Arch Enemy return to Australia in 2018 as part of the Download Festival in Melbourne as well as a run of headline shows. This will be the first time the band perform in the country with vocalist Alissa White-Gluz who joined the band in 2014 and who are touring in support of their latest album “Will To Power” which was released in September 2017. We chat to Alissa to discuss what Arch Enemy are planning for Australia as well as talk about the latest album plus we find out where it all began for Alissa.
Andrew: Thanks for your time, really appreciated. We’re excited to see you come back to Australia, I know you haven’t been to Australia with Arch Enemy before but have you personally been here before?
Allisa: Yeah I have. I did a tour of Australia in 2013 with the band Kamelot which was the most recent time I was there.
Andrew: Oh Ok and how was that experience for you?
Allisa: It was great! Actually I think that was right around the time I got invited to join Arch Enemy, I was on that tour when the call happened so it was an exciting time in many ways. I remember having a really good time, really warm, friendly people and of course some beautiful sights in nature as well so I hope that I get a little bit of time to do some sightseeing and some touristy stuff but I don’t know if that’s going to happen but it would be nice.
Andrew: Yeah what with being on a tight schedule and being part of the Download Festival. Is there anything in particular that you missed out on last time that you would like to do in Australia that you heard about?
Allisa: I would love to go surfing although I would really need to ask the locals if I’m allowed to go [laughs]. I would love to see some wildlife, I would love to hike. When I go to different places I’m not the kind of person that likes to go shopping, that doesn’t interest me at all. I don’t want to do that, I want to get out of the city and see a mountain or a forrest or a waterfall or an ocean and that’s exciting to me. Of course Australia has some of the craziest flora and fauna in the world, especially from someone who lives in a country that’s mostly uninhabitable by anything! So that’s exciting.
Andrew: [laughs] It’s funny because I have spoken to a few musicians from Canada and they have all said there is some kind of weird similarity between Australia and Canada, do you kind of feel that way at all?
Allisa: Yeah actually our front of house engineer on our last tour who had also been on other tours in the past, is Australian and he was saying how if you take the earth and flip it, Australia and Canada are the same just upside down and I actually do see it. It is true, we are the same but opposites but just that thought that we’re all kind of laid back and friendly as a population, I think that applies. We don’t have any insects or anything because it’s always winter and Australia is more like everything will kill you [laughs]. Everything is poisonous and gigantic but yeah I can see the similarities, absolutely.
Andrew: Well as I said we are excited to see you in Australia again, I know it’s been some time since Arch Enemy have been here. You have the new album that came out a few months ago, “Will To Power” and we had a review of it and absolutely loved it. It’s a great album but it does have some different elements in there, some clean vocals are in there which is quite new for Arch Enemy. How has the reception been from the fans and the critics so far?
Allisa: It’s been great! For us when we did “War Eternal”, there was so many changes going on in the band that we didn’t know how it was going to be received and then we were pleasantly surprised because every journalist, every reviewer, every photographer, every time we did a meet and greet or signing or we did a show, the response was above and beyond what we could of imagined, just super positive. So when it came time to write, record and release “Will To Power” we had this sort of nervousness in the back of our minds like, ‘Oh my god how will we outdo War Eternal? What if it doesn’t do as well, how is it going to do?’ The thing is you can’t really focus on that because all you can do as a band is just make great songs and release them, that’s all any band can do. But luckily the response has actually been even better, in the chart positions in various countries we were higher than with “War Eternal” and in many cases it was the highest chart of an Arch Enemy album ever. We’ve been seeing increased sold out shows, increase in ticket sales in all the shows. Really good reviews from journalists, very open minded and accepting fans and of course media that helps us out like Spotify, streaming and radio stations. So yeah everyone has been very happy about the album and that’s cool for us because we’re so involved in the music that after a while it’s like, ‘What did we create here?’ [laughs]. We don’t even know anymore so basically we get out there and start doing the promo tour and meeting with 30-40 journalists a day and talking to everyone in different countries in different languages. We’re happy that everyone is getting it and understanding what our vision is for the album and they are enjoying the music.
Andrew: That’s good to hear! How many songs are you playing from it and what can we expect on the tour in Australia as far as the new material?
Alissa: So on the tour we just did in North America I think we played 5 songs from “Will To Power”, I think between “Will To Power” and “War Eternal” we played 8 songs or something like that. It’s mostly new songs and of course some old songs as well, depending on if we’re doing a festival spot or a headline spot. Obviously if we’re headlining then we have more time and try to include even more songs but so far what we’ve noticed is that the best crowd response comes from the more recent material so we do want to include as much of that as possible.
Andrew: Sure and for yourself, how do you approach the older material? Obviously fans will pick up on the difference between your voice and Angela’s voice so do you stick to how it was recorded or do you inject your own style and flavor into it?
