Interview: The Dillinger Escape Plan
on January 22nd, 2012The Dillinger Escape Plan are nearing the end of their tour cycle on the back of 2010′s ‘Option Paralysis‘ release and have begun working on new material, for what, is something they are not quite sure of just yet though. They’ll take a short break from writing to hit Australia next month as part of Soundwave Festival and support System Of A Down on their Sydney and Melbourne headline shows. Deborah Konopnicki recently caught up with the band’s frontman Greg Puciato to chat about what the band are currently up to and the upcoming tour. Expand this post to take a read.
G’day Greg. Thanks for taking out some time to chat with us today. I’m a massive Dillinger fan so this is a bit of a thrill!
Oh thanks! That’s rad.
What are you guys up to at the moment?
We just finished a tour with Mastodon in the US and now we’ve taken like a month-and-a-half off to try and get a lot of writing done for our next album. It’s the longest time that we’ve had off since December 2009 I think so it feels a little strange to not be touring. The next time that we do any real touring is when we go to the UK with Mastodon for like two weeks before we hit up Soundwave and touch down in Australia.
How was the US tour with Mastodon for you?
It was awesome! We haven’t toured with those guys since like 2002 when we were in an RV and they were in a van and we were playing shows for like 100 people a night. We were playing in like taverns and bars and stuff. I remember if there were more than 100 people we all thought that it was incredible. To be on tour together nine years later and have us both be successful and have some of these shows together with so many people is a celebration that we’re all still doing this and that we’ve all managed to keep our shit together!
I think one of the best things about you guys for Australian fans is that we never have to wait too long in-between tours. Every time that you’ve come back since I saw you for the first time years ago you’ve just taken your show to another level and the fans have really responded and I’m sure that it’ll go up another notch for Soundwave!
Yeah, we love it over there! Look, if I was an alien from another planet and I had to come to the earth and I didn’t know anything about countries and I didn’t have any allegiance to anywhere then I would probably pick Sydney or Melbourne! You guys have a really cool thing going on down there. You have a really nice mix and a really cool culture. It’s like European, American and your own thing going on. You have a much friendlier place. You’re into art and music and I feel more of a kinship with people down there then I do with most of the people in the United States, which is strange. We love it down there and the last time that we played Soundwave was one of our favorite, favorite tours that we’ve ever done. We don’t have anything like that here! As far as travelling festivals go we have Warped Tour and things like that but those things are no-where near the size of the Soundwave. They’re more like the European festivals but the European festivals are all separated. You play in England one day and Germany the next day and they’re totally different line-ups. It’s a cool thing to be on Soundwave where you’ve got this massive line-up that’s the same bands every day.
I loved your Soundwave set from a couple of years ago. Festivals can be weird but I loved how you totally captivated your fans with your live show and also totally blew the minds of anyone that was walking past. Do you guys get a kick out of totally wowing the audience like that and shattering expectations?
I love it because so often we’re preaching to the choir. I mean, there’s something awesome about playing to a room full of your fans because you feel like you’re all in on the same joke… kind of. You have this explosive energy from the second that you start playing and you know that everyone there knows the songs and knows all of the words and there is something just so awesome about that. It’s something completely different and equally compelling about playing in front of a bunch of people when you know that 75% of them probably have never heard of you. Yeah, some of them might have heard of the name but I love watching the reactions going from complete shock or sometimes disgust to eventually being into it – or not! It’s just nice seeing people’s reactions that aren’t there to see you. It puts you out of your comfort zone a little bit, which is a good thing too. It’s good.
Just touching on that last Soundwave for a tiny bit longer, I think that one of the universal highlights from the shows were when you hopped up on stage with the majestic Trent Reznor to perform “Wish”. Would you say that moment was one of the highlights for you as well?
Oh yeah, for sure. I didn’t understand how cool it was honestly and this is going to sound really lame but I wasn’t a Nine Inch Nails fan as a kid. I didn’t ‘get’ how big of a deal they were. I actually became friends with Trent before I was a fan of Nine Inch Nails. I then went back to listen to all of the Nine Inch Nails stuff and was like “Wow… how did I miss all of this awesome stuff growing up in the 90’s?!” and now I’m a huge fan. When we did that thing with Nine Inch Nails, all of my friends and all of these other bands that were on the tour during Soundwave were like “Man, I can’t believe that you’re going to do this… this is insane!”. They were videoing everything from the side of the stage. After the fact when I started to see all these YouTube videos from it I started to realize “Oh, shit… that was like really crazy! That’s so insane! That band is massive”. It wasn’t even like we were coming on stage for one part of one song, he told me to sing the entire song while he sang back-up vocals and played guitar. It was so insane. Trent Reznor is such an incredible musician. I mean, he’s won Academy awards and stuff! It’s really an honor that someone like that gives even half of a shit about a band like us.
Now focusing on the 2012 Soundwave, what do you think you’re most looking forward to? Are there specific bands? Places that you can’t wait to get back to in Australia?
It’s weird because most of the bands on this years’ Soundwave I feel like we’ve seen or played with at one point or another. Bands like Slipknot, Meshuggah Mastodon, Underoath, Thursday and Devin Townsend… there are this bunch of bands that we’ve toured with before which is awesome. There’s so many of them! The thing that I’m most excited about honestly is having Mastodon there. We’re just all really excited just to keep this thing that we just did going in some respect. I’m excited to see System Of A Down as well because we played together about nine years ago, right at the height of “Toxicity” and they were the biggest that they ever were. It’s going to be cool. I’ve seen those guys around at shows or we’ll just catch up but it’ll be really cool to hang out with them and talk about what’s been going on in the decade or so since we last played together.
