The Downbeat - Alpha Wolf (Sabian + Mitch)

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

My guests this week are Sabian and Mitch from Alpha Wolf. We talked about why their band is so good and heavy, why Australia leads the way in modern metalcore, and I ask Chat GPT to write a romantic fanfiction about the band.

Good A, mate. That's the tone that we're setting on today's podcast. If you know the Downbeat podcast, you'll know friends of Australia, really. A lot of Australians on there, a lot of Aussies. UK, if you're American, you don't know history, right? No offence. Then, basically, UK, we had loads of criminals, and then we were like, what should we do with all these criminals,

and then we just chucked them to Australia. Now, admittedly, when they got there, you know, to get rid of some people, it's very bad, it's a very bad time, okay? It's stolen land, essentially, yeah, so that's my view on that. So we're very political in the first 42 seconds there, so let's roll that back a little bit, and just say, are you watching this early on patreon.com for all slash it downbeat? Sounds pretty cool. What else do you get? Well, you might have that cool, nearly down.

beat merch drop early, 24 hours early, so that it sells out because I'm too scared to print more than 100 of everything. You might have those early, you might have this episode earlier, you might have the odd giveaway. Yeah, giveaways are coming. Oh, big time boy and girl and MB, the giveaways are coming. Just give me a quid. It's one pound. One quid. And then, ideally, give me a quid and forget about it and just leave it rolling on. So I can pay Simon the editor who so far this episode has not had to edit anything so I'm hemorrhaging money for no reason all he has to do is shine it up and make it look like that he is good he is good my guests wait before I talk about my guest I already said you go to www. the downbbyde

dot 80 so it's about down me and you could get a t-shirt or a hoodie or shorts are the shorts are out yet if the shorts are out by the shorts there's a u.s store it ships from los angeles california if you're going to moan like, oh, how long is shipping? How far do you live away from that? That's how long. There's a UK store. It ships from Los Angeles, Reading, England. How long is that going to take your ship?

However long it takes. Brov, give me a break. My guest this week, that's the plugs out of the way. Let's talk about my guests. My guests this week are Alpha Wolf. Why, we got Mitch and we got Sabian. Yes, his name. is Fabian.

They're in town. I watched them. They're really good. They're one of those bands that they used to come on after, whenever I finish a metal core album, Alpha Wolf will come on.

And I go, what is this is awesome. Guess what? It's always Alpha Wolf. We had a little chat about why that happens and whether or not they paid for that to happen.

I'm not going to tell you if they did or they didn't. You can find out in about 11 minutes if you just keep listening to the podcast. What else did we talk about? It was cool.

It was a cool chat. Can't really remember what we talked about. Talked about why Sabian's called Sabian. Talked about his vlogging. Talked about Australia. I talked about business, TikTok, social media. Why is their band so heavy?

That's about it. We did. Just basically carry on. If you're watching it on YouTube, drop a like, drop a subscribe, drop a comment saying, you ramble too much, you idiot, your hair looks absolutely rubbish. Leave that comment. Two or three more comments, probably a bit nicer. It'll make me feel a bit nicer.

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You can get a 3D printed frame around them. You can see the ones in the background. with me right now look like they've got frames that's actually 3d printed i didn't frame that up i'm too lazy have you got a landlord yes all landlords are cowards yes that is a fact but are they going to chew your ear off about how you can't put holes in the walls well they're magnetic we're living in the future put them up with a magnet what's your hobby i guarantee you go to displace.com put in this is my hobby oh i like dogs with hats on boom you're getting a poster right use the code downbeat, all one word, downbeat, you can get 20% off 1 to 2 dispates, you can get 30% off

3 or more. I got 8 in my house. For those 8 that I have, they have planted 8 trees. They've planted 18 million trees so far. That's probably a forest by now, isn't it? I don't know. Go, displate.com. Use the code downbeat. Support me, support the podcast. Let's have a little chat to Mitch and Sabian from Alpha Wolf on the Downbeat podcast. Hey guys. Hello. Yo. Welcome to the United Kingdom. Can you please introduce yourselves and what you do in the band, Alpha Wolf?

I'm Mitch and I play drums in Alpha Wolf. I'm Sabian and I'm the guitarist of Alpha Wolf. And what symbols do you play? Vinyl. Not Xavier? No. Your name is legitimately Sabian. Yeah.

Your name's legitimately Sabian. My dad's a drummer. Any time to my time. my mom's contractions on a Sabian watch. No fucking way. And then I took up drums for a little bit and didn't like it. Whoa. That's a shame.

I mean, it's kind of better, though, because if your name was like ESP. Yeah. Yeah. Did you play Sabian? No, I didn't. No. I like Minel too.

Oh. Weird. Back to end, too, that's a long time ago. Fuck, minor. I was scared to say it. No, it's fine. I like the symbols. They're fine.

Yeah, fine. How long is this tall? How is it? 20 shows. It's been good. What you want? Uh, shoot eight today? Yeah.

Yeah, yesterday was seven. Yeah. Where was yesterday? Leeds Key Club sold out. Tonight was sold out as well. Tonight was sold out. Yeah. UK loves it.

UK's awesome. You guys, like, blew the fuck up. It's a lot of hard work. I mean, it is a lot of hard work. Like, we started 10 years ago, and we done five years with nothing. And then... We did five years. years of nothing.

You can't just pick a band name and do nothing. I feel like I've told the story so many times, but you haven't heard it. I haven't heard it and there'll be many listeners that haven't heard it. So we started the band, myself and John, our bass player, in Tasmania. There's not really a music scene there. And our goal at the time... Cycroptic. Are they from Tasmania?

Yeah, they are. They're the biggest export. Big up. Until our fourth. Sorry, psychropic. Carry on. So, yeah, we started the band and our goal at the time was to leave. Tasmania, play a show in Melbourne.

It's the big goal that all Tasmanian bands want to do, and we did that. And then we moved to Melbourne, and then we wanted to tour the East Coast, and we did that. And then we wanted to tour internationally. That took us like seven years. Five years of just being. How much music is out at this point? It's real funny. I think we'd put out about 10 songs as Alpha Wolf until one day we traveled to see a Mewa play.

and at that day we were like all right scrap everything because it was like it was your demise hardcore it was like really it was all these different genres we're trying to find our feet what we liked and we saw a muir and we decided on that day that we are to

write heavy music and solely be a heavy band and now we've branched out a little bit we get sad a bit and whatnot but like get it's out a bit yeah so we're like let's go home write an EP put out an EP that's all heavy music good artwork etc etc etc and properly become a band what year what year is this but this is 2015 we put out our first

proper thing and deleted everything off the internet nice good move yeah that was pre that EP and that was the start of heavy alpha wolf and then how many records between then and now after that real life records real life not an EP all right so two albums yeah two albums two albums that's pretty good We're on our second album and we're headlining, sold out UK shows. So, like, I remember always seeing the band and always just saying, oh, an EP, oh, an EP, oh, an EP, just got a new EP. Just got, you just did two new EPs, correct?

Two songs, two songs on a split EP. Still an EP. Yeah. And then. But you've got to play Spotify, man. You got to put out songs and just. I'm into it. The new game in the system thing.

I think EPs are coming back. I had so much of a conversation with so many people. how like press agents are all fucking old people. No offense. All of you, please continue to let me get people on here. But like, maybe not even press agents. The press are all people who are just like, oh, well, it's not an album.

So we're not really going to do anything with it. But it's like, yeah. Motherfucker, we don't need, I don't need to be in the magazine anymore. I remember there was this weird limbo period before Spotify and we're trying to get our singles submitted for review and all reviewers are like it was before react channels

and all of that no one would do a write up for a single for obvious reasons why would you yeah but now we're in Spotify world where you can put out one song it can get reacted to 20 50 hundred times and that itself is PR

so singles EP's here's a question did you ever do did you ever do did you ever do it Because your and you can tell me Because your band came up all the fucking time

Until throne came out It was Alpha Wolf It was it was and like I've actually learned the ins and outs Of this system now and it's not as bad as I thought it was It is if anyone doesn't know You sign away like 20% of the royalties on Whatever song gets pushed

Which now like See We've asked out of the royalties on whatever song gets pushed. We've asked out of that. label's like how because maybe we should honestly like now i heard it's 20% i'm like i'll give 20% away for that but somehow our biggest song fell into that somewhere um somehow like heavy metal workout playlist yeah it's on some weird playlist yeah it was a big one it had my brain ticking because we put out a single maybe a month after that that had a cool ambient intro for

about 30 seconds and then it slams if you're skipping through a playlist and something takes 30 seconds to hit skip it. Is the big one the one that begins out of your can't pronounce it. Akadama.

Yeah. So as soon as what does that word mean? It means bad guy or villain in Japanese. Yeah.

