One of the beautiful things about music is its ability to transcend boundaries and expectations. Nothing can be taken for granted or thought of as a given, with each individual piece of music a different sonic representation of the people who wrote and played it.
But sometimes things can surprise you out of the blue - especially collaborations - where bands from seemingly opposing sides of the musical fence combine to create something truly epic.
Two bands that would generally never be considered as bedfellows - I Prevail and All Time Low - recently did just that, uniting for the just released track Hate This Song which sees both bands venture outside of their comfort zones to create something special irrespective of which band and/or genre you prefer.
Hate This Song combines All Time Low's effervescent, three-chord charm and knack for melody with I Prevail's duelling vocals and riffy snarl. Essentially, Hate This Song is a modern breakup track that highlights how music is the universal love language with which we communicate.
With I Prevail currently in the country as part of Parkway Drive's 20th Anniversary Tour, frontman Eric Vanlerberghe joined HEAVY to discuss both the tour and the new song, starting by asking him about the unlikely union with All Time Low.
"I think that was the plan and the magic of it," he smiled. "In between this last record, and before we start working on our new stuff, we had some opportunities to work with other bands, one of them being All Time Low. Our manager hit us up a while back and said 'hey, we got an email and request to do a collab with All Time Low' and it was like okay, sick, let's do the track. They sent the track over, and it's pretty much what you hear, except Brian wasn't singing the verse and the bridge was this instrumental thing. After hearing it a couple of times and listening to it and trying to get our heads around it, I knew that chorus… that chorus is a banger. It's a 10 out of 10 chorus. So we said yes, let's do it, now what do we do? Do they just want us to sing the parts they already wrote? After some talking back and forth with them, they said no, we want you to write something to it. Just take out whatever you want and put whatever you want in. So we had Brian sing the second verse and tweak some stuff up, then with the bridge we thought if they came to us, I'm sure they don't just want our poppy, melodic side. If they really wanted us, maybe they wanted to hear some riffage and our take on modern metal. So we banged our heads against the wall for a few hours and wrote this bridge part and made this abrupt left turn in the song and find a way to throw it back to the chorus. After a couple of days working on it, they were actually in our hometown of Detroit playing a show a couple of weeks later, so I ended up going to the show and getting to show them in person, and it was like, fair warning, it's pretty different. I played it for them, and they all were like, oh my God, this is sick, this is so sick. So we went back and tweaked it a little bit and here's the song. It was fun. It was a fun writing challenge to be able to really write outside the box of what typically I Prevail is. The same with our last collab with Halestorm, it was just a new tool for us to write stuff that's not typically I Prevail. Maybe it won't fit the record, but maybe we learned something on that journey. Or maybe we have a song now to feature a collab with a totally different artist. It was a lot of fun and a great experience."
In the full interview Eric talks more about the unlikely marriage between I Prevail and All Time Low, how difficult it was to merge the two style and genres, their next album and how far advanced it is, the tour with Parkway Drive and how much it means to the band, how the shows will differ to when they were here last as part of Good Things last year and more.