So the other exciting news is that you guys are writing at the moment! Is the aim to have something ready for the Australian tour?
We want to! I’m not sure if we’re going to but we want to. I want to have at least two or three songs done by the time that we come to Australia. If that’s the case then I don’t even necessarily know if we’ll play them at the festival but if we land a sideshow then we might bust out one there.
There was some talk about you guys releasing an EP and then an album to follow on form that. Is that still the course of action?
We have no idea. We don’t even have a plan honestly! We have so many options available to us! This is like the first time that we haven’t been under any contract or anything what–so-ever. It’s like the first time that we’re totally free. We’ve tossed around the idea of doing an EP in some kind of non-traditional way by only releasing 7” singles and digital downloads and not even releasing a CD version or doing a two or three song EP, but at the same time if you do a two or three song EP then that just cuts into the amount of time that it takes you to write an album because you can’t re-release those songs once they’re out. If we were a band that wrote 20 songs at a time then it would be great to do an EP but we really take forever. By the time that we get three or four songs deep I don’t think that we’re going to want to release them and then start again for a full-length album. We might as well keep on going and get about ten or eleven out there.
You released “Option Paralysis” completely by yourselves as well. Did you find that it was such a rewarding experience that you want to head down that path again for this new release?
There are certain things about it that are really rewarding and there are certain things about it that are a huge pain in the ass! Like we haven’t had a manager really in a long time, so to not have a manager and to have the responsibility to do a lot of self-releasing, I want to create music, I want to write music and I don’t want to talk about label shit with Ben and Liam; I don’t want to deal with all of that stuff. I leave it all to them. I don’t want to be so concerned with it. Self-releasing is a massive issue because you have to do all this other stuff that you wouldn’t think about having to do and it just totally drains you. We think about The Dillinger Escape Plan almost all-day long anyway so when you have to think about those other aspects like “who’s going to release this album in Japan, who’s going to release this album in Australia, who’s going to release this album in Europe, who’s’ going to be our publicist in this place and that place” it just gets to this point where I’m like “well who gives a fuck!?”. I just want to write music and go on tour.
With the few tracks that you hope to have ready soon, what kind of direction can fans expect to hear form you guys? You’ve made it pretty well-known that you don’t really even listen to a anything that sounds like your guys so what can we expect to see that in the new tracks?
It’s a little early to tell with these songs but I can tell you that we’re very conscious of trying to not write a better version of “Option Paralysis” because I think that once you’ve been a band for a while and you’ve got some kind of critical acclaim then I think it’s really easy to stick to what you’ve already done and try to make it better. I really feel like with “Option Paralysis” we reached the apex of what we started with “Miss Machine”. I feel like we started “Miss Machine” then went onto “Ire Works” and “Option Paralysis” and everything was building on each other. I feel like “Ire Works” was building on “Miss Machine” and I felt like “Option Paralysis” was just the ultimate version of, or like a super version of “Miss Machine”. We’re better at what we do and we’re conscious of what we’re doing. I feel like we wrote the best record of what we could with that style, like the crazy Dillinger stuff that’s like ‘singy’ parts and all of this other stuff. I really don’t want to do another record like that. I don’t care at this point if we lose a whole lot of fans. I’d rather write a new doom record then write another Dillinger Escape Plan sounding record.
Wow, I’m not sure how to process that at the moment but it sounds pretty damn interesting. Is there anything in particular that’s pushing the music in that direction or has that just been the plan all along in your head?
I really don’t listen to anything at all that sounds like Dillinger and I know that Ben doesn’t either so our influences have always been really far away from what we really sound like. I think that’s the thing that’s really interesting; we don’t really listen to our peers. We don’t listen to anything that sounds like us so we don’t end up recycling or regurgitating any ideas that are part of our ‘scene’. I haven’t really been listening to any metal or anything hard at all so I have no idea! I don’t think that what we listen to has too much of an influence on what we sound like.
One last question before I run out of time today, and perhaps a pretty ambitious question but do you have a time in mind where you would like to see some material released?
I mean, I think that we’d want to get it out by the end of 2012, but that’s the only realistic thing that I can say. I mean, we’re not going to tour any more after this Australian run and the little things that we do around it – like, we’re going to go to Thailand and things like that. We get back maybe the third week of March and from that point on we really just want to write. We wrote “Option Paralysis” in about four months or so and then took two months to record it. If we put out nose to the grindstone and keep that same work ethic then I think that we can record it by maybe like August or September. It’s going to be tough to get it out by the end of 2012 but I’d really like to. If not, it’ll be there by the very start of 2013. I know that it sounds like a rally far way off right now but it’s really not.
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THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN – Option Paralysis
Available online now [Here] with free postage.
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Catch The Dillinger Escape Plan playing Soundwave Festival nationally
FEBRUARY
25th – RNA Showgrounds, Brisbane [AA] SOLD OUT
26th – Showgrounds, Sydney [AA] SOLD OUT
MARCH
2nd – Showgrounds, Melbourne [AA] SOLD OUT
3rd – Bonython Park, Adelaide [AA]
5th – Claremont Showgrounds, Perth [AA]
—> Full details at www.soundwavefestival.com
Also supporting System Of A Down on their headline shows
FEBRUARY
28th – Entertainment Centre, Sydney [Lic/AA]
29th – Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne [Lic/AA]
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