Interview by Kris Peters
Prequels and such talk are usually reserved for the film industry. The blockbuster before the blockbuster, if you will, but in all honesty has it ever really worked?
I could drag out a myriad of examples and create all sorts of conjecture here, but at the end of the day you have to admit it is not a word commonly used in the music industry.
But then again From Ashes To New are not your run of the mill common band.
Since breaking through with their debut album Day One in 2016, the US rock outfit has gone on to amass four Top 10 singles, over 600 million all-time streams and more than 75 million video views to date. So when they announce their intent to make a prequel to an already successful concept album then who cares to stop and argue the semantics of contrasting industries?
From Ashes To New are far from a safe band.
By weaving hard rock, hip hop, electronic and alternative music into a tapestry of sonic enlightenment FATN have set themselves distinctly apart from an ever clustering swarm of by-the-numbers rock outfits that class experimentation as deciding on which degree of seperation they are feeling on any given day.
And so enters the fray an album titled Blackout which acts as a conceptual prequel to Day One, encapsulating the trivialities and nuances of a pre-apocalyptic world that was glimpsed through realistic eyes during the 2020 pandemic during which the album was written.
With the release date of July 28 looming, HEAVY sat down with vocalist Danny Case to venture down the rabbit hole that has consumed his thoughts during the making of Blackout.
"We've been comparing it a lot...," he measured, "...it's a quote, unquote prequel to our debut album Day One. When we were writing the record it was early 2021 when the lockdowns were just starting to end - for us at least - and touring still hadn't come back but we were writing. It was in your face every day. One of the first songs we worked on was Armageddon because it seemed like every day was the end of the world. That was the song that came about early on and we were like, hey, we have our very first record day One. The art on it has a kid on a planet looking back on the old planet as it is falling apart. So why don't we take this record and make it where the kid is on that old planet before he leaves for the new planet. Another thing we were trying to do was capture the same kind of heaviness that the first album had. We wanted to take a step back and look at what do we really wanna do? What do the fans really want from this band? And we found that we really enjoy writing heavy music and that was what put this band on the map. It also tied in with the music we were making in that it was kind of like an apocalyptic record almost."
In the full interview Danny talks more about the musical side of the album, writing to a concept, the singles released and how they represent the album, the concept in greater detail, how FATN has changed since he joined the band, the different styles that make up their music and how they successfully integrate them together, future plans and more.