It's cool. So as soon as you hit play on that song it bangs. It goes straight into it no fucking around and we think that maybe ticked

something in an algorithm that people are instantly interested because right off the rip it's ripping. It is a ripping song. Big gym anthem. Yeah.

So that's, I don't want to write to spot up. I don't want to be like our songs have to hit on go because we still just want to write good music yeah but in my head it's like I think a song with an ambient intro that takes a while to hit probably won't take off in a playlist interesting as a heavy man there's so many bands that sound like us yeah well I think we put out five singles and it was good to see the difference in each but in saying that when we wrote Akkadama and we're showing our friends demos it was always

the first one we'd show people because we knew it it was like a good song. Yeah. It just had something. It's like, you need to listen to this song we just wrote. And it like piqued my interest as well, probably for the same.

Yeah. Yeah. Coming up on that playlist and it would come up after other bands. And I'd be like, who the fuck is this? And I'd look, it's always that song. Yeah. And it was always these guys. I was like, okay, I'm in on this band.

How do you, because I don't have really like, I don't have like a genre of music that I just only listen to. Yeah. But my criteria with me. music is it has to be the my only criteria is it has to be either incredibly emotional or incredibly ridiculous yeah right yeah and by that ridiculous i mean like to like death core is not i fucking love death core but it's like i'm not listening to it because i don't want to hear the lyrics about the fucking a breakup right i want the lyric about fucking someone's

someone breaking every single bone in someone's body yeah it's like it doesn't take itself seriously um but what genre are you calling alpha wolf yourselves i think new metal core is yeah we get thrown into new metal core but generally it's metal core i feel like we can get put onto a metal core bill and be the heaviest band on the bill yeah um these headline shows are different because we get to showcase our soft the songs because sometimes we'll slow it down and sometimes we'll attempt to sing and do that sort of thing but generally it's breakdowns um we love new metal so we'll try and throw some DJ scratches in there like new metal beats we just want people to bop have a good time so

some upbeat metal core yeah bouncy yeah how many people in the band five a rule base classic classic real bass player you know you know me so well let's go real bass back when you're getting rid of him Real bass. So the scratchings obviously. Track. Yeah. But it was... Acceptable.

Acceptable. Don't worry. Recorded by then. Um, he'd done a DJ cover of one of our songs that didn't have DJ scratches in it. And we're like that. So cool. Here's the song we're working on. Can you scratch over this?

And he sent us like five different versions. We found the one that we liked the most. And it's authentic. What track is that one? Acid Romance. Real bouncy one. It just goes into DJ scratches. Yeah, we put DJ scratches on.

It's coming back. on the last track on our last record. I remember before that I used to scratch on the strings and it doesn't sound as cool. Give it a little thing. Yeah, and then you know like having, because you don't have, you don't got like orchestral shit or anything.

Not yet. I mean, I like that shit, but I mean, you know that when it comes to doing, like whenever you have to do like a wow headliner, like I imagine to be in Australia, like you can get that person in. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, of course. We just watched Parkway do that at the office.

We did ahead of a lot of it. Really? String quartet with them. Oh, yeah. So sick. They're getting into it too. We have guest vocalists that are just friends of ours, not people who have hired because they're big or whatever, just friends.

Like, Lucas from holding absence. Haven't been able to perform with him yet. Also a friend, Lizzie from the Beautiful Monument in Australia. She performs through this a lot. Whenever she's at the show in town, one day we might tour her just for the one song. I'd like to do that. Yeah, that's cool. We'll get more money.

Yeah. Yeah. We can afford more flights. How many people do you play to in Australia? We are only playing Australia like four times this year. Notfest, three shows and Unify one show. Because we've played a lot. Yeah.

And we need to starve them. Is that your biggest market? No. What's your biggest market? USA. Is it? Do you know how many times we've been, get to the last part of,

like getting put forward for a tour and you guys get it it's happened like it's having like three times which you know it's fine because it's like one of those things where we just like who got it and it's like our fourth and we're like yeah fair enough

which is weird though because we're never we're not like anything similar really so our agents have said we've skipped steps we've done three completed tours there one doesn't count because it got cancelled due to COVID go on there for our fourth at the

of the year and each time it's a huge another level on what the last one was it's not a headline at the end of the year no i know exactly what the tour is because we were it was you it got to you it got to you and us and i was like i mean it would be sick just take us both but yeah yeah yeah i can tell you you're gonna have such a lovely time woohoo um so what's your headline numbers in the state don't too many actual numbers but i what venues would you play in the states because i don't no we only had like a two week gap where we could do it and we couldn't play all the same markets that we just yeah we done a midwest headliner yeah in jacksonville kentucky racket and they were like two to three hundred couple sold out but on a new album next year

we'll headline probably the same rooms that we did with polaris last year yeah but i think we're aiming for yeah five to six hundred i think we're aiming for are you doing festivals this year i mean the one that's routed around the tour that we're doing. Yeah. Blue Ridge is already in the rest. Interesting. We're not on that one. Annoying.

Really? Yeah. We did Blue Ridge last year. Yeah. So do we. They keep getting, they get bands back like two years or work. I saw that.

I saw it. I think Bad Omen's played it last year. Yeah. Probably on. They'll be like, a fucking headline. Probably headlining. Yeah.

Um, without like, obviously, because I was like, oh, you guys blew up and you like, actually we've been going to fucking 10 years. But you did blow up. Yeah. And we like to think it's hard work and good songwriting. You're not blowing up for no reason. Good marketing, good songwriting, hard work.

Yeah, it's not a day. The right team. The right everything. There was a line up change there too. Yeah. A line up change. Better drama. Two line up changes.

Yeah. Better drama. I'm not going to go down there for you. I'll do that. Do you that. Listen, you wouldn't be. in the chair if I wasn't on the fucking team. I'm on the team. I'm on alpha-war team.

Do you... So you did blow up. Do you think during... This is a conversation I have all the time with everyone because I feel like you put out your best stuff either just before or during COVID.

Yep. And then you have this like... And the same is true for Spirit Box. The same is true for bad omens. Same is true for Lorna Shrine. And I think what happened is The band's put out their best stuff But then also what you had is this like

All these new kids that have Maybe not even been to a show Or been to a heavy show Get into this new band to them Because the stuff's really good and it just gets to them And then they can't go and see the band And it just, like fizzing and fizzing and fizzing And they can't

And then COVID went away, ish. And, uh, Then fucking all these bands just went, because everyone is just desperate to see you. There were bands that decided to still work when there weren't shows. And I think those bands have grown from that. We saw the US touring market was filled with us holding absence, Thornhill, almost cycling the tours because bands at our level put out good music.

in at the start of 2020 or at the end of 2020 whenever it was and we couldn't get into the country yeah we couldn't get in the country so as soon as the gates opened up were the first ones out and some bands kind of just you know put the break on for a bit so they didn't get the tour offers and the bands that were still working and hopeful for the world to open up kind of reaping the rewards now yeah it's like we i couldn't write music for six months yeah well ours was good Ours was ready to go. So I guess that's probably the difference. We didn't.

Yeah, we literally pushed it back like six months. Yeah. It was ready to go. We started a Patreon. We were like going hard on that. Just making digital content, releasing our tabs, releasing live videos that aren't quite good enough for YouTube because it's GoPro's and anything we could do for that. So we were busy even though we couldn't tour. We even ran a pop-up shop for three days.

And that was fun. In Australia. Yeah, biggest merge drop. we could our fans got to come hang out at that we couldn't perform because it wasn't legal but we got to sell merch and see people and just do something that other bands weren't doing hired out a proper retail store shop fittings and cool things like that's pretty cool is that your brain i see i see i see the fit yeah yeah i see the stage supreme it was fun it was fun so we've wanted to do it again but now that we're touring almost 200 days of the year

it's too hard to organize Because that killed us mentally doing the pop-up shop. We ran it ourselves. We were selling the stuff ourselves. We didn't. Yeah, I thought about it for the downbeat and I looked into like the logistics. And I was like, nope.

Well, I didn't want to have us behind like a glass wall where you could take a photo with us and that's that. It's like, no, no, no, we're going to sell you the merch. We're going to sign whatever you want and printed all out. When was that in the pandemic? Beginning and middle. I think that was start of 2021. Our lockdown was two years. So.

And you were. I feel like, were you either? late to start lockdowns or there's something up because i remember seeing a festival me like what the fuck everyone you're having a festival or was that new zealand somewhere had a festival i don't think we had a festival we were locked for yon ages yeah but this yeah i'm in a different city to these guys but they were locked down for like two years straight and everything where i was was was fine but we couldn't have gigs yeah actually yeah when we done the pop-up shop so there's this whole thing circulating around if someone from Mitch's city got COVID,

he'd have to then hide in a hotel for the day in Melbourne until who was cleared of COVID. So he missed a full day of the pop-up shop because it's like one person in Brisbane has got COVID. I think it was somebody at the airport around the same time I left. So any Brisbane visitors in Melbourne have to go isolate now until you are cleared of COVID. I didn't even work.

