INTERVIEW - Rise To Remain

Rise To Remain are the UK’s hottest new metal band, already racking up acclaim from Kerrang! And Metal Hammer who both awarded them their ‘Best New Band’ accolade. After a series of EP releases and blistering festival sets, September sees the band releasing their debut album – they have also just announced a 20 date UK headline tour. I caught up with the band’s vocalist Austin Dickinson to get the low-down on all things Rise To Remain.

You recently supported Funeral For A Friend on tour – did you have any favourite cities that you played to?

It’s really hard to decide as we’ve had so many great shows everywhere; Manchester, Wakefield, London, you name it! It’s just brilliant because there’s all the normal places where you know everyone will always be totally up for it – like Manchester is a kick-ass city, there’s always a party happening! But then we get to go to places that we wouldn’t normally visit, Penrith for example – going to somewhere like that and getting a great reaction, that’s a whole different kettle of fish - people go nuts for you and it’s like, ‘WOW!’

You guys also recently played Download - how does the experience of playing the smaller venues compare to festivals?

At small shows you’ve got say 400 of your fans going bat-shit crazy. When you play a festival, you’ll have those 400 guys, they’ll be there; but they’ll be surrounded by like a couple-thousand people who might not necessarily have heard of you or checked you out otherwise. It’s a great platform to be able to play to a lot of new potential fans.

And was that also your thinking with releasing your EP with Metal Hammer magazine, getting more new people on board?

People just download most of their music these days, so I’d rather just give it to them and see what they think. That was our first proper introduction, we’d done a couple of EPs before then but we’d only sold them at shows. That was the main idea behind that – it being a kind of introductory release - and we were very happy Metal Hammer magazine were on board with it. They’ve started to do those free releases a lot more recently – the most recent The Defiled album for example - who are a great band by the way. It’s a brilliant way to just get people hearing your stuff.

You’re now signed to a major label, EMI – does that feel like a very different aspect to releasing your music?

To be honest, not really, as EMI have everyone’s best interests at heart. In this case we did everything in the reverse way, we actually signed to the label after we had our album mastered and finished. The whole reason we wanted to do that was that we didn’t want a situation where we had a label telling us what to do. EMI just did the complete opposite - as soon as they heard we were looking for a label, they got excited. We were just chatting away and they showed the same enthusiasm in the record that we did; that’s so rare in a record label these days, especially a label as monolithic as EMI. We just can’t wait for the album to be out and for everyone to hear it.

And what kind of stuff can we expect from the album?

Gnarly guitars, gnarly dudes, rad sounds. Fast, heavy, big choruses - we tried to mix things up a lot on the album. It’s definitely diverse, listen to our track The Serpent and you’ll have a rough idea of what the album is about. To be honest, we don’t want people getting bored halfway through our songs – I’ve heard bands before where some tracks are just six minutes of self-indulgent shred, and it’s like, it sounds ok for the first three minutes, but then it’s kinda boring. We want to keep changing things up, keep things interesting, keep people satisfied.

I think that’s always the true test, if their albums are consistent from start to end – that’s what you want to hear.

Yeah! I have the same problem with a lot of metal releases as they tend to stagnate by track six. It’s a shame as there are a lot of amazing bands out there who might just fall short on a record. We just wanted to make a foolproof album that just has song after song that keeps your attention.

With so many bands around, does it ever feel quite competitive, that you need to be doing your own thing to stand out?

That’s the music industry for you, mate. It’s always like that, but at the same time, the people you’re ‘competing’ with are also your best friends. We’ve toured with bands like Korn, Trivium, and we just all really get along. There’s definitely a kind of camaraderie that comes from being a musician. You tend to all get together, have a bit of fun, say ‘Hey, let’s get some beers!’ and so on...

Some of these bands you’ve toured with have been around for years, have they shared any of their experiences with you?

I lost my voice on day a while back and I remember Matt Heafy from Trivium saying ‘Have you been drinking much water?’ and I was like ‘No more or less than usual.’ ‘Ok piece of advice,’ said Matt ‘Don’t stop drinking water until what’s coming out is the same colour as what’s going in.’ Thanks! Too much information, but thanks! Shit like that happens all the time, there’s always advice you can pick up on. When you’re touring with bands like Funeral For A Friend that have been so iconic in the world of post-hardcore and metal, the lessons you can learn from just watching them on stage and talking to them are infinite.

Do you feel the music industry is kind of moving away from the whole ‘we were discovered on MySpace’ thing now?

Well, I mean, that kind of thing has happened - like the classic story of a girl singing in a tube station, and then all of a sudden she’s headlining Wembley. It’ll always be there, but at the end of the day, it’s just technology advancing. Everything will just converge into one black box eventually - It’s gonna wipe your arse, play your favourite songs and call your wife when you’re coming home.  I dunno, I don’t know where the next step is. It’s funny you mention it as me and the Funeral For A Friend boys were having this exact conversation the other day, what’s the next step? – I’m not sure we can give away our plans just yet, it’s top secret, but yeah, we’ve got plans...

I guess that’s kind of the core of the matter – that it’s just another platform you can use to get your music out there, but you can’t rely on it entirely.

The thing about the internet is that we can stay up to date with our fans, we can get feedback, upload live videos on YouTube, keep track of how everyone’s doing – it’s cool to chat to fans, show our appreciation. They’re the guys that keep us on tour. If I ever see a fan wearing one of our t-shirts or something I’ll go up to them and give them a hi-five.

That’s the power of music isn’t it, that it can just touch so many people. It’s always there, whether they’re driving down the road, or going shopping.

Completely. And it’s important to respect that, especially to acknowledge our position. People appreciate our tunes, and they appreciate it even more when you go out and say thank you.

Rise To Remain’s latest single Nothing Left is available to download now. The band’s debut album City of Vultures is released on the 5^th September.