Soundwave 2013 – While She Sleeps Interview

They say necessity is the mother of all innovation. As cliched as that line is, the concept really holds water when you consider UK’s While She Sleeps. They have risen from a scene that is slowly choking itself to death with homogeneous music and the stock-standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-breakdown-chorus-chorus drone we’ve come to see time and time again with recent metalcore. But by taking the time-tested metalcore energy and fusing it with the ballsiness of hard rock, well, ladies and gentlemen, we have that ‘breath of fresh air’ everyone’s looking for. And guess what? It’s coming straight to us. Feeds caught up with lead guitarist Sean Long to chat about old music, new music and Soundwave.

For a band who appears to have formed from thin air, While She Sleeps have all of a sudden taken the Australian metal scene by storm. While their recent EP The North Stands for Nothing scored them many fans over here, Their national tour with genre buddies House Vs. Hurricane was sure to win over the rest. This was the first time Down Under for a lot of the band, and where the conversation started: “Man…that was one of the best things I ever did. They were a bunch of rad guys, and the dudes from Northlane were sweet. It’s cool because they weren’t little shows but its sort of like starting again over there. That was really cool but we had fans over there! We didn’t think we’d see that but there were a whole bunch of kids at the shows.”

So having already toured here once, the lads will be right at home come Soundwave 2013. They are one of the most obvious additions to the lineup after Maddah himself tweeted how amazing they were, despite the choice of name. We got chatting about how that all fell into place: “We’re not really sure how that happened, ha ha. Our Management told us ‘you know, we’ve sorted it out. You’re going to Soundwave’. We had only just got back from Australia too so we couldn’t believe we were going back.”

Obviously very grateful for the experience, Sean spoke of Soundwave more from a fan’s point of view, rather than as seasoned touring musicians: “I’m pretty stoked that Linkin Park and Blink 182 are playing! That’s crazy!”

The band will of course be bringing with them their latest studio offering This Is Six. Though already with a couple of releases in their back catalogue, This Is Six is their one and only full-length, so far. We got chatting about the step up from an EP to an album and how they went about it: “Well, with The North Stands for Nothing we didn’t think it was going to be released, it was just like another demo, or three or four-track EP. But this time round we know we had a bigger audience, we knew a lot more people would be listening to it so we tried a lot harder; we actually really surprised ourselves.” And the extra attention to detail has clearly paid off, as Long continued: “People seem to be loving it. I’m happy with all the feedback we’ve been getting. We actually listen to it a bit ourselves, we would hear it here and there in the studio you know? And yeah, even we are still loving it.”

The buzz of finishing up a full-length album to critical acclaim had clearly not worn off, as Sean confessed that work on the follow-up has already begun: “I’ve already started writing some of the next one, ha ha. It’s cool but its hard, because, like I said, we surprised ourselves with the other one, so I’m shitting myself about this next one.”



This Is Six
is officially released and with there still being 6 or so months left before While She Sleeps return to their swelling fan base, there is plenty of time to learn the words for Soundwave 2013.

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