It has been a huge past few years for New Zealand outfit Alien Weaponry. The band rose to attention in their homeland off the back of a High School music competition and soon after gained international attention when their music videos started to clock up millions of views on Youtube. Since then they have released their debut album, Tu, they have signed with Napalm Records, opened for Prophets Of Rage and played at one of the biggest music festivals in the world Wacken… all while the members of the band are still teenagers. Now Alien Weaponry are getting ready to play at Download Festival so HEAVY Mag caught up with Lewis de Jong to see what Alien Weaponry have in store for Australia.
“The band actually started eight years ago,” explains de Jong. “And when we started it we didn’t expect for it to go as far as it has gone. We kind of started it just for fun and then we entered Rock Quest which is the New Zealand school band competition and we won that and I guess that is when things started to kick off and ever since then it has just been blowing up rapidly… everything has been moving at 100 miles per hour and it has felt really unreal.”
“When I first heard we were playing Download in Australia I was pretty damn excited because that is a really big name in the Festival world,” he says when our talk turns to Download. “It is always great when you get the chance to play at such a high profile show and I guess I am just looking forward to the experience of it… especially getting to play in front of 1000s of people. When we first started our band we set ourselves the target that we wanted to play at Wacken by the time Henry was twenty years old, now Henry is still eighteen and we have achieved that goal and I think that moment when I got off the stage at Wacken it was one of the best moments of my life and that showed that if you believe in it hard enough then you can achieve it.”
You can listen to our full Alien Weaponry interview on the Spreaker player on this page and of course make sure you pick up tickets to Download Festival… all the details are below.
