Project Description

Interview with

MITCH ALEXANDER

from

EYE OF THE ENEMY

Interviewer – Vicky Hebbs

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Photo – Joel Adams

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For any new fans, how did you get together to form Eye Of The Enemy?
No idea. I joined in 2015, as maybe the 7th “new member”, and there’s been two after me. EOTE is like a cell; it’s always undergoing violent mitosis, but it’s better for it. [Chris] Kano (guitar) is the only original member, and it was always, and still is, his baby. Over the years he’s kept the ship afloat, writing and riffing, hiring and firing.
I know for my part, oddly enough, I had friends telling me I should “join Eye of the Enemy, or a band like them,” probably four or more years before I even met them. But my old band, Hours In Exile (previously Mordhel) were opening for Eye, years ago, and apparently they clocked me and said “if we ever need a new singer we should tap him.” And they did! Also as a weird piece of trivia, I think Eye have recruited from Mordhel, like, three or four other times before me. It was like their recruitment and training camp.

How would you describe your sound? How has it evolved since you began making music together back in 2006?
I’ve got no fucking clue. I always thought it was melodeath-meets-NWOAHM, but the reviews have been coming out saying that we dabble in melodeath, or only occasionally push into it. So I dunno. Or care, frankly. We’re five relatively different and super strong-willed aresholes, all with different ideas of what counts as heavy, but with a consistent vision of what’s good. Kano loves his Fear Factory, Decapitated and Pantera. Simmo [Headley] (drums) and I love our nu-metal; I grew up on Korn and Slipknot. James [McInnes] (bass) has been making music with me since I was 17, and we both love the really fucking weird stuff, like Daughters, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and shit like that. The Dillinger Escape Plan, Meshuggah, Norma Jean. But he’s also into his piano-djazz (it’s jazzy-djent, and there’s no other word for it) and I love tough guy beat down shit like Kublai Khan and Emmure. And then there’s Thems [Chris Themelco] (guitar) who’s well into the larping melodeath shit I don’t understand at all, like Insomnium, Omnium Gatherum.
So if you can imagine all five of us not only convinced that what we enjoy is the best and heaviest music, but that the other four guys are complete fucking idiots for disagreeing – that’s how our music sounds, to us. It’s the riffs that come out of the Large Hadron Collider when you smash all those different tastes together.
In terms of its evolution though – that’s all Kano. He’s the one constant, he’s the EOTE anchor. From what I know, he sort of “lead” the writing of the first album, but it was collaborative. Then on TVP the band was in so much flux he just went “fuck it” and wrote an album. TVP is distilled and bottled Kano, more or less. Titan was him having to admit he asked a bunch of jackasses to join his band – he still wrote the overwhelming majority of the riffs, cause that’s his thing. He’s a riff machine. But the writing process of Titan was a challenge – we had different people joining the band at different moments, and as everyone who’s been in a band with a shifting line up knows, that not only presents logistical challenges, the fact of the matter is, it presents political ones too. There’s feelings of being too new to say anything, or being too set in your ways and overcompensating to make sure someone doesn’t feel left out. Titan was not only all of us writing, it was us figuring out how to write with each other. So Kano would give us more or less complete songs (like Clay, or Hooks & Wires), or he could give us bare shells (like Titan) that would have everyone arranging and editing, and changing shit. It took until the end of the process, after fights and laughter and despair and joy and blood and body odour that I feel like we’re more than ready to charge ahead as a cohesive unit and start smashing some new songs out.

Your new album, Titan, has just been released. Can you share the concept or origins behind the release?
Lyrically, it’s such a wank thing to say but – I don’t want to go too into the personal meaning behind some of the songs, cause I don’t want to shift or colour the meaning for anyone else. But I’ve got lyrics on there about some of the most traumatic shit I’ve been through, my near-death, loved ones’ slow deterioration, pure violence. There’s conceptual stuff and there’s literal things that I think people will take as a metaphor but nah, it’s literal and genuinely that weird.
As whole though, I made sure the lyrics served a double purpose, to match the album’s musical progression. We wrote with concepts in mind, to fit a loose, or maybe “broad” narrative. Like, one song, and I won’t say which, was initially started to be the musical equivalent of finding an intruder in your house, going for them, and then realising that “oh noooo, they’re much stronger than you and you’re fucking dead.” We’d give Kano or Thems prompts like that, little stories or feelings,, and when we started to get a bunch of riffs and tracks together they all had this sort of internal logic – this tracks was always going to go after this one, that track definitely needs a different one between it and another. And it just sort of traces a chronology of things getting worse, and then things getting better for all the wrong reasons. 

Is there a song from the album you want everyone to listen to first, or that you are especially proud of writing?
Look… I wanna say Titan, cause it’s personally my favourite; it’s heavy and weird and massive. But also, Clay has the meaty melodeath hooks, and the film clip Connor O’Keane did for us is just ridiculous and marvellous. If you want some more melodeath, the track people seem to think is the hidden gem is Stress and Colours. For some stomping heaviness; The Artist’s Decay and Abrasive Turns Of Phrases.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but in terms of being proud of having written it – Titan and Empire have the most amount of collaboration, I think. I can point to specific sections that were just commandeered by one person in particular, who made a part work with what someone else was writing. For me, Abrasive has the most amount of sections I arranged/wrote/fought for, it’s got a lot of me in it.
Lyrically – I dunno. I wrote all the lyrics and I’m pretty fucking proud of them all, honestly. I’m overall pretty happy with what I managed to come up with. Abrasive is the most personal, Empire, Artist’s and Stress have some of my favourite lines.

