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Interview with
DANE and SIMON
from
TO THE GRAVE

(20th December 2021)

Interview by Adele Rosa

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ADELE – Straight off the bat, I kind of want to know a little bit about the origins of To The Grave. Tell me a little bit about how the group formed.
SIMON – I think it started in like 2009 or 10. But I’m not actually an original member, either. The original drummer left, I think after a year or two. But basically, it was a band that was formed by a couple of boys in Sydney, who were going to JMC together and studying. They just tried to chuck a project together, started playing shows in Sydney. I joined not long after they formed because their drummer, I think, was doing something with the police and he just couldn’t balance the work. The band had like a sort of middling career coming up the ranks in the local scene in sort of like 2010 to 2015, Dane, you joined in 2015, didn’t you?
DANE – Yeah. So this is when we officially tell people we started you know, like that’s when stuff turned around. Not I don’t know. I think the Dream Team just kind of clicked then. The boys already built a really cool foundation. I was in bands before that. But when I went and rehearsed with these guys the first time because they were looking
for a vocalist, even seeing you guys have wireless packs, and little monitors and stuff, I was like “oh crap”, this is professional. And so that stuck with me. And then we’re just trying to level it up and get better since.
SIMON – It was a great story, actually, because it was kind of poetic in that, like, the original vocalist left because he was having a kid at the time, and he just couldn’t balance the band at the same time. And then we hit up Dane and we were like, “Hey, you wanna make some gurgling noises for us?”. And he was like, “Oh, yeah”. Came and rehearsed
with us, and the rest is history.
DANE – Yeah, so then a little EP in 2016. See, when I start telling this story, I always forget how long it actually arcs. All the boys, like “the dream team”, we didn’t really want to break it up or anything, but everybody wanted to travel and people are moving in, having kids. And you know, all the adult stuff is happening. So we just kind of put the band to rest for a little bit. And regrouped, I guess 2018/2019 we were like, “Nah, let’s go”, so everybody who was still keen to put all their hands in the basket, we did. And then the rest is history.
SIMON – Rose from the ashes again.

ADELE – We love a rebrand.
SIMON – It’s great, isn’t it?

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ADELE – I feel like everyone needs to go through a rebrand every now and then. But I guess we’ll go back to 2015 where you’re both in the band. Tell me about the gritty early days, how the music was sounding, how you guys were performing. I guess in contrast to how you guys are doing now?
SIMON – Well, I guess the early influences, we had that kind of early 2010s wave of American metalcore, we hadn’t really found our sound yet. We were kind of just writing whatever came to our heads and we just put an album together.
DANE – Like, you know the old “I killed the prom queen”. And when we kind of joined, I was like “well this has better music than the music that I was playing over”, and even you look at footage and it’s like a metal core sounding band with pig squeals and stuff happening over the top of it. It was really weird.
SIMON – The best of both worlds really.
DANE – It was cool. Like meeting up every Monday in Surry Hills to practice in Matt’s apartment studio thing.
SIMON – In that space, yeah.
DANE – Real gritty, like as gritty as you could probably get it.
SIMON – It was grassroots. And it was grassroots for like, I think a lot longer than it should have been. But we got there eventually.

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ADELE – That’s good. I mean, obviously, you guys have come a long way, especially with the releases that you’ve had. I want to talk about this monstrous label of “the flag bearers of deathcore”. I think that’s an incredible way to kind of describe the essence of the music that you guys make. Right?
SIMON – It’s a hell of a compliment.

ADELE – I just think it’s the most amazing label, and way to describe your music. What do you think it is about your sound that kind of captures the attention of the listener?
DANE – I mean, I think there’s probably levels to that. I think a word I’ve heard a lot is like “claustrophobic”. It feels different. To put it on, like it kind of distracts you. I guess that was the intention. Like there’s a lot of deathcore and stuff. And a lot of it is, like, very well produced. But I think the stuff that got us into it was real, kind of makes you question if you like it for a second because it’s so abrasive. That’s what I like, jusr keep it at 11. But I don’t know, the flag bearers thing, that was kind of coming out of the gate. I guess it’s like dressing for the job you want. You know what I mean? Whether or not we had any right to say that.
SIMON – We kind of just did us. We’ve heard here and there. I don’t think we have a specifically set out with the you know, the mission statement to be the most savage thing going out of the country. But we’ve had people say that to us before.
DANE – But if I told you that, like you’re not the hardest drummer in Sydney, you know what I mean?
SIMON – Well, I have to be now!
DANE – That’s kind of how we just subtly get competitive.