Even with that lot. I don't want to. It was silly. I just don't want to talk about it. Fair enough. Okay. So you got, you get this big push. Yep.

From whatever from hard work, 10 years of hard work plus writing good music. A lucky single in a pandemic. A lucky single. A lucky single. That helps too. Wait, that's the lucky single that you were talking about. Yeah. Yeah.

And a good music video. Yeah. That's what I tell people. You need a viral moment. Um, we've had a couple of those. What's your other viral moments? Um, we caught out crowd killing. Did you?

And called out merch cuts were one of the first. Public big call or outs of merch caps. Run me through both of these. So I film every show with two GoPros either side. Well, one GoPro either side. Two GoPros every show. And if something happens, I can turn that into a TikTok real. Why, got it.

So we played this venue in Vancouver on the infamous drugs illegal street, and we're kind of miserable with that day because of that. Oh, that I know exactly what street we're talking about. Our green room was super hot or cold. Yeah. Something unlivable. There was no aircon in the venue. Yeah.

Yeah. It's almost like he's in an attic to get to the back. Yeah. Somebody put the heater on during the day. So it was like 30 something degrees. Yeah. We're all cranky. Locky our vocalist, very cranky.

We're hearing about all these merge cards going on. They're lying to us about their rate. And we're looking at our contract being like, no, it's not right. And on stage he's like, wow. these motherfuckers are going to take 20% of our merch and we can't even breathe in our own fucking green room what the fuck and they're going to cut our sound and do all this and shit because we're calling it out and then i put it on my vlog gave lucky the video he put it on his um instagram and that's when we realized that our fans don't know it existed yeah and

the venues are trying to tell us we're not allowed to talk about it but it's like well we can if you're practicing that why aren't we allowed to tell our fans that's where their money's going so that went viral in great support of everyone and now everyone's talking about it like every second

band's what's your solution to the merch cut thing because people don't know that it's been happening in America forever yeah but the UK is only recently like well for us it's the size of venues you only see it

the bigger venues. So the smaller local bands that are probably grumpier don't know about it because they're still playing the three to 500 cap where it's non-existent. It's when it's the 1,000 plus caps and it's a thing that you can't escape. There's not really a solution. You want to be smart and do a click and collect out of the van or something. Everybody says that. You know what annoys me more than more than, because I moaned about merch cuts all the time.

Yeah. What annoys me more than the moaning about merch cuts, which I do it myself and it does fucking annoy me anyway is the fucking solutions yeah not everyone posting like it's their big idea like oh why don't the band get a cut of the bar like it's not going to happen i think our best solution is continuing to lie about the figures you can only do it in america though in the uk in the uk they make you use their sellers nope what's your yeah okay so i knew you had a solution i think the best one i come up with at least not the venues we're playing one venue was like we're going to look at your card sales and normally they don't ask they just ask for a verbal

figure and that's it yeah they wanted proof of the card sales so i'm like look i can photoshop it but if they swipe my phone they'll say it's a photo i can we can make a new account and only sell between the hours of 7 p.m and 8 p.m but maybe they'll see that's a freaking genius so they're still going they're still going and i was like okay okay here's the solution i've come up with we're headlining was it like a 1500 cap room or something a thousand cap room Sydney somewhere I won't say the venue name oh yeah and my genius

idea was to log into the openers account kind of insulting so yeah so I was like we will pay the fee on their numbers which is a fraction of our numbers and let them touch the phone they can hold it

they can swipe through any screen they want and see sales throughout the entire time did you give the openers a little a little bung for doing we bought that that band to Australia so they're happy to be there and just happy to so yeah that was my solution um did it work yeah fuck so glad so we're very deceptive of that um and you also tried to charge us to use their trestle tables yeah see in the UK what they do is they what happened was a company

I'm not going to say their name the company that owns all of the venues and Saudi Arabia so they sold their they sold 500 million of their shares to Saudi Arabia in the pandemic. They sold their merch rights to, and effectively are merch rights to a separate company who in the UK, in their

venues, they force you to use these people to sell your merch as well as whatever. So not only are they not invested in selling your stuff because it's not theirs. Yeah. They don't care. So there's like multiple times

on this last one we just did. One booth three bands massive line for the headliner obviously it's their show but the person who's supposed to be doing our merch doesn't care or know what they're flogging so they will just try and make the line shorter so they can go home and pull people to the back so people aren't buying stray merch because they're buying other people's merch so like there I don't know what the solution is other than you need to pay someone $20 to go up to the merge booth and just steal a box like oh there's 100 shirts missing we must have sold them with my My thing is...

Not a bad idea. Like your countout, you're missing 100 shirts. This is how I think it's going to end for that company in particular, which I won't say what it is. But you know what it is. You can quickly Google it. I think there'll be something else.

Because there's big dirty on that company. There's big. I think they'll be saying, they'll do a classic news move. Something stinky will come out because they happen to own like a ticking company or something. Something stinky will come out.

about that company that's so bad and such bad press and they'll spin it by saying we're getting rid of merch cards yeah like it's some fucking charity yeah but we start out thanks for my money instead you're welcome to the idea company you know who you are why don't you just do it yeah we're starting to see one by one venues are dropping it off or the talk is it's only going to be the headliners yeah and that's only good for everyone yeah um we're starting to get into the territory of having to have vendor sellers on tour yeah so my brain's yeah I'm saying what's your plan because you got plans yeah I don't know yet you could buy the seller out from the inside you could find out who's gonna be

the seller America's lump tips yeah be like what's going on what's going on what's going on that what be you I was about to say something that oh but you said that a headliner only paying the fee or whatever on that last run we did a lot of the euro venues were were just like a flat fee for the whole thing they're too just paid it every time it was so sick they were just like

we're gonna take the fee yeah that's fucking and a couple of times actually it was bear tooth and motionless and like motionless paid for us or because we had to there wasn't enough space for us so motionless bought another space and then that's having it was like what nice fucking

some bands can be nice it's nice touring with those bands you're gonna be nice he's striking tonight yeah yeah what a fucking nice I got it from Yeah, tell them, tell them. Yeah, we did a tour with August Burns Red in Australia.

And J.B. hit me up to Drumtech Forum because they couldn't bring their drum tech out. So I was like just hanging out with them for the week. And they were like, yeah, if we ever play a headliner, if there isn't 12 or 13 feet of space in front of the drum riser, then we strike. That's it. And they played like some of the bigger venues in Australia where they very well could have just left their shit up. But they didn't. And so it's like, yes, I'm going to do that. I'm the same.

Like, someone did it to me a long, like, you know how bad it is to play in front of it. And it's not even not even bad for you the singer's got even less space and then that breaks into your space and all that stuff. So like I've played bad shows stuff like that and I was just in my head. I was just like I'll never do that to anyone. One time I didn't do it was I was a London show and I didn't have a drum tech. Yeah. And my whole family was there and I just said to the rest of the house and I was like, look, and it was a big, it was a big stage. That's fair enough.

Please. I said it on, I said it on the day one of the talk. London wasn't for two. I was like, I'm going to strike every night, except London. Yeah, and they were fine.

That's a heads up. But again, like, we just did arenas. I don't know if it was because on day one of the tour, motion has striked for me. And it was an arena.

It was like, six thousand cap or whatever. There was enough space for three drum kits, not striked. Motion has striked. And I was like, they actually said,

it happened to them and they got completely fucked. And then they'll never do it again. They told me, what band is, but I'm not going to. yeah i'm saying um yeah i know a few of them and there's loads of them and then

it's a bad's kill man it's the worst a state looks so gross when there's drums yeah everywhere it's pop a shit and i like so i gasped motionless up on twitter about it yeah and then day two bear tooth struck as well for the rest of the tour other than like

wembley arena everyone struck and it was like it just made everything look better for everyone It was just fucking, so cool. And also, if you got a drum tech, why do you care? Put them in a fucking work. You're all paying for that person. They have to work like, I don't know, set up, pack down, that's it.

I kind of get it if a band's got like, even if you got a tech, if you got millions of electronics and you've got a tech, you can strike. If you haven't got a drum tech and there's loads of bass, I'll accept. But if you got a drum tech, you've got a drum tech. We've never traveled to tech. Just do it. Never. Come on, boy, selling out shit.

No. Get the man of tech. So our other guitarist, Scotty, please. He's our businessman. And I thought you'd be businessman. No, I'm social media and like, aesthetic and whatever. That's part of business. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we all have a little role. So Scotty's all business and we're tight-dasses. Absolutely tight. I think being Australian, the money we have to front for an international tour we don't like taking lines of advances off anyone we've got the labels but we don't want it um so we'll front everything ourselves and we don't think we need techs yet you go when we when we played blue ridge last year we watched all the different bands playing main stage some bands playing to 80 000 people

still changing their own guitars side stage other bands had people to like squirt water in their mouths and do whatever and say so you're paying all these people to do this stuff did corn play no he's got he's got like someone to give him oxygen at the side oh yeah jonathan davis has an oxygen guy doesn't slip as well core he runs off and inhale is something yeah that would make sense though yeah they got masks i'll give them that so i don't know we we like like saying what bigger bands like 10 times the size of our band need yeah a drum tape Hmm, you can do your own strings, brov, but like, setting up a drum kit's the worst shit ever. I've never known, I've never known, like...