Alissa: Well something that people might not remember because obviously there was the singer switch, is that even Angela [Gossow, ex-vocalist] live is different than Angela recorded if you know what I mean. Every singer sounds different live than they do on record, that’s just how it goes and somebody might sound different one night to the next just because maybe they were sick or maybe the room acoustics created a slightly different sound. So any song that we do live is going to sound different than it is on the album whether it’s one that I recorded or one that Angela recorded or one that Johan [Liiva, ex-vocalist] recorded. That being said I try to stick to what Angela did because she did those songs amazingly and I love what she does and so I just try to go along with her phrasing and pronunciations because obviously that’s what people hear in their heads and what people are usually listening to. But with that being said we also play so many shows that songs sort of tend to evolve over time and mutate into these live versions and we don’t even notice that happening, I mean that happens a lot actually and then after a while I’m like, ‘Wait a second’ and I’ll listen back to the album, even if it’s one of my own songs and I’ll be like, ‘Oh my god that’s not how I do that anymore!’ But it was never a conscious decision to change it, it just happened.
Andrew: Yeah I guess that’s part of the progression of any band, is that as you play songs over and over again that little things change over time. With you being in the band now for a few years and with the second album, do you feel that things have started to really settle now and fans are more accepting of you?
Alissa: Whether it’s true or not, from my own personal perspective I felt settled in immediately actually. It felt normal and natural and very right from the beginning and that was compounded by the fact that journalists were very happy about my presence in the band and the music we created and live reviews were great and people in the audience were really enjoying it and we had an audience and it was a big audience and it’s been getting bigger and bigger actually! So we don’t take any of that for granted, we’re super thankful for that, very aware of that and we work really hard to bring great music around the world because that’s what we would want as music enthusiasts ourselves. So it just feels right, I guess in relationships of any kind you can feel when it’s not right or when it’s right and it definitely feels right.
Andrew: That’s great to hear! So take us back to the beginning for you, how did you get into music and what made you decide to get into the heavier kind of music?
Alissa: I didn’t really make an intentional goal of being a frontperson of a metal band but I always had a very loud voice, I would even get into trouble at school for being really loud! I was a really good student but my voice just projects so I always had this really loud voice, I was always pretty fearless when it came to anything and I still am I guess. I grew up in a house where my Mom, my Dad, my older sister and I have a younger brother too but he was younger than me but he was just a little baby when I was growing up and these are all music lovers and my sister actually is also a frontperson in a touring band and so we have this great respect and appreciation for music. My Mom has vinyls on the wall of Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie, Janet Joplin, Nirvana, Eric Clapton, The Who, Deep Purple, just all sorts of really cool music influences. So I’ve always loved music and I guess through the ages of, say 13 to 16 I sort of made this progression from classical music to grunge – which is a huge leap – to punk and to metal. I mean metal and classical are actually quite similar but to go through grunge and punk to get there is kind of a weird path to take! But that’s the way I went and then I just enjoyed going to see shows and at that point in Montreal in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, there was just a lot of metal bands. A lot of nu-metal and hardcore and metal bands in Montreal and any night of the week I could take the train downtown and go see a show anywhere, and so I would do that, alone. I would just go on the bus, get on a train, go downtown, walk into a little dive bar and see some bands playing and I really enjoyed that. I didn’t think of making a career out of it or anything, I just thought it was really cool to see people up there just doing it. And so from there I ended up meeting a lot of people and eventually I ended up meeting people who were forming a band but needed a singer and long story short I ended up becoming a singer in that band and from there I just noticed that – even with that band which I think I was in for 8 months and then it broke up, we played like 5 shows in total or something – even among those 5 shows I was seeing a sort of momentum where it would be, ‘Well we sold 7 tickets at our last gig but now we sold 12’ and just that little bit of momentum was enough to keep me wanting to go forward and it’s been a gradual and slow climb like that ever since. Luckily now rather than 7 or 12 tickets sold, multiply that by hundreds or thousands [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] exactly! It’s a great story and it’s great to see you in such an iconic band. I’ve been a fan of Arch Enemy ever since that second album came out many years ago and to see the transitions and evolutions of the band and with you being in there now, it seems to be a great time for Arch Enemy. We are looking forward to see you with Arch Enemy in Australia, thanks for your time, really appreciated and we will see you very soon at Download Festival.
Alissa: Alright, thank you so much!
Download Festival Australia
Saturday March 24 – Melbourne, Flemington Racecourse
www.downloadfestival.com.au
Arch Enemy Sideshow Australian Tour Dates
Presented by Metropolis Touring and David Roy Williams Entertainment.
Friday 23rd March – Sydney, Manning Bar
Sunday 25th March – Brisbane, The Zoo
Tuesday 27th March – Adelaide, Fowlers Live
Wednesday 28th March – Perth, Rosemount Hotel
From: https://metropolistouring.com/arch-enemy/
