had a good bunch of metal and hardcore fans there. It was a great response every day, we played in front of thousands of people and it was a lot bigger than what we thought it would be.
Extinction(s) is due for release in November, what should the fans expect from this release?
Trevor: The fans should expect a big progression of our sound. It sounds like us but we’ve definitely taken things to a different level. There’s some songs on there that dig more back into our roots, where the band came from. There’s also some new directions in there as well. It was four years between records for us so we had a lot of material. We had 24 songs ready to go and we cut those down to 14 then to the best 10. I think this is our strongest record to date, time will tell whether thats the truth but we all feel really good about this record. It’s heavy, its dynamic and I think the songs will translate to a live setting very well too. That was a big thing for us. We wanted to write a record where we could play the entire thing live. Our last record Watchers Of Rule that was more, not prog metal but the most progressive of our catalogue and those songs didn’t really translate into our live show as some of the earlier stuff. We definitely take pride in our live performance and interaction with the crowd, high energy so we had that in mind when writing this record.
How was it working with the likes of DL, Adam D and Will Putney on this release?
Trevor: Personally I didn’t work with DL or Adam, Ken wrote a couple of songs with DL. He was kind of an outside perspective when he sat down to write the songs. Adam was the producer for the drums and worked with Nick. We chose Adam to track Nick as Nick is definitely a technical drummer and we wanted this one to feel a bit more peeled back and straightforward, we wanted him to shine with his skills at the right moments. With Adam being a trained drummer and we have a lot of history with him we knew he would get the best performance out of Nick. This was my first time working with Will, I had an amazing time working with him. He had a tonne of great ideas for arrangements. He’s been a fan of ours since the first record and he knew what he wanted to hear from us. We tried a lot of new stuff as well. I probably gave the most dynamic vocal performance of my career, I’m always trying to further my voice over the years and a lot of credit goes to him for helping me achieve this in the studio.
You’ve already released Incinerate and just recently Survivalist so far, how has the response been from those tracks?
Trevor: It’s been amazing, those songs have already got more streams than a lot of our songs from previous records. It seems like the fans are enjoying it, they’re getting a lot of plays on satellite radio and stuff like that. From a live perspective the songs are doing really well too and it’s exciting to see them react to it so early when the album isn’t even out yet. We’re really eager to see how the whole thing does. All the songs have a similar energy throughout so I hope the rest gets the same response.
Are their any tracks in particular you’re excited for everyone to hear?
Trevor: I dig the whole record but one of my favourite songs we’ve ever written and my personal favourite on the new record is One With The Sun. It’s the last track on the record and it feels like at the end it’s kind of like a funeral. It’s heavy, it’s dynamic and it brings a lot of the best of UNEARTH to the table and I like it a lot.
Definitely, I imagine the fans will love it too. I think my personal favourite is Sidewinder as it’s just utterly crushing!
Trevor: What’s funny about that one is I was working on a different song and I hadn’t worked on Sidewinder for vocals or lyrics yet. I went to bed and I think I was working on King Of The Arctic at the time and I was drawing a bit of a blank at the time, I went to bed and I dreamt the chorus to Sidewinder! I had the entire chorus written so I woke up early, I was singing this fucking song in my head and I just sat down and wrote the whole song that morning. That’s never happened to me before! I just dreamt a song and it was really bizarre. That one’s really aggressive and it was one of the first songs I wrote because it just came to me.
UNEARTH have been a band for 20 years. How do you ensure you still continue to push yourselves creatively?
Trevor: With the four year break between records, we did our fair share of touring around the world. I think right now it’s a really good time for music right now, especially metal and hardcore. It really inspired us to become fans of music again. I don’t want to say we got complacent but we definitely relied on where our roots were from and what we grew up listening to. There is so much great music out there now that we all got fully inspired again and I think that’s where the energy for this album came from. We just became big fans again of what is going on right now and not just yesterday. We’ve been doing this for a long time and you have to stay hungry if you wanna stick around. We’ve seen a lot of our peers come and go over the years and we are still standing. We are determined to go further and further.
Being the elder statesmen of metalcore and being an inspiration to many up and coming bands has it been interesting to see how the genre has developed over the years?