ADELE – I like that, because it’s kind of like sticking it to the man. And doing whatever you fucking want. Right?
SIMON – Stay hungry.

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ADELE – Exactly that! I’m gonna jump back to 2019. Obviously, you guys took a break after the release of Global Warming, because of the loss of your fellow band member Joshua. If you don’t mind me asking, I’d be interested in diving a little deeper into this period of both of your lives, within the context of life in general and music making as well.
SIMON – That situation arose, you know, things weren’t looking too great for us at the time. And I think all of us were sort of feeling a pretty heavy cloud over the mood of stuff. And apparently that was affecting us in a few ways that weren’t voiced at the time. But yeah, it was a bit of a lull, low period in everybody’s demeanour and. Then obviously the accident happened and then life just sort of started freewheeling didn’t it? It was like, stuck in suspension. I know it almost sounds a little cliche, but it’s one of those things where you don’t really believe it, you’re like, “ah, surely not”. And then you don’t think it’ll actually happen until it does. I think it affected everybody in a different way because we all had kind of a different relationship to Josh because like obviously, Dane and Tom, they were friends with Josh a little before he had joined the band, and I met him maybe a year or two prior.
DANE – He was like one of our biggest fans before he joined. And so he was always at our shows and stuff.
SIMON – Yeah, after that we sort of all had to find a way to, to cope with it. And we just knew that we had to be there for each other. The day that we got the news, I drove straight out to Dane’s, and we all kind of met up and obviously, Jack couldn’t be there, he was in Melbourne, but yeah, we just got together.
DANE – It’s so weird just to look back on that, it almost feels like it didn’t happen and we just met up for something else. And we, you know, the whole funeral and everything. You remember it so clearly some days. But then don’t some other days.
SIMON – It was one of those weird periods that simultaneously managed to slow down to like 0.1% real time and also blur by. It must just be like a grief thing of the way the brain handles it. But it was just such a strange time, obviously.
DANE – Think you said it best. We just kind of had to be there and be there for each other and pick it up. And being there for his family and stuff kind of took us all out of it. You know, it was bigger. And there was police involved and everything.
SIMON – In fact, I think that was one of the really nice things about that period, was getting to know his family, because he was a band member and a good friend. But we didn’t really know that much about his family. Dane, I’m sure you and Tom had met them at least once or twice. But yeah, to get to spend that time with them and actually get to know them a bit. It was really pleasantly surprising how welcoming they were with us as well, knowing that like we were the family on the other side kind of thing.
DANE – I just think with the music thing, it’s weird, because we’re writing music now. And like, this is what I mean. It doesn’t feel like he’s gone. Because we’re still always thinking about him and his influence. And literally, I’m sitting here writing lyrics, feeling him go “that’s cringe dude, like, change it”.
SIMON – Yeah. And I think there’s, there’s always going to be a small percentage of us, at the very least that you know, that keeps doing this for him. Like, I think he’d be crushed if we stopped or let it affect us in a way where we were like “we got to call it quits”

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ADELE – Yeah, of course, you always carry the sentiments of something, I guess as life shifting as that, through your art, and I think you’ve done that superbly, on your new record. We’ve kind of gotten into what the album could be about, but what can you tell us about the album, its message and how it came together.
DANE – The record, front to back. It’s Global Warning with seven songs and the cover attached to it, the remix and stuff. So the idea with that was when we put Global Warning out, there was a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor that very much felt that era. And as we were kind of moving into different sounds and stuff, it was good. Let’s kind of whip it into shape and make a record out of it that’s at least musically, and I guess my assessment of it, lyrically, the message was, we don’t have to be dicks to animals, but we very much are and it’s not cool. That’s the baseline of it. Please stop fucking with animals.
SIMON – And it was so nice to have something to say this time. Like, I’ll never forget it. When Dane was saying, you know, it’s finally time to write about something real. You know, some proper horror.
DANE – The band is more of a vehicle for what we talk about and what we’re about, really. It’s a really heavy, aggressive way. I said this to someone the other day, I feel like people who stand up for animals and people who stand up for those more vulnerable than them can be bullied and mocked for it. It’s socially acceptable to do all that stuff really to like, you know, animal rights activists and things like that. And so that doesn’t make any kind of logical sense to me. So I like the band being this kind of vehicle of empowerment if you’re somebody who cares about justice in the world.