Even when it's set up side stage, stands are perfectly laid out, everything and just needs to be lifted on stage. You still reckon, drum tape? Yeah, I'll do that, but it's just setting them up. I just don't want to do it. I literally would just pay some one. It makes me hate the drums. It honestly makes me... And it's the same, like, if this, obviously the cameras get set up, I don't.

do the cameras and the lights if i had to move a single egg version of me to do the set up for the podcast did i hear in one podcast someone designed this how it looks no was that i was you it was me right i'm tripping that's right are those looks good drumsticks these are larzal rick's drumsticks oh oh happy metallic a day thank you i had a big a big listen to it today i and i had a a cool tweet which I deleted immediately. My friend, Ben, that plays for Royal Blood, had the Lars Ulrich T-shirt on,

that Downbeat Lars-O-Wit T-shirt. And they were playing with Metallica. And Lars saw it, and then they got a photo together. And then Lars' wife asked me to send her five of the T-shirts. And then they gave me a pair of sticks. Damn. That's sick. I only found out the other day Lars has, was it, two sons to play in a band that's,

I saw a level, same venues. Yeah, not Metallica sounding though. No, I didn't listen to it, but I saw, it must have been Jimmy Kimmel with them doing an interview, and he mentioned his sons on tour in Europe at the moment, so I checked it out. Oh, cool. Yeah, I'm like, good for you, it's not,

it doesn't sound like Metallica, like what the fuck you do it? Big shoes to fill. Although on the flip side, I think that vended band should do, I think Slipknot should do like a Marvel universe thing where Slipknot just leave and they just replace the members of SlipT not with the children yeah yeah he'd be gone forever and then you get young blood in there yeah hundred year band i had a cool a cool metallic tweet this morning if i say so myself and then i deleted

it because no one really understood it was 30% a joke he'll get it where i was like well no it was i just i just want it i just want really i was bored i sat there waiting for you guys arriving i was like i could just really start something out on the internet and i just tweeted new matalette Because I saw everyone just painting on it. And I was like, new Metallica is better than whatever Sleep Token is trying to be. And it fucking, I got radios. I got radioed so quickly.

It was fucking insane. And then, but then loads of the real haters came out, like going like, yeah, sleep token. And I was like, that's not really what I'm trying to do. I was just, I was trying to get, I was trying to get radioed, but it was fucking. I love Metallica. I, the guitarist hates Metallica.

Oh, nice, fight there. Yeah. And you're a Metallica hater? I'm not a hater. I just never got into him. Yeah. How old are you? 31.

How old are you? 31? Yeah, same age. No excuse. Yeah. Interesting. We'll get to favourite bands in a minute. What?

Why does he... What's your other guitarist? Scotty. Scottie. Why does he hate Metallica? What's his reading? Because Tom, our guitarist hates him. I think it's all the upbringing.

So, he, when he found heavy. music he found probably started with the paramour and everything like that and that turned into heavy music whereas my mom was blasting and a sandman to me when I was six yeah like you know greatest hits on TV just watching music videos and everything so that was me going into that I started to resent music because she played it so much and then I saw parkway drive play one day and I was like no no no I'm into heavy music let's go yeah parkway did bits for Australia remember there was that there was that moment where just every band in australia sounded like parkway yeah it was fucking crap i swear by moment i mean like five or six years yeah yeah yeah like 2007 to

2013 i tell people i had a legit four or five year obsessive amount of years parkway was the only band i listened to and people hated me for it like please listen to listen to the trivium please listen to it and i'm like no dude parkway have perfect albums why would i do you know what though this is a this is a controversial opinion i i i just love new parkway so much it's good really like it sounds like bon joe the took steroids when you see it live it makes sense oh festival season parkway yeah gang chance we played our first proper big crowded festival just recently at non-fest and we we think we're the biggest band at the moment we think we're killing it but when you're put in front of 30,000 people you realize how small

fish you still are because I think there's this video going around at the moment a crowd of people playing connect four during one of our biggest songs and they didn't give a fuck that we're on stage everyone's just watching the connect four go down that's funny where's that at not for it was pretty Yeah. So our fans are going nuts. The people that know us are going nuts. We're probably won over some heads. But I think 10 to 15% of the people were knew who we were.

The rest oblivious. So I was like, all right. And then you... That's good for you, though. Yeah, it's great. It was good. And then you see park when Slipnot play and it's the entire stadium going nuts. So you're like, all right.

You must have known you weren't at stadium level. No, 100%. We don't have that legacy yet. Yeah. But it was good to... see it the good thing about like as you say you've been around for ages but like the good thing about having done all those eps and singles wiped a bunch of them off the face of the planet and only having two actual records is the grand skis people love discovering a new band yeah yeah so someone

will get a song on spotify come up afterwards and they go oh who's this band to check it out and there's only two records and yeah i found this new brand everyone wants to have there and i like I like it. I back gatekeeping. Everyone is like, everyone's like, oh, I've got this new band

and you can't see it. But the minute you get to, we've got seven albums. Yeah. And it's like, there will be people who go and have a look and see the amount of albums

and go, well, if I didn't hear about it before now, then why, and then where do I start? It's like breaking bad. Like, not comparing straight from the path,

but like, it took me a while to watch it It's like eight seasons. I love hearing when people haven't heard of our band. And if we're on a support tour, they fall in love with this because they see our performance and they're like, oh my God, new favorite band. I think that's so cool.

Headlining's weird because you're relying on your fans to come along. You're not winning over people. Yeah. Unless you support bands are like the biggest bands in the world. Strike gold. And we got some pretty cool sport bands on this one. You have, but with all due respect to those support bands. they're not like huge number pullers yeah i feel like this is you've done this these sold-out ones

it's like i feel like it could have been and again no offense to the sports it could have been alpha wolf a party clown uh squirer with a broken layer yeah you know what i mean it's like i feel like you're doing it take a minute right now just right here to thank the newest sponsor of the downbeat podcast athletic greens AG1 by Athletic Greens is a foundational nutritional drink containing 75 superfoods, anti-oxygenes and adaptogens, designed to fill gaps in your nutrition with a formula for fueling cellular health on the daily. I first took Athletic Greens when I heard about it on another podcast, shout out the Huberman Lab podcast. He's very clever with supplements.

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check it out um question I mean there's a lot of questions that's what's kind of what I'm doing who writes the music or which people write the music and how is the music created so I feel I feel like we got good when Scotty joined the band and started writing. Right. That's when everything got a bit more serious. What's the timeline of...

That's first album. Scotty wrote the first album. I think I got a couple of riffs on there, but I quickly realized that my riffs aren't shit compared to Scotty's. And I was so okay with not caring. Yeah. Because the songs were 10, 20 times better. Second album comes around.

Mitch is in. Mitch is a phenomenal drummer And Unfucking believable Like Thank you The first thing I do When I hear one of the tracks

When I hear like a mental track And I'm like Oh that's a fucking horrible thing Let's go to the light vits Yeah Straight on the live vids Absolutely smashing it Yeah

So our riffs are still Breakdowny ones and twos But you've got these psycho drums going on And now writing for the new album Mitch has stepped up to guitar Writing some sick riffs What?

Yeah I'm still just I did like four songs the album. Yeah. Writing guitar? Yeah. Get out.

I ain't got any time for talent. It makes me so jealous. I live in a whole other city, so I don't get to see these guys. So I had to figure out. I was like, he's writing on my guitar. Well, I was. Could you play guitar before? Yeah, but then I stopped.

I sold it at some point for symbols. Yeah. At least you did that in respect. Yeah. And then eventually... It's a fucking big hand. Jesus Christ. No wonder you get at drums.

Yeah. I found a love for hooks and vocal placement. Yeah. So all I'm caring about these days is like these guys got the riffs covered. So how's it getting written? Because I started asking people this just because I wanted to know. And then the feedback from people have been right. It's really interesting to hear how each band works.

We wrote, they wrote one of our heaviest songs by Mitch sending a video of himself playing drums. Just drums to nothing. Yeah, I was like, it was kind of like a slowed down penny blast. I was like, I want to do this at the start of a song. I want to play this beat. Yeah, I was like, do this, keep this next pattern. And then I think that's a good start of a song. See where you want to go with that.

Import that into the door or midi it out. Scotty just started riffing over that. And bam, we've got a heavy song that wouldn't have gotten written guitar first. That's how. That was one song. That's how 70. And then Australia goes around. Right, right, right.