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What inspires you most to write music?
At this point, nothing and everything? We’ve all been writing and performing music for so long that it’s just something we do. There can be flashes of inspiration to write riffs, or sections or whatever, but foundational to that is a second-nature, habitual drive. I guess what inspires us to write music is the idea that if we don’t, we’d be people who aren’t writing music. And because that’s not who we are, it’s almost like ego-preservation – “I am a musician, I create music!” I think what inspires us is the knowledge, whether we realise it or not, that we’d be pretty fucking down on ourselves if we stopped writing.

What are your thoughts on the Australian metal scene? Has it changed significantly since you first made music together?
Since 2006? Absolutely. I have a lot of thoughts on Australian metal, I don’t think we’ve got the space. It’s both gotten obviously and terribly worse, to the point where I can happily feel like a fist-shaking grandad saying “back in my day!” But it’s also undeniably better and more vibrant than it’s ever been.
You’ve got financial downturns and depressions ruining overseas and local investment into the scenes from the bottom-up, you had the arse fall out of the festival circuit with BDO and Soundwave dying, you’ve got some fucking amazingly backwards State and Federal laws depressing investment and turn out, and you’ve got Adelaide and it’s three inhabitants who are the only people there still buying music tickets. You’ve also got a couple of genres that a stratifying and gentrifying, just Architects worship and radio-happy buttrock with downtuned guitars. It can get pretty dire sounding.
But at the same time, despite these obstacles – maybe even because of them – we’ve got more and more bands carving out overseas reputations at all levels, that is really making it seem like Australia isn’t a one band town, but it’s a scene. And because of that international respect, we can, miraculously, get more underground acts out, who get underground acts to open, which boosts them, and that boosts our own scene overall.
It has been snowballing since Parkway Drive became the biggest act on the planet – they helped Thy Art Is Murder, who aren’t as big but are way more heavy. They’ve given their own tick of approval to Justice For The Damned, who are also killing it. You had Psycroptic forge the underground path, which left a trail for King Parrot, and now you’ve got Disentomb and Aversion’s Crown killing it. Northlane have stepped up and I feel like could become a younger generations’ Karnivool. Voyager are demolishing the prog scene and rightfully getting recognised. And then there are bands at the underground level who are already legitimately world class, bands like MUNT, Mountain Wizard Death Cult, Nucleust, Deadlights. And we’ve got heavy festivals happening again, like Invasion Fest, Good Things, UNIFY, Download. There’s a vibrancy that seems like it’s only getting brighter as those negative outside forces I mentioned before keep pressing down. It’s trite but I reckon it’s an “exciting” time for Australian metal. Especially with streaming, and Bandcamp and what not, you can find acts like Dead Kelly or Portal or Black Rheno. There’s a lot happening and it feels like the draw strings are being pulled together.

Are you planning to go on tour following the release of Titan?
Not in the traditional sense – we’re not looking to be a full time touring band, which is both liberating and constricting. But yes; live shows, and tours, will start up again soon.

What can fans expect from one of your live gigs?
Utter fucking chaos, violence, good times, some spit, riffs, a cathartic mosh, flossing. We’re all gig pigs, we love it, and we don’t pre-plan any of it. We just want to go off, and give people the chance to do the same.

If you could perform with any music artist, Alive or Dead, who would you choose? And Why?
A dead one, so we can’t be upstaged.

What are your goals as a music artist, and as a band? Do you have any long-term aspirations or goals in mind?
We just want to create and perform music we like, as often as we can. There’s no point in setting long term goals cause this industry and this artform is random at the best of times and we’ll be in a radically different world due to climate change in 10-15 years anyway, so fuck it – get it while the gettin’s good.

What is the best thing about performing to a live audience?
The smell. There’s all that horseshit about sharing in the energy and joy of happy crowds connecting with super personal art and providing it with tangible meaning, resulting in an overwhelming feedback loop of interpersonal pre-rational understanding between humans at a visceral level, but nah – it’s the musk.

Finally, a few questions for some quick answers –
FAVOURITE:
Album – Grand Opening and Closing by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Artist – Paul Yore, followed closely by Mothmeister
Movie – Starship Troopers
Place to visit – Berlin
Venue to play – 170 Russell
Food – There’s this kebab place down the road from mine, called Adam’s Kebabys, and they’re legitimately the best kebabs on Earth.
Drink – Octomore 6.3 but fucked if I can find it anywhere
Person in History –  Henry George, author of Progress & Poverty
Tattoo – (If you don’t have one, what would you get?) I’m clean-skinned! So I’d love to get TAT FREE on my inside lip.

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Titan is available HERE!

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Check out EYE OF THE ENEMY below
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AMNPLIFY – DB