Stray From The Path

Stray From The Path are touring Australia in support of their latest album 'Anonymous' and as a part of The Amity Affliction's 'Let The Ocean Take Me' tour. Before their sideshow with Architects at Oxford Arts Factory on Tuesday night, Drew York and Tom Williams were able to take some time out to chat to killyourstereo.com about touring on such a huge bill, their latest album and the status of a follow-up.

You guys have been in Australia for half a week now - how are you enjoying things so far?

Drew York: It’s insane! We’ve gotten lucky to get in with UNFD and have them take us over for the second time on such a big tour. Architects is in the building, and we’re playing a sideshow with them tonight. The tour’s been great - it’s huge, some of the biggest shows we’ve ever played - ever, and we couldn’t ask for anything better.

For an Australian tour this is enormous. As a general rule, we don’t get tour packages that include four or five internationally renowned bands, ever. The fact that we’ve got a hardcore/metalcore bill that’s sold out the Hordern Pavilion is mental. You can probably count the number of times that’s happened on one hand.

Tom Williams: Yeah, it’s not normal in our ‘realm’ either. Unless we were touring with like, Deftones or something, I can’t think of anybody that could do that. It’s fucking wild, and it’s cool, because going into this, Amity are a band that have done Warped Tour and played the same stage as us, with the same bands, and on the same level. When we came here I kind of expected them to be on the same level as us, until they went on stage, and it’s insane how huge they are here.

I barely even listen to Amity, and I got chills watching them play in Melbourne. I couldn’t even dream of playing like that, and they just kinda play it off like it’s just another show - it’s amazing!

You guys did your first tour of Australia with Northlane last year in much smaller venues, how have you found the two tours to compare?

DY: When we came with Northlane it was like, okay, smaller rooms, kind of like this one tonight, maybe a little bigger, but we knew the show was gonna go off, and it was what we were used to back home. On this tour, it’s like, we literally have to go out there, and there’s so many people, and we really need to win them over. I guess with the tour being so enormous, it’s just so different.

How have you found that struggle so far? Do you reckon you guys have been winning people over?

DY: Before the tour I was a little bit nervous. I didn’t know what we were gonna say or how we were gonna do it, but when we get up there, it’s like we just do what comes naturally, whether we play to 100 kids or 5000.

TW: Sometimes it takes a couple of songs, but by the time we play our last three or so songs, we’ve usually got everyone. It’s definitely something where we can’t just give up or anything because these kids are waiting for Amity and we need to get them going, and we usually do. It’s been working out well. We’ve only done three shows so far - this is also the shortest tour ever. Biggest, and shortest. The fact that we come down for like a week and then go home is crazy, but it’s been fantastic. All of my friends in other bands are heaps envious of this opportunity, and it took until we landed for me to go ‘far out, this is a big opportunity for us.’

All of the bands I interview always talk about how it’s really easy to tour Australia, in comparison to the rest of the world. You come over here and you do a week long run, whereas if you’re touring America, you’re looking at a possible three month stint playing a show every night.

DY: It’s easy thanks to Amity and UNFD really. We literally fly to every show, get put up in shows way above our standards, and play to a crazy number of people. What we play to in a week of Warped Tour shows, we play to in Brisbane. So it may be easy, but it’s because a lot of people make it easy for us.

TW: For us to come here and tour with Northlane and Amity is pretty damn lucky too. If you were to ask me for my top three bands to tour with here, it’d be Northlane, Amity, Parkway Drive, and we got two out of three in our first two tours.

There’s just a few hours till you hit the stage tonight. Do you ever feel like you get pre-show nerves or anything of that nature?

TW: I did on the first show of this tour, because it was pouring rain, there was 5000 people watching, and all my stuff was just a mess. We had a new setlist, opening with a song we haven’t played for a while, but now I’m just keen. I usually don’t get too nervous, but I get a bit anxious to see how it goes.

DY: Anxious, definitely. The only time I really get nervous is when we play a home show because there’s so many friends and family there, and you’re wondering whether or not they still even care about you.

You guys released ‘Anonymous’ last year. It’s about a year old now, do you think it still holds up well?

TW: Yeah, after Melbourne yesterday especially. We closed with Badge & A Bullet and it was fucking mental. We did a signing in Melbourne yesterday and there was like, 50-75 people showed up in the rain. That’s more people that would come to a signing anywhere in America. The album’s only a year old though, so I still think it’s pretty relevant. That said, we are already thinking about the next one.

For the ‘Anonymous’ marketing campaign, you had a crack at a similar way of marketing to Northlane with ‘Singularity’. How did you find that to work for you?

TW: It worked great. We looked at the hashtag and people were like ‘it looks scary’, ‘what is this, some conspiracy thing?’ and the minority didn’t even know it was a band or music. With the first five minutes of the website being up, it crashed. This has been the biggest album we’ve ever had, by far too.

DW: I think the other three combined didn’t sell as well.

TW: If you combine the other three and then like, triple the sales for the debut week, it still isn’t even close.

Listening to the album, it’s pretty obvious that you guys are really pissed off about the political state of America. Is there anything specific that triggers that? Or is it a conglomeration of different things?

DY: I think it’s just we see this stuff going on and we wanna address it, rather than write a song about something really unimportant. Tom reads up on all of that stuff and is more ‘into’ that than anyone else in the band.

TW: I think the grand scheme of it is that you can’t believe anything you get told, whether it be from my dad, from the internet, or from Fox News, because everyone’s feeding you shit. The first song ‘False Flag’ just comes down to a mess of lies and you can’t trust fucking anybody. We’re expected to accept government, law enforcement, capitalism, and all this stuff, and it’s kind of frustrating.

