Well it has to be one of the biggest surprises of the year. The announcement that Underoath were back together, let alone had a new album coming out came out of nowhere – and that is exactley the way the band wanted it to be.
The announcement that Underoath were dropping Erase Me was met with some very happy music fans, but it also had a lot of people asking – what happened to the build up for such a big album being released. Well HEAVY Mag caught up with Christopher Dudley from the band and found out that even their label was kept in the dark.
“It actually started with us deciding on whether or not we actually wanted to make a new album or not,” says Dudley. “We were on tour and that was going really well, we knew the tour was going pretty well but we just weren’t sure if we wanted to create again. Through a lot of discussion and soul searching we decided that we did want to record again, but it had been about a decade or so since we had done that, we’ve all obvioulsy grown a lot as people and grown a lot as musicians… we’d all matured. We also wanted to make sure that we weren’t trying to ‘do’ anything, because in the past our tendency has been to go into the studio and say ‘well what do people want to hear?’ You want those people to like what you are doing but we took a step back and decided that we just wanted to write what we wanted to write.”
I ask Dudley if when Underoath got back together whether it felt like it was something new or was it that old familiar. “It was definitely something new,” he says after thinking for a moment. “At a personal level I guess it felt like slipping into an old shoe but musically and creativily it felt new…. very new. We wrote in a way that we have never done before, we recorded in a way that we have never done before. In so many ways it was completly brand new but the results speak for themselves.
Erase Me is out now.
