Feed Her To The Sharks is an Australian metalcore band. They just released their third album, Fortitude, in February on Victory Records. They were in Antwerp touring with Thyartismurder and Aversion Crowns. Since it’s their first time in Europe, we sat them down and asked them a few questions about the album, tour life and Killswitch Engage.
How’s the tour so far? Your last stop was in Switzerland, how was that?
Switzerland was one of our favourite shows of the tour actually. It was great. And the shows are getting bigger and bigger everyday. Which is good even though we only had two weeks notice for the tour. The tour with Caliban got cancelled and the we got a call if we wanted to play in Europe. And we we’re like ‘yeah, let’s do it’. It’s our first time in Europe. We’ve been to Sweden to record our album. But it’s our first time playing anywhere else in Europe. And it’s been amazing. We’ve only been in Belgium for three hours though. But the weather’s nice, the venue is nice (Trix club), so we’re not complaining.
So you don’t need a lot of preparation for touring?
Usually we like to have a lot of preparation. But we just got our shit together and we did it.
Have you noticed a big difference between the European crowd and Australian?
The European crowd are more accepting, if you can put it like that. All the other bands on this tour are heavier than us but people are still out there. It’s not like they’re just here to see a deathcore show. They respect all the bands and we’ve had a lot of positive responses so far. It seems like in Europe people really come to watch the music. While in Australia, unless there is a big show in a big venue, people rather come out to have a drink, meet their friends, go outside while a band is playing. But here in Europe, when you start playing everyone has your attention. So if we could, we would tour Europe over and over again.
The new album, Fortitude, which came out in February, can you tell us something more about that?
It’s our third full-length album. We worked really hard on it. We spend a lot of time writing this one. And it’s been different to our first two releases. For the first two we had a few line up issues. We never had a permanent five members of the band. But working on this album we’ve had the five people that are currently in the band and we’ve all contributed our own influences to the album. And this added a lot more to the album than what we’ve previously did so that a good thing.
While your first two albums were self-recorded, this is the first one with a record label? Is there a big difference?
There’s not a big difference in recording itself. The biggest change for us is the fact that the label helps out with promotion and getting the album out there. And now we have someone to distribute it and there’s a name behind the album, rather than just us putting it out on Facebook. But there was no pressure on the writing process itself. We showed them the song but they didn’t really have a say in how the songs turned out. We had a really good producer, so the quality of the album is fantastic. And I guess they just had faith in the fact that we would deliver good work.
What does the artwork on the album Fortitude represent?
We did the artwork through a company called Forefathers (an American based company specialised in design). We came up with the name Fortitude because, even though it’s not a concept album, a lot of the song some sort of theme in common, facing your fears. We’ve been trough a difficult time writing this album with band members and injuries and such. So the album just went in that direction. The front cover is a guy facing this wall of energy and we tried to capture what Fortitude means, facing your fears head on.
Feed to the sharks, where did you get that band name?
When we started the band out we tossed up some ideas but this was one came out of one of the first lyrics we ever wrote and it just stuck. And we thought since we’re from Australia it suited us as a band and we just went with it. And it’s nice to put on flyers, an energetic, brutal kind of name that describes the band rather well. It was a lucky coincidence. Writing a song and finding your band name at the same time.
People often compare Feed Her To The Sharks with bands such as Buried in Verona. But if you got to choose, which band would you like to be compared with?
It’s not that we want to be compared with another band, but if we got to choose, we’d really like it if people compared us with Killswitch Engage. Any time someone comes up and is like ‘hey man, I really like your stuff, it remind me of Killswitch Engage, I’m like yes’. That’s the vibe we’re going for. We take influences from a lot of bands, but we try to keep it our own. It would be pretty though if people compared other bands to us. Maybe one day.
Interview done by Elien Van De Walle
