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Blindfolds Aside: Protest the Hero on Being DIY Against the Odds

Canadian prog metal band Protest the Hero’s vocalist Rody Walker on their music subscription service, pretentious rockers and why touring is just like any other job

Feb 26, 2016
Protest The Hero is (from left) Tim Miller (guitars), Rody Walker (vocals), Mike Ieradi (drums) and Luke Hoskin (guitars). Photo by Chris Preyser.

Protest The Hero is (from left) Tim Miller (guitars), Rody Walker (vocals), Mike Ieradi (drums) and Luke Hoskin (guitars). Photo by Chris Preyser.

Ever since Canadian progressive metal band Protest the Hero started releasing their material independently through an exclusive subscription service, they have a new task at hand every time their single comes out. Vocalist Rody Walker says over the phone from Toronto, “As soon as the song goes up, we just have to sit at our computers and flag it.”

This has been the drill since October last year, when Protest the Hero began their subscription series Pacific Myth releasing one song at a time each month, for a six-track EP. With the fifth track due on February 15th, all new material is available only to those who pay the subscription fees of $12. Even then, songs have invariably found their way online. Walker blames social media and how “everyone’s after that moment of self-aggrandizing glory.”

Walker and his band have been fairly vocal about everything around them. The song “Dunsel,” off 2011’s Scurrilous is about the soul-sucking record industry, while their crowdfunded 2013 album Volition had “Underbite,” which was pretty much a piss-take on what Walker calls “disingenuous bands.” He adds, “Saying the same things every night, like ”˜Oh, Milwaukee is the best crowd in the world! Oh, Toronto is the best crowd in the world!’ If it’s not the best crowd in the world, don’t pretend. We spent so long on the road with bands that lie ”“ to themselves, to the audience. They go out there with their heads shoved so far up their own asses pretending that they’re rockers that I lost a little faith in people, you know?”

Walker says Pacific Myth is turning out much more difficult in terms of songwriting than they imagined. But there’s a silver lining. “The songs are so intricate that they take a little more than a month to get together. At the end of the day, I think it has made us more efficient songwriters,” the vocalist says. The band strongly recommends DIY. But Walker has one advice: “Just make sure the music is good before you start. If you’re gonna make any kind of splash, any kind of impact, it really has to be about the music. You can’t just have a clever marketing campaign or something like that. If you’re gonna get popular out of nowhere on an independent level, you have to make sure you have good tunes.” Their new songs “Ragged Tooth,” “Cold Water” and “Tidal” are very much in the fun, experimental metal space, with unpredictable grooves and an overlying mythic tale.

Apart from writing, recording and releasing, Protest the Hero may not have a lot planned out for 2016. Walker, who also  has to plan his wedding, says, “I think we’re probably going to be spending most of the year at home writing and then, I’d like to say that we’ll have a release at the end of 2016 and the next two years ”“ we’ll spend it touring.” But the allure of being on the road is not as exciting as it used to be: “The romanticism is definitely a little dead. The biggest difference is that it’s now a job and everyone hates their job a little bit. It’s difficult, because it is at the end of the day, one of the greatest jobs in the world. You get to paid to go around the world, bang your head and be creative and write music.”

When will their job bring them to India? Walker says they had an offer once, but it fell through at the last minute. Fully acknowledging that he’s met members of Mumbai alt metal band Goddess Gagged [who take their name from a Protest song off 2008’s Fortress], Walker says, “We know that there are people in India that would come to our shows. That’s really awesome to hear ”“ somewhere we’ve never been has any interest in us whatsoever. We will make a more consistent effort to go to India, because we have a lot of friends that have been there and they have nothing but wonderful things to say.”

 

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