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ADELE – Not only that, I feel like you’re unapologetically loud in the message that you try to send through your music, which is incredible. I want to touch on the closer of the album as well, which is a cover of My Chemical Romance’s mechanical “The Ghost Of You”. Tell me a little bit about the choice to cover this track. And of course, I think the placement is really important as well, you know, ending the album with this one. Tell me why you decided to close the album with that.
SIMON – Oh, man who doesn’t want to cover My Chem at some point?

ADELE – For sure!
DANE – That’s an idea that started with Josh. I remember sitting in a car park in Melbourne with him. And we were on a day off talking about what we wanted to cover. He was just telling me how he wanted to do the whole [Welcome To The] Black Parade, back to front and then he was so conflicted about that and was like, well, we have to do something. And I remember the conversation being because we can’t pick a My Chemical Romance song, we won’t do one. That was something that kind of stuck with me after he passed like, nah, fuck that.
SIMON – It didn’t get any easier after he passed either, we were like, “Shit, which one are we gonna do? They’re all bangers.”
DANE – Yeah, I know, we had scrapped a bunch of Slipknot covers lying around that we’d kind of touched and there were a couple of My Chem song’s started in the back. So Tom, our guitarist, came to us one day and said “The Ghost Of You is the one I’ve tried, I’ve played around with this one, and this one, and this is the one”. I trusted him with that, yeah.
SIMON – Just made sense really.
DANE – Yeah, for an hour, you’re bombarded with that unapologetic message. But if the last thing you’re left with is just kind of the sense that like, man, everything’s so fleeting. Just make sure that you care for each other. That’s the core of it. Isn’t it?

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ADELE – Yeah, a beautiful choice to end the album on something like that.
SIMON – The most poetic thing you’ve ever said, Dane.

ADELE – Will go down in history. You’ll be able to lay out the entirety of the album and its sentiments in a live music setting soon, because you’re playing Knight And Day Festival, which is probably like the most hectic way to ring in the New Year. Do you have anything special lined up for it? Talk me through a To The Grave live performance?
SIMON – That’s a good one.
DANE – Yeah, that’s a really good one. Because that’s the topic right now. We already have so many ideas on how to change things up. We’ve got a powerful message and sound now, is the live set going to be what it’s always been? No, it has to be different.
SIMON – Gotta put a rock show on. Yeah. The biggest kick in the teeth is having all these ideas to try and work on a live thing. We used to just get together every Monday and jam out. And we’d be in a room together and make it happen. But I guess there’s two sides of that coin, because now that we can’t test all these ideas, I’m coming up with a crapload of them. And we’re not being able to run them through a filter. And then a whole lot of scheming, there’s a lot of plotting and planning. And even the last time we jammed for the last show, it was like, you know, might play a cover, might play, you know, things like that. The other stuff that we’ve got planned, I don’t know if it’s like, ready enough to talk about but rest assured that like when that happens, you’ll go, “oh that’s what Dane was talking about”
SIMON – Yeah. We’ve got to work out how much of it we can do, because we’ve had a lot of time to sit on our hands and figure out some crazy shit to do.

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ADELE – Yeah, for sure. Well, then I guess we’ll have to wait and see til performance comes around. It’s very relative to start the new year off like that.
SIMON – Yeah, what a way to see it out.

ADELE – Exactly, on the topic of the new year, do you have anything in store for 2022 at all?
SIMON – How much do you reckon we can say?
DANE – Yeah, definitely, we haven’t really publicly said that. There’s definitely a new album coming next year. Like, I don’t think this would make much sense, because it’s not done. But next year. As soon as we’re able to make all this stuff happen, it will happen. But definitely a new record, a big record. And literally levelling everything up.
SIMON – Yeah, new music, massive tours. We’ve gotten some offers that are making us squeal a little bit.
DANE – But yeah, all that crazy stuff. Once we’re allowed to say stuff about it and once we’re confident in announcing it, crazy.
SIMON – And it’s not even that we don’t want to tell you it’s just that we don’t know. Like nothing is certain at the moment. So we’re just fingers crossed that all this stuff actually goes ahead.

ADELE – There’s definitely beauty in the unknown. I’m keen to see what else you guys have up your sleeve in the new year. Thank you so much Dane and Simon for your time.
SIMON – Thank you for having us.
DANE – Thank you.

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Press Release 4th November 2021 (below)

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AMNPLIFY – DB