And what does Scotty do? sometimes he would just find a tempo. We don't want to have the same tempo twice on an album. So we try and just vary as much as possible because some of my favorite records that aren't heavy records. You know in the first two seconds what vibe it is. It might be the sad song. The heavy song like Redo Chili Pepper Silver Chair, shit like that.

Redoeyer chili peppers is in your favorite bands. Yeah. You can both leave now. Classic songs. I don't know. Classic. Carry on. This is the way I wanted to view our albums.

Like, we're heavy band, yes. But I wanted every first two seconds of every song to have an instant different vibe to another song of ours. So we don't just end up with, you know, after five albums, 50 songs all sound like the same thing. Because we can write an Al-Wolf song, easy enough, find our favorite tempo and just copy our riffs and do whatever. Or we can come out with some new interesting songs.

ship and i think tempos play a big part in that so we we try and keep a mental note or an actual note we have a list yeah all tempos and oh we're missing range what's the range come one must know oh 170 is pretty popular 150's popular 1 30 in triplet so if you can see 4 170 so he's a great tricklet speed yeah it's just fast enough to be like fuck that's fast but it's just slow enough to be like fuck i can play it yeah and if you do like a breakdown and triplet at 130 it's really like swung almost like yo ho hoey but heavy yo ho ho yeah yeah i always think 170 is uh a jogging tempo yeah like you can join 170's like a yeah i think i imagine people jogging too yeah i always our band is like you've got 140 and then you've got

there'll be a song on the record at one this is not even we don't do it on purpose it just happens one song at 140 around 140 and everything else is 170 to 190 yeah right right right and that's like my weakness as well that tempo yeah that like

having to lift your whole leg up yeah it's not it's not legs yeah so what's acid that's 212 yeah we got told that's the festival pogo tempo is it's my favourite last beat tempo it's the perfect tempo to get people to jump at a constant rate and we forced ourselves

who told you this that's good info just kind of figured it out yeah yeah yeah so you watch any video of a crowd jumping up and down in unison it's 212 and so we forced ourselves to write that and now that song live is so fun because we can get most rooms completely off their feet bouncing watch every band on earth that watches this right every so but you know what but all the festival pogo bands if you listen to their albums or the bands that are really good at getting people up and down they almost have a full album of that and that's what it gets stagnant so we have one singing in our set that does it

and that's all we need so we want we don't want the whole hour long set jumping up and down one's the circle pit song it's the what's right well i think i looked at 160 starts with blast beat it's a circle pit song um 212 jump up and down song got the slowed down once the lights out song 212 i used playing the death metal band and my favorite tempo for blast piece was 212 because it's just slow enough like for like a European blast right there right they're right just slow enough that you can hear every single a lot of black dialy motor is 212 yeah every you can hear every single split in the notes but it's not fast enough that it's it sounds like it's on the beach i mean actually our other song that's 212 has a l blast in it

number two uh mind bends oh right what's an alpha blast no that's alpha wolf what's an alpha wolf blast they're both euros yeah but just not too bad we let him blast sometimes mitch is a death metal background are you last atron 5,000 are you from tasmania no where are you from brisbane yeah is there a brisbane death metal band i love cycroptic by the way it's well um they're such a good band i like i was in a normal metalcoreish band for a long time and then i just kind of that ended and i was just kept blasting i got super into black dally murder So I was just I wasn't touring with anybody So I'm like I'm so let's see how far I can push this blasting thing

And then I figured out how to double stroke and trigger So it was just like everything Are you a double stroker? Yeah Yeah No wonder you're so fucking tight Not an alpha Not an alpha at all

Not an alpha I've been toying with learning it Because I don't like I talk shit on people fake stuff But I never ever talk shit on like Someone's triggering And for some reason everyone always thinks that I talk shit on triggers, which I don't.

People don't understand triggering. Like, yeah, they think it makes you faster. It's like, actually, do you ever see the videos of Chris Adler when he'd had his accident? It was fucking horrible, but he'd had his accident and he was blowing his parts. And they decided to trigger him for a few shows to see if it would make it better. Yeah. And it just makes what you can hear even worse. We've toured with plenty of bands that use triggers that if they have an off night, it's really

noticeable yeah and yeah that i just spent so long in the bedroom like working my double stroke that that wouldn't happen what double stroke is it sorry to get really drummy so that's fun sabian i'm sorry you get really yeah uh what double stroke are you doing though which one so i was using speed cobra's i had my foot pretty much half off yeah i got those i got those i can do yeah and so the the motion i always like was telling people how to do it the motion is like leave your foot flat and floppy go down for one and then push forward for the second one yeah that's like an actual double because I've seen people do the ones where you just play shit. Yeah.

You know those ones? It's like you pad the bass drum, like fuck and then you trigger it and then you just Yeah, just hope to the best. And it just ends up going. Yeah. Some of it's like, yeah. But the fastest I ever got with it was like 260. And even then it was like.

Fucking sick. Yeah. Because I played it. I got hit up by a symphonic death metal band and I was like, yeah, I want to see if I can blast. six minutes yeah and it was what was the band uh it's bank called i shall devour i shall devour we never had a good um yeah yeah i did two i did the last two songs they put out i did on real drums with double strokes and whatever and it was probably my fastest work was on spotify yeah yeah yeah it's on spotify i shall devour yeah yeah that's song called with darkness i think yeah yeah yeah the first time i

saw Mitch drumming was at this festival in Melbourne. He had long-ass hair, and he was blasting with... What's just how I'm doing now? Nothing. He was blast. Helicopter blasts. And yeah, drumstick was like this far off the snare. Windmilling, blasting.

I was like, I need this go in my band. Turns out he'd, like, block me on Facebook. I hadn't blocked him. No, no, no. He sent me a friend request and I denied it because he sent a really shitty... Worksheet one day for a gig. A worksheet for a tour that we were doing. I was like, where's a run sheep of the day?

And they sent me this fucking word document. I was just like, so you didn't accept the friend request? Yeah, I was like, I don't need that. You guys are fucking evil. It's ruthless shit. A guy today in the gym, right? There's a, there's like a, there's this little old man in the gym.

And he's like, he has to use the lift to get, like, fair play, he's in the gym must be for like mobility or whatever. He has to use the lift to get the second floor and everything. This is the second time I've heard Facebook today. She just comes up to me in the gym. He's like he must be 70 Just comes up to me and goes Have you got Facebook?

And I was like No, I don't actually And he was like oh I was gonna ask if I could add you on Facebook I've never spoke to his past my life That's weird Look at my cool friend I made at the gym It's fucking Facebook

Weird It's not as popular anymore I like I had to log in to do something Like an ad for something And I just don't get it Now it pops up all loads of shit Yeah, no.

So many ads. We pay people to do our ads for us because I've lost a touch. I used to be ad galore back in the day. But now it's like I have to what, log into Instagram and Facebook at the same time and run my Instagram ads through Facebook. I don't know. What's your views on TikTok? Have you noticed that raw videos do 10 times better than edited recaps? Yeah.

It's a very interesting climate. I still love a great video wank edited video. Me too. but they don't perform well. Isn't it weird? Yeah. So I literally give my camera to the singer of the opening band on this tour and say just film the set and film the popular songs.

Are you paying this person as well? What's you making these opening bands work? It's got automatic settings. What are you making these opening bands work for? He'll do it for them sometimes. Yeah, I take photos and video them. How do you know about asking this person? Oh, they're all friends.

Yeah. Oh, you're all friends. There's some reports. The other one you were like, well, we fucking took them outside of Australia. No, no, it's just like a give-and-take type thing. I'll take photos of them at the big shows, film them and stuff like that. And all they have to do is hit record on mine and follow what chaos might happen. I'll sift through that footage.

Scotty, our guitarist, he records bands as well. So he will make our recording stems sound real good from that night. And I'll stitch them together, put it on TikTok, reels or whatever. and some pop-off, some don't. So weird. I had one from yesterday, pop-off, and I was like,

it's like the first real fucking pop-off on Twitter, on TikTok. I just don't get it. I post the same wall of death all the time, and every time it's guaranteed to pop off. It's insane. I don't know. The reason for me asking the TikTok thing

is because when we're talking about ads on Facebook, some guy, Corey, I can't remember his name, did like an in-depth, like analysis on what he calls the e-shittification of social media platforms. And it basically charts when a platform is going to demise based on how long it takes for that platform to take the power away from the creator and put it in the advertisers' hands. So like Facebook, Instagram, all, you know, all at MySpace, they,

They all were creator-based for like 10 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then one day someone goes, okay, time to make money from this. And then they introduced the algorithm stuff. We're about to lose Twitter. Twitter is on its fucking way. Yeah.

