Tony Foresta: "All Of A Sudden I’ve Doubled My Fucking Workload"

Beginning life in 2012 as a casual project – “just dicking around” - Iron Reagan is Tony Foresta (vocals), Phil Hall (guitars), Mark Bronzino (guitars), Rob Skotis (bass) and Ryan Parrish (drums), the Richmond, Virginia outfit soon inking a deal with extreme music heavyweights Relapse. Foresta, also of beer bong-favouring thrashers Municipal Waste explains. “Ryan, I grew up with him. We talked about doing a band for years, like, fifteen years we talked about doing a band together. He was so busy when he was playing drums in Darkest Hour, and I was doing Municipal Waste all the time. We were never even in town at the same time because we were on tour so damn much.

“He eventually quit Darkest Hour, was just hanging around and Municipal Waste was taking a little downtime between tours and albums. We just started a band, playing locally, having a good time. Phil had a shitload of riffs, everything just came together. We wrote the demo. Everything just exploded from there and we didn’t really expect it to go where it went as fast as it did. Once that demo came out it started changing really fast. I think it had like 20,000 downloads in like two days or something, fucking crazy. It’s so funny, how all of a sudden I’ve doubled my fucking workload,” he laughs. “Right now you’ve gotta tour twice as much.”

Does that mean increasing your booze habit two-fold too? “Oh man, I hope not. I think I have actually, now that I think about it,” he chuckles. “My tolerance has gone way up. There’s something a little more intense about the Iron Reagan songs (compared to Municipal Waste), playing them live. We still bring a party atmosphere, but it’s a little more intense.”

A pivotal figure in this more aggressive sound’s development was late GWAR frontman Dave Brockie, a fixture of the Richmond area and regular touring partner-in-crime to both the Municipal Waste and Iron Reagan camps. “I spent a lot of time with Dave; he really liked the band. He would always like hang out side of stage with us, backstage, before and after the show… We wrote this album, The Tyranny Of Will, we wrote half of that album on the road with GWAR. We were kept talking about it with him and he would always tell us ideas for songs and talk about just funny things that he wanted to do with us. I spent a lot of time with him and I miss him. I miss him sorely.

“He left a mark all over the world, but in Richmond it’s definitely more personable. He influenced a lot of people in a lot of different ways. It was a heavy blow for this town to lose him. He definitely shaped the arts scene and the art community, and the metal scene. He pretty much helped build that. He was fucking part of the roots of that. That’s how Richmond works now, is because of the stuff, the paths that he laid.”