Trevor: Most definitely! Bands started mixing metal and hardcore back in the 80’s with bands like BIOHAZARD and CROMAGS, INTEGRITY, AGNOSTIC FRONT etc and then in the 90’s you had EARTH CRISIS who were fully in the hardcore scene but their music was very metallic. It’s got to the stage now where metalcore is pretty much just metal! You had bands like PANTERA, SEPULTURA and SLAYER introducing breakdowns in the late 80’s and early 90’s so that’s basically what modern metalcore is. It’s like a take on a blend of all those bands and what they came up with. It’s opening up a lot of different avenues. KNOCKED LOOSE for example, they sound like they could’ve came out of 1997 but there is a modern twist to it. Then you have POWER TRIP who definitely sound like more thrash metal but there is a hardcore sound to it. They have riffs which could’ve been from a TERROR record. There is a lot of variations of what people would call metalcore.
Oh absolutely, I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about bands who are bringing a sort of resurgence of an old sound like GRETA VAN FLEET for example.
Trevor: Yeah and they sound like LED ZEPPELIN and it’s great that they are introducing younger people to that style of music, LED ZEPPELIN are like 50 years into their career now and some people may not have listened to them previously. So it’s great to see bands like that opening peoples ears to and maybe influence people with music that was written quite a long time ago. It’s giving people the chance to listen to classic music.
Following the album release what does the remainder of the year going into 2019 hold for UNEARTH?
Trevor: We have a US tour which starts soon which will be for about a month, we come home for the holidays and then January and February we have a lot of tours we are due to announce. I know we have something brewing for Mexico and Canada and a European tour which is being put together right now. We’ll be touring a lot and we’ll be working on Japan and Australia again and if we can make it happen we will come back to Europe for the festival season. There will be a lot of touring for this record and we are taking a slightly different approach. In previous album cycles we would return to some places quite a few times and we feel like that may have been overkill. You see the bands from America who maybe come over to Europe once every album cycle so it’s more of a special event when it happens. We all have families now and we don’t want to be gone for eight months at a time like we used to. There’ll be a tonne of touring but not quite as much as what we were used to before.
Throughout the career of UNEARTH you’ve racked up quite a lot of material, do you find it difficult putting set lists together for tours?
Trevor: We’ve definitely had some heated discussions about it! Nothing that will break the band up though [laughs]. We tend to choose what songs we enjoy playing and what is getting the best reactions from the crowd. Years ago we tried something different I think it might have been on Myspace but we did a poll and asked people what they would like to hear and we thought it might bring out some songs that aren’t in rotation. We generally have about 25 songs that we can comfortably play on a tour and be rehearsed. It turned out that the songs chosen were songs which were all on regular rotation in our setlists anyway! It didn’t really open up any ideas for what we should maybe change up. If we choose any different songs it’s probably going to be for our pleasure I guess. We usually play about 14/15 songs live and if we revisit the same city we try to shake that up and make sure it’s just not the same show over and over again. This is our seventh record so there will be some changes. Some songs will get added and others will be dropped and this tour we’re adding some songs we rarely play as well as some new songs so this tour cycle will be probably the most varied we’ve ever had.
Sounds very exciting! Its funny that you mentioned the poll idea because a while back METALLICA did a headline set in the UK and it was “By Request” and you could vote for any song from their entire back catalogue. I got very excited about potentially hearing some deep cuts but it turned out everyone just picked the same old Master Of Puppets, Enter Sandman, One etc which was a bit disappointing.
Trevor: Yeah that’s what happened to us! As a band you play the songs which get people hyped up and most of the time those songs are self explanatory y’know? It’s kind of obvious so that’s interesting that it turned out the same way for them as it did for us.
If you had to choose only one song from your catalogue to help convince someone to listen to UNEARTH what would the song be and why?
Trevor: Right now I’d have to go with One With The Sun, I feel that brings everything that we are about to the table. It was never really about the singles or videos for us but one song that I don’t think has ever left the setlist is This Lying World from The Oncoming Storm. For some reason that song always gets the best reaction and it just makes it so much fun to play!
Thanks very much for your time man, it’s been a pleasure to speak to you. The new album is amazing and I’m looking forward to hearing the reactions.
Trevor: Appreciate that man, thank you very much! You’re in England right? Our tour will be coming through there so I hope to see you there. We’ll grab a pint!
Extinction(s) is due for release on November 23rd via Century Media Records.
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