Law enforcement right now is nuts as well.  They’re allowed to pull you over on the road and take a blood sample that you can’t refuse. That feels like some Nazi Germany shit. Then recently, an unarmed 18 year old kid gets two bullets to the head from a cop. That’s nuts.

It’s super scary. Then I come over and I’m expecting that I’m gonna have to take all my clothes off and have someone punch me in the dick before I can get on a plane, and they’re like ‘no, just put your wallet in this basket’ and then you can go. In America, with all this high terror alert, they just wanna drive fear into you however they can, and because you’re scared, they wanna take away your liberties. You can’t even use your phone without it being recorded. They use fear to make you comply with them, and that fucking sucks. That’s what ‘Anonymous’ is about.

It’s probably gonna be even more extreme on the next one, because things are only getting more extreme.

You guys have been given heaps of comparisons to Rage Against The Machine for your work on ‘Anonymous’. What’s your take on that? Are you happy about it, or would you rather just be known as your own thing?

DY: We understand it. We all love the band, and we’d never be like ‘fuck that band, we don’t sound like them.’ Obviously there are elements and parts that sound like them in there. There’s also parts that sound nothing like them that they would just never write.

TW: It’s all an evolution of everything, you know? That’s what I grew up listening to. Rage grew up listening to California hip-hop, and tried to mix that with Rock and Roll. Look at Coldplay, they grew up listening to U2 and so that’s what they sound like. I grew up listening to Rage, I also grew up listening to Converge. Meld the two together and you’ve got something a bit like Stray [From The Path]. That’s what it’s like with every band. Like I said, Coldplay or Rage Against The Machine, or any band really just create based off what they’ve grown to love. Personally, I’d rather just be known as Stray, but those comparisons are what people do. It’s what I do, it’s what Drew does, it’s even what you do.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t think there was an overwhelming RATM-esque sound on the record. Obviously Badge & A Bullet had a lot of it, but everything else I felt had the influence while remaining distinctly different.

TW: Of course. You can’t show me any Rage Against The Machine song that has a blast beat in it, or even any song that’s as fast as some of our tracks. I play like Rage Against The Machine cause that’s what I grew up listening to, but I also try to make it my own thing.

You guys have been together for a fair while now.

DY: 13 years technically, but as far as the world is concerned, we didn’t really start until 2007.

TW: I’d say 7 years of being a full time and 13 of me playing in my garage. (laughs)

I didn’t really see Stray From The Path’s name popping up in Australia until like, late 2011, or even 2012. Was it frustrating having to put in so much effort and wait so long for any real reward?

TW: Oh, absolutely! That’s why you do anything though. If you open a restaraunt and just say ‘hey, we’re open!’, no one’s gonna come eat there. You need to show them that you’re food is good, and then if you’re food’s good people come back, and so we were making a ‘recipe’ of sorts that people liked to ‘eat’ and that we liked to make.

We’re late in our career, and we’re only starting to make it now. You looks at some of the bands that were really struggling like Attack Attack! or Woe, Is Me. They all fell off I think because their fans grew up and started listening to us, and to Architects, and to Every Time I Die. Heck, Every Time I Die just put out their seventh or eight album and it was one of their biggest. All these bands that are deep in their career with a more mature sound are now starting to thrive.

We always had faith in our music, and so we started playing to like, 10 kids, and then the other we played to 5000 in Melbourne. Obviously we didn’t headline that, but we earnt the spot, and we’re now globally touring. That said, it also takes a lot of luck. There are a lot of bands that are fucking fantastic and they just never get anywhere unfortunately.

When you were looking at doing this as a full time thing, was the goal that you had in mind anything like the way it is, or was it less glamorous or more glamorous or what?

DY: This kind of started when me and Tom were like, “we don’t wanna go to college, we just wanna do this band.” I didn’t think about where this was going or anything like that, I just fucking did it.

TW: It’s definitely more glamorous. We started touring in a shitty van that broke down all the time playing to fucking nobody, and that’s what we wanted. THAT is what we wanted. The fact that we got a top 40 album in America, play Australia to thousands of people, play Warped Tour is just a bonus.

DY: We just wanted to go to California. (laughs)

T: That’s literally all we wanted to do, go to California. Then we went and our drummer got food poisoning and it was terrible. We were playing three songs a show ‘cause he couldn’t deal with it. I remember before that tour though, we were like ‘do we really wanna do this?’ and we just went ‘fuck it! let’s do it’ and then we got signed.

This is your second visit to Australia, second time supporting a bigger artist, and it sounds like both of those times you well and truly earned your fanbase down here. Do you think we could see you on a headliner next time around?

TW: I think we’ll come back when the new album is done, so after your next winter. We’re also crossing our fucking dicks for Soundwave, just like everyone. We always like to do a couple of support tours before we head out on our own, but seeing how these shows have gone, I think we could definitely do it playing clubs like this [Oxford Arts Factory].

You mentioned a couple of times that you’re working on the follow-up to ‘Anonymous’. Where’s that at right now?

TW: We’ve got one song, and a couple of riffs. (laughs)

DY: It’s like a newborn baby.

TW: We’re shooting to hit the studio in February though, and then we’re shooting to get it out in September two years from when Anonymous came out.

Catch Stray From the Path in Sydney (September 4) and Brisbane (September 5) with The Amity Affliction, Issues, Architects and Deez Nuts.