But these companies took so long to do it. And like he's charted how long it took each company. It's like 10 years while. Twitter's probably 15 by now. TikTok did it in two years. It was like, all right, add time. So he thinks, and a lot of people think, that it's time's going to be up before it should be i saw a comment today in one of our videos um

we posted this really cool recap we got from impericon recently every shot looks amazing cinematic everything one comment said well this doesn't show me how good the band is live because it's not raw it's not whatever it's just fancy video stuff he's not wrong yeah like if we post a raw video then he could be like oh damn all right they're pretty sick they're my brother in christ you could go and watch one other video just scroll through the fucking internet laziness pisses me the fuck old some people here studio production shit and they go oh they could just fake it's just fake you know yeah but some people like people leaving a comment like that though you could just go check yeah i thought of a really good idea by the way yeah and uh we're gonna do

it right now you're gonna be the first band that we do it with nice um right so what we're going to do we're gonna ask AI well i'm gonna i'm gonna ask you Have you got any like in jokes or words or even objects that are Integral to Alpha Wolf or something funny like I thought in my head when I was thinking of this like obviously Australia You have the shooey which is a Which is a thing that you do you do you guys hate the shui? Yeah, it's dumb as far So in Glasgow they've got the here we here we here we here we've got that last time. Yeah, Scottish people that'll do it tonight Scottish people quite a lot of them hate it.

How? Like you hate the shooey, but on the flip side, like, when I see a shooey video, I'm like, kind of sick. They were chanding Yorkshire last night. Yeah. Oh, you're doing, yeah, you're doing the rounds.

That's the only two. The only two chance I can think of in the world are the Yorkshire one and the Glasgow one. Remember they're howling at us ones? We thought they were ruining for Alpha Wolf Wolf, but they were doing something else. Yeah, like, wolf howling. No, no, we thought they were wolf howling,

but apparently it was something local. where oh yeah it sounds like Tasmania Tasmania no it was somewhere in America it sounded like they were booing yeah it sounded like they were booing then were like are they wooing oh it might be one of those sports teams

yeah yeah oh it was Buffalo New York maybe yeah when you got the years and you have no idea what's going on yeah it was weird Integral what are we got what like branding was or just like an injunction you got a current

in joke on the tour the current in joke is sucks to suck Yeah. Okay. So if someone sucks, it sucks to suck. He sucks to suck. Yeah. Right, let me log into my open AI account.

Sox off. Sox off. Sox off. That's a good one. What, socks off. If you're ready to fight, socks off. Yeah, it's like if you're play fighting or anything. Yeah.

Sox off, dog. Sox off. Sox off. They're just, we just started play fighting when we were in the van, putting our shoes on or some shit one day. Sox off, dog. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to write into chat GPT. Yeah.

Write me a fan fiction about the band Alpha Wolf. What was the other one? You've got socks off and... Sacks to suck. Taking their socks off and fighting. And we'll just see what that comes. comes up with because I think sucks the suck might be too hard. Oh, I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot generate inappropriate or explicit content.

We're going to have to get, we're going to sucks to be a robot. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to get rid of the fighting then, taking their socks off. It might be even funnier. We don't know what's going to happen here. Watch every podcast on earth steal this idea. Now I've got another idea after this. Have you?

An AI idea? No, no, no. You're fine. You're funny. Remember I can edit it out Oh, this is sick. Let me just check, though. Well, they think your lead singer's called Leo.

Lucky Keog. Well, that's, well, we'll just pretend that it says Locky. Yeah, we've got all of you in here so far. I'm just checking it because we don't want the other singer to come up. Oh, my God, we've hit the mother load. It's exactly what I wanted. I can't believe it. It's quite long, though.

Well done. This is absolutely mental. This is the best thing has ever happened on the podcast. It was a warm summer night, and the members of Alpha Wolf were lounging in their tour bus after a long day of performing. The air was thick with exhaustion, but there was an underlying sense of excitement and the anticipation of what the night might bring. Suddenly, the lead singer, Lockie. It's Locker, right? Loughlin.

Lucky. Locky stood up and announced, I don't know about you guys, but my feet are killing me. I'm taking my socks off. Without hesitation, he proceeded to remove his socks and the rest of the band followed suit.

As they sat there, barefoot and relaxed, guitarist Sabian caught the eye of the drummer Mitch. I'm not fucking making this up. There was a spark of something there. Oh, God. This went so well. There was a spark of something there.

Something electric that neither of them could deny. Without saying a word, Sabian reached out and gently took Mitch's foot in his hand. I'm going to scream. Rubbing it with a slow circular motion, Mitch's eyes flooded closed, and he let out a soft sigh of pleasure. The rest of the band watched in awe as Sabian continued to massage Mitch's foot. His touch, gentle and loving. There was something intimate and sensual about the way they looked at each other.

Something that couldn't be put into words. This is so long. As the night wore on, the band sat there barefoot and relaxed, enjoying each other's company. The tension between Sabian and Mitch was palpable and everyone could feel it. Finally, as the night drew to a close, Sabian leaned in and whispered in Mitch's ear.

I've been wanting to do that for a long time. Can you please do that for the sake of it? I've been wanting to do that for a long time. Mitch smiled and without a word. You know how to do this bit if you don't want. Mitch smiled and without a word. He leaned in and kissed. Sabian gently on the lips.

The rest of the band erupted in cheers and applause. The rest of the band erupted in cheers and applause. Good on them. And Alpha Wolf knew that this was the beginning of something truly special. From that moment on, the band was closer than ever before, bonded by their shared love of music, their bare feet and the beautiful romance

that had bloomed between Sabian and Mitch. Damn. It's a bromance level. That's a long way away from Sox off. Can't. Sucks off. That's fine. well that went better than I could ever expect

what was your idea all right so I need you to open up your band banter group chat oh no well okay and search alpha wolf and show us the results oh yeah I mean it will be

so we broed down with invent animate about this because we both trashed each other's bands and we put it out in the air and become best friends it was funny I got one yeah it's

looking at alpha wolf and stray they're looking at alpha wolf and stray right now for one but Matt told me that it's gonna go to them first

oh that's it that's the one that's the one thing I've got no gosh nothing well I think we're too

too far from each other's realms really other than you guys taking all the fucking tortables should uh in fact

let's go Let's go back in. Hey, we're probably cheaper than you because we're new. Yeah. We got told that. We're good value. We got told we're the best value medical ban on the market because we're cheap. I'm just trying to look to see if there's anything that anyone said.

It's literally just me and Tom talking. Fucking half wolf on Spotify. No. Nothing. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you don't. Sucks to suck. It should AI that one.

Just be. It's just. two tours yeah i too yeah you pipped us on both of them um what's the first one there's nothing well i can't tell you what either of them are still happening still haven't been announced oh i could tell you some other bands that i'm gonna roast no i'm not going to do that um all right dream festival i'm gonna create a dream festival with you you don't seem impressed i want to say Oh, create one. Okay.

Yeah. I'm going to walk you through it. Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry. We've got enough time. What time you've got to be back at the venue? A bit of it. Headlining's weird because you sound check at three and play at 10.

Yeah, it's the worst. Do you drink? Does anyone drink? Yeah, but we drink and drinking a beer. We stay away until an hour before. Kind of. Set up. Two hours before in showtime.

Yeah. I just, like, I tried that last tour to not drink. and it was just so boring. I was just so bored. Yeah. I can't play drunk, so I don't get drunk before, but I'll have a few drinks.

I love having a few before I play, but I'm trying not to for some dumb reason. I literally have no idea why. Did an episode with Mario from Gojira, and he was like, I don't ever drink before I play, and I was like, I just want to be like you. I'll just do that. Drinking before days off,

which means the hangover's worse, because I haven't been drinking every day. Yeah. And you're just so fucking bored. See, I always straight-aged for like a long, long, long, long, long time until two, three years ago. So I've done a lot of touring full, sober. And I think it's funny as being slightly tipsy on stage. Like, I'm into it.

Yeah. I back it. I mean, there's no chance festival season. You're going to get me to play a main stage at one o'clock and then I'm not having a beer. There's no fucking way. There's no way. Yeah. We did Blue Ridge last year and played on the first day at like midday.

and stayed for the whole four days and it was just fucking chaos for four days we were just trashed my favorite though it was good met a lot of people yeah every day old friends had rock up and play their set and next day someone else that were toured with it i feel like i met someone from your band on me oh yeah yeah where were we were side stage watching knock loose oh yeah i remember i think you were there and drew was next to me as well i was like Fuck, this is a spin-out. Yeah, we're watching... Not loose with their click went down.

They played the whole set without a click. Really? Without it? Yeah, whole set. Oh, shit. Still smashed it. I heard it come out the front, but I didn't know they played without it. Piffed it. Well, they can do that.

They're a band that can do that. Someone that... The old... The old right, left, left, right. Yeah. What's red again? Yeah. This rich are out. Right, Dream Festival.

Unless you got anything to plug. You want to plug? Lofi. The Lofi EP? Yeah, we'll plug the Lofi. I love that. I'm a big lo-fi guy. We're lo-fi fans and the first one popped right into the Spotify algorithm and blew the fuck up.

