Cancer Bats interview done by Mike De Man.
Before we get into everything, let’s date back about 9 years to your first album through Distort, Birthing the Giant. How would you say the band has changed since then?
I’d say the biggest difference since then is that we can finally play our instruments a lot better haha but at the core of it I still think we’ve stayed the same. Its still a bunch of friends playing music together. Jaye who plays bass with us now, was there at the very start helping us record our first demo and getting guitar sounds dialled in, Andrew who was our first bass player is still the one who does all of our graphic design on all of our albums and a lot of our t-shirts. So as much as we’ve evolved over the years, we still have tried to keep things rooted in how and why we started the band in the first place. Just friends hanging out and wanting to make music and art together.
Do you think the band has had more success in your home country of Canada or other countries across the globe?
We’ve definitely been embraced by the hardcore scene in the UK and are now bigger there than in Canada. Our shows in Canada are awesome, don’t get me wrong, I just think the UK are lucky to have lots of great venues in every small town where they can have shows all the time and build up and keep and awesome scene going. In Canada it’s hard to even keep a venue going for a year let alone 20 years like it is in most towns in the UK.
Out of your albums, a significant amount of them were released through Distort. How was your time working with them?
Distort was great while we were with them and they put out a lot of great albums from bands like The Gorgeous, Johnny Truant, The End all who we got to tour with and in the early days it really worked like a family. As time went on it made sense for us to go our separate ways.
Talk to me about Searching For Zero, your new album that was released this year. What were some of the things that influenced the writing of it?
The writing lyric wise was all influenced by a lot of personal events that had happened in 2013 while we were touring our 4th album DSOL. There were many deaths of people close to the band and lots of long periods of touring and dealing with all of that at the same time led to us needing some time off. When we came to writing the music for that album it went back to why we started the band 10 years ago, it was the 4 of us meeting up and hanging out and playing riffs and having fun. We spent the first month just recording our jams every day and throwing around new ideas, recording them and moving on. There was no pressure, we weren’t thinking of anything more than just writing songs that the four of us were stoked on and we tried to keep that going all the way into the studio. We didn’t want to get too caught up in trying to figure out what we should do for our career or what songs we should write to make our band popular and more to keep things grounded in why we play in a band in the first place and what the four of us love about our band. That was the biggest influence on everything. That and meeting a genius named Ross Robinson who feels the same way and getting to record those songs at his house.
If you had to pick three songs off it that impact the band the most, which three would those be?
Arsenic In The Year Of The Snake and True Zero are the two songs that really sum up the vibe of everything that happened in 2013 and everyone has a real strong connection to those. I would also say Beelzebub has a huge impact on everyone, because of the subject matter but also just us finally being able to write a song that is heavy without having to rely on breakdowns or thrash parts or anything other than just a stripped down heavy vibe and holding our ground with that.
One song of yours that always stood out to me was Lucifer’s Rocking Chair. Was there ever a big fan response to that song when played live in comparison to others?
That song gets a huge response when we play it, especially in places where the video was on TV. So in Canada, the UK, parts of Europe, and Australia that song goes down huge. I love that song and we play it every set.
Can fans ever expect the band to do another tour as Bat Sabbath, your Black Sabbath cover band?
I don’t know if we’ll ever do another full tour as Bat Sabbath, but we’ve still played some of the covers here and there. When we went to Japan at the start of touring this album, the promoter of our Tokyo show asked if we could do some Sabbath covers because he was a fan. So as an encore we played 3 Sabbath covers and everyone partied, it was awesome. So I feel like we’ll still do some covers here and there.
Out of every tour you have gone out on, which one has left you with the
best memories?
best memories?
We’ve been lucky to have done so many amazing tours over the last 10 years as a band. Our first run of major tours was back in 2006 when AlexisOnFire basically took us on their world tour. We did all of Canada with them and Every Time I Die, the whole US with them and Moneen and then all of the UK and Europe. All of those shows were so crazy from playing to 5000 people in Canada to 50 people in South Carolina to a packed Gothic castle in Germany. Such a wild 4 months on the road and it taught us everything we would ever need to know for the next years of touring ahead of us.
