An interview with frontman Aaron Beam

 

Welcome back to the UK Aaron, how are you?

I am fine thank you, I am not drinking on this tour  so there will be no hangovers.

Red Fang has been on tour non-stop since the release of Murder The Mountains in 2011. And now you are here at Download, one of the biggest festival in Europe: how do you feel about being part of such an amazing event?

The first time I really started learning about Download was during a tour in the US with a band called Unearth in the summer of 2011. They were showing us picture of the crowd which looked totally insane!  The guys from Unearth  could not stop talking about how great Download was, as they just came from playing there. It’s great being here now, I didn’t necessarily think this could ever be a possibility for us.

I like to ask this question to artists playing here at Download: is there any band you are looking forward to see as a fan during these three days?

I wish we could have got here last night to see Queens Of The Stone Age, I have never seen them live and I have been a fan for a long time. Jason Newsted and his band are playing right after us so I am really looking forward to seeing  them, we played a couple of times with them before.

2013 started in great style for Red Fang as you guys played at the Soundwave in Australia, it must have felt like an achievement for you.

Oh yeah! My wife toured the world for ten years in the nineties and she never managed to get to Australia. It has always been a dream of hers. I felt a little guilty but I also felt this kind of proud accomplishment  to be able to go down to Australia. Soundwave is incredible, everything is so well organized  and the people  that go there.. I think that Australians are very resilient people,  doors open at 10 am, we played at 11.20 and every day before noon there was a huge crowd, already drunk and ready to go. It was great, I’d go back there in a second!

I think Red Fang is great music for Australians.

It was really, really fun!

Let’s talk about your upcoming album: Murder The Mountains still feels fresh to me, I cannot believe you have the follow-up already. How did you find the time during your recent, extensive  tour to even think about a new album?

It was tough, we actually had to turn down a bunch of  tours to set aside some studio time, which we had never done before. This is the first album which we have recorded as part of what they call…. a cycle? I hadn’t even herd this term before, but essentially with Murder The Mountains we felt we could only tour for so long before it was going to start petering out. Luckily it still feels fresh to you, but we knew we had to get something else done and we made a point to have some studio time and not accepting tour for the beginning of the year. So we just sat down and wrote a bunch of songs in three months and recorded them right after that and mixed them immediately after. It was stressful as we have never worked that way  but I think that creating these sort of artificial, intentional restrictions with time, sometimes it’s the best way for creativity to happen. If you give yourself too much time, you may end up overthinking.

What can we expect from Red Fang – chapter III?

The new album is definitely a continuation of Murder The Mountains but I feel like, because we did not have enough time to explore,  a lot of the songs are  much more compact, even the long tracks feel like they are denser and they just get to the point a lot faster.  But I think it’s very hard to describe how a record is, I will leave it to the professionals.

And I think it’s always good not to give too much anticipation on an upcoming album, it’s better to be surprised..

Yeah!

Any anticipation on the title?

No we cannot release this information yet.

So we will have to wait and we will. Not to put any pressure but is there a release date?

It’s done, we finished everything before we started the current tour, the new album will be released in the middle of October. As soon as you start getting depressed because the summer is over, the new Red Fang album will be out.

Fabiola Santini

Ph: Fabiola Santini