It ended up being like our top song on Spotify and we're like, oh shit. It's kind of awkward. Yeah, it was like that lo-fi to study and relax too, like the big one. Just got added. You got added to that. No-fi beats for you to relax and study to. Yeah. I can show my nan this music.

That's cool. That would be the highlight my career, I reckon, getting on lo-fi girl. Yeah. You got like 300K and. like a week or something it was crazy like a nut the YouTube video stream

nothing but the Spotify one just crazy who writes the low fire pay some dude his name's Mick he's great um

we were yeah I want to say we're hands on but we weren't we're like yeah that part's cool can we change the voices of that and that

and that like little bits and pieces but for the most part he's the brains and he narrowed it that's what I did with that girl Mystic yeah yeah yeah I got her to do

Australia song And we were going to do a whole record of it. Right. And then a label stole our idea and did it before us. But so I was like whatever. But that's like I listen to, if I'm at the gym, I listen to heavy music. And if I'm not at the gym, I'm just going to low fight. That's it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we just fans. We didn't want it to be anything crazy, but we still run our own merch. So we're always thinking of stuff we can do with merch and doing our own vinyl. we've done these really cool plush pillows that are comfortable as hell and they're cool notebooks pens yeah you can do like different stuff that's not so for us it was more than just five lo-fi songs

it was a merch drop it was like it was everything and that's fun you know lucrative we don't have rules without a wolf we do whatever we want yeah that's kind of like i don't do it with stray but with the downbeat so i'll get the vinyl like voodivision and australia one did you i did fucking legend good friends we should do one they sell

okay you get a download code in now get you get you a thousand it would be the 20th pressing of our album no do on a new one when you're 11 EPs that you do Dream Festival I'm gonna start it we love

I need to play with Metallica one day okay we'll get there let me let me warm you up Metallica is good but you're gonna have a fight about it that's the plan and then you're gonna Take your socks off and kiss. In my head, the podcast is done.

The chat GPD bit is going on. That's going on TikTok. That's the bit. So, okay, where in the world would your dream festival be? That's to be the US. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Based on what?

They go crazy. Free Alpha Wolf there. Good for you. Crazy. Post-pandemic US is definitely crazier than pre-pand. everything else. I feel like everyone was just, just went, wait a minute,

did we waste all those chances to go crazy? And now they're on it. Also, we haven't played that many outdoor festivals to know where's a good spot. Have you got favourite state? State or city. If I were to say for the festival,

I would say like Chicago House of Blues or worse to the Palladium. Indoor festival. This is a dream festival. You can do whatever you want. I don't know. In those areas somewhere, yeah. Chicago House of Blues is cool.

Yeah. All the T. you know where i think well we walked off chicago has blues recently been like top five show ever yeah it's just it felt good yeah chic goes off for us it's good that venue looks cool as fuck as well yeah every photo the um yeah crazy just balcony high shit yeah you know where i think loki has the best music scene in the world right now and the worst smell at loading let's see if you can get it from that you must have played it worse smell at loading load in load in yeah was it recently no it's been a couple of feety ones it's in the states and i'm house of blues have you done

anah house of blues oh my god you haven't no is that the disney one yeah yeah when when where the bus parks there is duck a trash compactor and it's from all of the disney shit no we did park there didn't we the underground one yeah underground and there's a gym right next to it yeah that but we didn't play house of blues we played somewhere on that strip right but like it was in that underground car park we walk past that trash compactor yeah yeah we're still on disney property and we had to use the yeah it must be the same place it was gross yeah and that smell goes all the way through loading this fuck i literally was i puked in my mouth but that anaheim house of blues last time we played it which was our

show was like under oath bad omen spirit box stray which you couldn't you couldn't fucking do that right now that's crazy that was that was that was a pandemics back let's get these bands these small bands that kind of popped off in the pandemic like now you could either of those three except us could headline but like

the day before there was a sold out show I can't remember who it was and the day after all metal core that place it's just like you've been seeing Donald Duck all day and you need some evil in your life you're just like I need to go to the fucking show yeah yeah okay so we're in Chicago

has a particular what we're going to do now is like, what do you want your catering to be? Hey, we talked about this today. We want three-ply toilet paper on our cat and our rider these days. Really?

Yeah, I was on the toilet before and I'm reaching behind my head. Oh, that's such a spoil. So whack. And it was like, scratchy-ass, you won't pay for a tech. But you want to three-ply toilet paper.

Our TM keeps telling us to change it daily because it's been the same thing for years. And it's like, oh, if you want to switch it up, switch it up. It's like, all right, um, protein drinks, protein bars, um, toilet paper. That's a, I've never, I've never heard of that being done. People, you'll be in the group chat for that. Because the promoters at a supermarket and been like, what do you want? And say, all right, actually,

that spoil our bums today. Yeah. I know the toilet paper is bad in venues, but it isn't really that bad for you? What are you going on down there? It hurts, man. I mean, yeah. All right. Sab's a hairy boy. yeah what you i was thinking about that earlier today when i was shaving my bullsack and i cut my ball sack actually shaving and um it's to the point where i was gonna tackle my ass and i

done the bullsacking and i was like nah i'm just not even gonna bother yeah got a podcast in 25 minutes sliding up and down the stairs all right what yeah so what's your we should go to foods on tour that we can bring to this catering i'm trying to figure out i think still yeah It must sound like a favorite U.S. Like fast food. Oh. What should go to? I think one that never fails for me is Popeyes or Chick-fil-A.

Pop-I's guy. One of those two. We fell in love with Domino's for our first two tours. And then they changed everything. Domino's is now dogshare, isn't it? Yeah, you have to build your own pizza every time. And I'm trying to order eight pizzas forever. Everyone.

Everyone's talking to each other. What do you want any fucking pizza? We're toppings. We switched to everyone's kind of like a Nazi regime. of, I mean, less bad and nothing like it, actually, I take that back. But everyone has to have cheese just a plain cheese.

Yeah, oh, right. Because then it's like, who's ordering pizza? It's done. It's not like, oh, can I get olives? Can I go all these shit? It's like, no. It got so difficult. But we loved it. We boasted to our friends and family at home because our dominoes sucks at home.

Bosting about dominoes. Honestly, you would not believe the quality difference is crazy. I'm pretty sure I've had an Australian dominoes. I can't remember. I don't know. Dominos is just never my go to. Yeah. Well, we have like three fast-fin chains in Australia.

Well, you're going to eat today. Are you already eating? Oh. Like a cafe breakfast. Yeah. Do you eat after the show? You're going to eat your dinner? I always forget what time I should be eating.

Maybe it's time now to get a feed. What's good? I mean, you're like a boy. If you don't need to go back, do you eat meat? Yeah. if you don't need to be back to headline I can take you to Nando's Oh yeah

There's an Anno's so close to here Yeah I can do that we could just drive straight there We'd wrap this up now Haven't had UK Nandoes You haven't had UK Oh yeah it's a cheeky Nandoes over here Oh we're fucking going Yeah alright

We're going for cheeky Nandes guess what Downbeat card's got it Oh I got you Please buy a T-shirt And watch the advert I would have done earlier And buy the things that I said on the advert Is there a

And now I'm really rapidly trying to get to Nando's, so sorry. It's going to be very rushed. Is there a universal place to eat that if Alpha Wolf is in the van? Schmeckers. What do you reckon it is? McDonald's. Oh, right. I'm in my McDonald's era now.

What's the orders? Triple cheese. Yeah, I like a triple cheesie. I used to be a big Mac guy, but now it's just triple cheese. Yeah. You know what? States doesn't have a. triple no not states main

land europe doesn't have a triple cheese at the moment don't know it's gone yeah you can just have to do a double so what i like to do is for go my fries and i'll do two doubles yeah it's pretty fucking that's pretty good the heart doesn't like it but it's yeah we got two to two vegos in the band and they don't love eating it every day because their options are limited sometimes in certain states cities they do get the cool veg patties yeah whatever so they love that but we do end up there nine times times out of ten but they don't have we don't have a mcplan in australia at the moment

over here they're the plant's pretty everywhere yeah yeah so double mcplant now in the ukk yeah there's one right by the venue but as soon as someone says schmeckers everyone's ears perched up there we go right so mcdonald's is doing the catering yeah um headliners i wish your accommodation first oh need a pool yeah something in a crappy hotel that won't break the budd because we're tired of us no but it's your dream festival yeah we're still saving money like why do we need to spend the money well if it was dream festival someone else is paying for this you don't get the money at all oh oh saying you're not the business man this tight ass is it like we've play and then get in the van and fuck off back to the hotel is it like that

it can be whatever you want guys dream big we haven't seen a big hotel yet haven't had a tour bus yeah i reckon those we could give you on a tour bus and i'll give you a day room in a hotel i saw a couple tour buses at Blue Ridge and that was mind-wrecked. Wait, you're not in a bus for this? Yeah, we are. Thank God. But not the fancy, fancy baddies. Not like the US ones. The big black and silver ones.

What are you in on this? Big red. Yeah, nightliner. Oh, yeah. Every single band is on the bus. Every single band is in the trailer. Everything's packed. No shower. To fuck. Yeah. I do quite like those tools. They're fun, though. If as long as you've got a big enough lounge downstairs.

Yeah. It's kind of fun. get to meet everybody you got four bands on one bus one one team one front of house that's all the crew that's how you've got four bands on a bus yeah you know what's going to start happening when you get these crew members yeah you start doing the pulling rank which is when the headliner's like well now you have to share our sound guy because of this and we've been up done years of that we've just planning a headliner and uh i really want a drum tech so it's the first time ever i was like we're having this many bunks and deal with it.

And luckily everyone was like, well, we didn't need that many bunks anyway, but thanks for outing yourself as a complete wanker. I feel like one of the spots is fair. It's a TM. It's all good. Yeah.

Everybody's responsibility. Yeah. I mean, I can't wait to see you with a drumtair. I'm going to fucking your game roasted. Not you. Okay. Who's headlining?

Metallica at the House of Blues, Chicago. go. You can have one each. It's two days. I'll give you one each. Essentially, essentially, this is your favorite band of all time. Limbiscuit.

They can headline it. Limbiscuit, your favorite band of all time? It's so hard to say all time. Give me a few then. Metallica has to be all time, but I'm not listening to them daily now. What's your rank

the Metallica albums for me? Master of Puppets 1. Nice. Maybe Black Album 2. Nice. And justice for all to, ride the lightning. Yeah.

I didn't mind load reload. Yeah. Do you know what? The older I get, the more I appreciate them. Well, I grew up on that cunning stunts video, the double VHS. And so that to me is load reload. And fuel on that is banging. Is that the power cut out?

Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. They hadn't seen it. I put it up on YouTube. Like, oh, this stage broke down and people caught fire. They're like, that is so cringe. It's so sick.

That's like an integral part of my childhood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, whereas like a modern day favorite band's Brumvirazin, because everything they do is crazily innovative. Yeah, they haven't missed for ages. Yeah. I don't want to say it in case you've also done it, but you know what?

The thing I don't like that bring me started and now everyone does is the computer voice at the beginning of the set. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I love it. I love their talking, AI things. I think it's great that they did it and like the one of the late

do you see them on the latest or with knock loose? I haven't seen them for so long. Oh man. I've seen them. I think I was, I managed to catch them like every year for the last three years or whatever

and the latest one is crazy. Like it has like an old MS DOS prompt come up and like that. But then I've seen about six bands since then. And they're just exactly the same thing. See, I'm the biggest man. You are going to go crazy.

with an AI voice. It's like, yeah. It's sick when Bring Me does it, but like, come on. We're in our band. That's good things,

right? Yeah. So within our band, I'm the biggest fanboy of Bring the Horizon, but all the boys got to see them headliner festival in Australia. I was in New York with my partner.

You missed that. Yeah, I was doing Christmas in New York. And everyone's hit the group chat, like, oh my God, they're actually that good. And I was like, I've been sane.

I've been sane. Yeah, so good. I've been sane. So you got, bring me limp biscuit, Metallica. at House of Blues.

What's yours? I would say my favourite band of all time is Slipknot, but I've seen them probably four times in the last couple of years, so I'm going to say no for the festival. Based on their performance on those last four years? They'll probably play the same set of seen four times. I would love to see... Playing your Slipknot albums for me.

First, Iowa's my favourite. Iowa for sure, followed by Volume 3, and then self-title. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Volume 3, the first time I found Slipknot was when it was on, they play in like the background scene of Rollable, that DVD, the movie. It's like an old Chris, what's his name?

That guy that's in, not another teen movie. He's in some movie about like roller skating game and they kill each other and shit. And in the background of one of the scenes, Slipknot's playing, I Am Hated. And as a kid, I was just like, what is that? Oh my God, you know, waited to the end of the credits and found it and found the song or whatever. And I got into that. But I never got the album. And then the first album of theirs I got was Volume 3.

Volume 3 is fucking sick. Yeah, Volume 3 rips. And then I... The production is... Well, the mix is terrible, but I love it. Yeah. There's elements to her that are fat. But I also got to...

I mean, probably around then, was the same time I was like my plague was on Resident Evil. So that's when I was kind of like, oh, I think I like this album better. And then I got an eye when it was just... Rabbit hole. Those three... Yeah.

are just insane yeah i would love to hear uh self-titled like remastered or something i think no i love the way that sounds yeah i would love to hear them work with a producer yeah like i would love them to work with like will putney or someone at just like like someone a bit younger who isn't like a legacy producer yeah and just be like this is what you're doing but could you get inside the mind of slip not the way they've written songs on those albums obviously partner is putney but you listen you look at the structure of any song from self-titled iowa how how did anyone but they can't even do that now yeah so get someone who's i'm not

will punty comes to mind because i know we'll fit for an autopsy will puttney loves gojira and you could some fit for an autopsy songs you could you could Giojira could have written it if they were on fucking steroids. But like, do I mean? Like, I feel like, like, it's not, I'm not talking shit. Well, yeah, no, producers are there to find the best in creatives and bring that to life. I think maybe there might be an element of, I don't know this for a fact, but there might be an element of, well, we've done it this, this way for this long.

I'm sure the conversations have come up before. Of course. But like, I just want to, I just feel like that. I feel like that with Metallica. than my favorite round of all time I'm like just just go and imagine they went to like

Misha or like you know what I mean like it would be insane because someone who's a genius type that into AI and get a song out of it well if if Metallica went to Misha what would the song sound like well that's our sleep token happen

someone put an AI prompt what if the X Factor was metal when it came up that's like there's a sleep token joke there they're not going to come on a fucking podcast what they're going to have fucking masks on All right. So you've got Slip,

this is a stacked Chicago House of Blues. Yeah. We've got Slipknot, Limp Biscuit. That could be 1999. Who else? We have Metallica. Who else did you have? I think I would go Carnival.

Nice. Just to mess it up. Saw them recently. Had Steve here. Yeah? Yeah. Great fucking. Incredible drummer.

Great band. Yeah. Didn't listen to them for the longest time because of the name. is the name yeah it's dumb it is dumb yeah great band all right okay smaller band this is where you would put a band that you would like to give this opportunity and you probably make them work for you to do something they need to play festival they need to get on the big stages even though it's a house of blue chicago but in front of a banging crowd they're going to win so many people over i don't

think i've ever even checked them out so we didn't because of the fucking name and i'm I'm a name guy. The name the gent world I've got into. But touring with them back to back in the States. What do they sound like? What's the, I should know? What's the vibe? It's almost humanity's last breath, but with some plotting you.

So it's like heavy, heavy. Some parts. Yeah. Interesting. They're in the gent world, I would say, but more catchy. Yeah, they can be as heavy as humanity's last breath. Yeah. Now they're getting produced by land and plotting you.

incredible singer incredible riffs the last album they put out very good very good i'll check it out yeah okay what's the after party it was a dream alpha wolf after party now before you say oh me saving money so no pingers like uh i've never had a pinger you've got a day off you've got a day off after it so don't worry about what's going on maybe three buttons on the rider all bands pool party pool party if it's some freestyle motorcross as long as it's not as long as it's not fucking winter Chicago. Are you actually into freestyle motorcycle? Is it just the Supreme Fox? I've told some people that

when I was a kid growing up, I wanted to be in Green Day or I wanted to be back flipping motorbikes. Nice. I never took up motorbikes. Never even tried. And I picked up a guitar and I just... You're on your way. You're on your

way to Green Day. So I can't ride a motorbike to save my life, but I think it's all six fuck. Right. Cool. So I can dress like it plus crusty demons was massive crudel militia all of that yeah cool music but i chose the guitar path and then one day you might be in green day yeah bring it on nice what's what's what's the maybe three bottles on the rider what is on the rider what is on the rider drink a choice jameson at the moment oh it's jameson everyone everyone's always jameson it's because it's crystal lake yeah ruined us yeah great parent very good band actually yeah drummers

drummer's absolutely fucking ganky dude what a freak it's so insane yeah sick yeah well that's it three bottles of jamo slip not limp biscuit back flipping

metallic back flipping motorbikes yeah into a pool pool party shocks are off yeah that's it nice I'm done if you want to go get some feed thanks for coming

thanks for having us having us. Thank you. You got anything you need to plug? By the time this comes out that other tour

might come out and I'll plug it at the beginning already be plugged you'd already know about it. Yeah, I think it gets announced in two weeks.

Yeah. Oh, definitely then. Yeah. Okay, we should have talked about that. Doesn't matter. Goodbye, everyone. Woo-woo.