Underoath is a Christian metalcore band that has been together for close to 15 years. In that time, they have released 7 studio albums, toured an innumerable amount of times almost worldwide, and have made quite the name for themselves in the music world.
On February 15th 2011, I had the chance to catch up with two members of the band at MusiquePlus in Montreal. I got there just in time to watch their 15 minute sound check, and I felt myself go back in time 7 years or so to when I first heard of them in high school. I couldn’t have been more excited to get that sneak peek and hear a couple songs off their latest record, Disambiguation.
Since February, Underoath completed their North American tour, visited Europe in April, and are now gearing up to play shows throughout the United States in July.
CONFRONT: How’s your tour going?
UNDEROATH: Great, the tour has been awesome!
CONFRONT: Yeah? How was your show last night?
UNDEROATH: It’s been good, my favorite so far on the tour.
CONFRONT: So Montreal is a good crowd?
UNDEROATH: Oh yeah, really good!
CONFRONT: Cool, what kind of songs have you guys been playing, a mix from all your albums?
UNDEROATH: Mostly a mix from the last four, we try and cover all the bases, fan bases.
CONFRONT: Cool! Have you guys been playing a lot off your new album?
UNDEROATH: Yeah, I think almost half the set is new stuff. We play 14 songs and 6 are new!
CONFRONT: Oh that’s awesome!
UNDEROATH: Yeah!
CONFRONT: How are the fans reacting to the new songs?
UNDEROATH: Every night is really different. Some nights are really good, some nights are indifferent, and then some nights certain songs get better reactions than others. It’s kind of all over the place. We find that a lot of people who like it say that their favorite songs are across the board, so there’s not really an obvious direct thing. But all in all, it’s going really well.
CONRONT: Good to hear. So your new album came out just a couple months ago, where did the title come from?
UNDEROATH: The interweb? Well we couldn’t figure out the title so we thought about maybe just leaving it as the symbol, and then we looked up the symbol, and the first definition was disambiguation in parentheses, and then it listed all these different abstract meanings that didn’t really make sense- it’s just not anything, it’s this symbol that means a lot of things, sort of. We just thought that would be really cool, so that’s what we named it!
CONFRONT: What about the album artwork?
UNDEROATH: Jordan Butcher actually did the artwork for it. The album has an overall theme to it that we let him take in the direction he wanted, and he worked with him on that.
CONFRONT: Cool. I read that your first album that you guys wrote was with almost entirely different members in the band and that’s been changing over the years, has it affected the final product at all? How has it changed over the years?
UNDEROATH: There’s only really one new member to the band right now, four of the members right now have written the last three or four albums. We only had a drummer change. People like to make it sound like the band got a whole makeover and everything is different, but that’s really not the case!
CONFRONT: So it’s not like some crazy change or anything?
UNDEROATH: No I mean it’s a crazy difference for us, because the member who left was a pretty key member, and the guy who joined- our friend Daniel- was also a pretty significant member in other bands and has played a significant role in our band and writing the record. So the record definitely turned out completely differently than it was set to with our old drummer Aaron. But yeah, it was great. People asked how the process went with all the hiccups along the road, but I think it actually sped up the process. There was a lot of friction with Aaron and then when Daniel came in he had a lot of ideas that we didn’t feel comfortable exploring with Aaron in the band, and then Daniel had been playing some softer music, he quit Norma Jean and hadn’t played heavy music in like 2 years, so we all had a lot of pent up creativity. It all just came out, we probably wrote the record faster and easier, and it’s more creative and better then if we hadn’t had that member change. We wrote it in like 6 weeks I think!
CONFRONT: Oh wow! In terms of sound, does it differ much from your past work?
UNDEROATH: I think it’s just the natural progression of our band. It’s not a crazy different sound, but there are just small elements we used that made it different. Pretty much when we were writing, any direction someone wanted to go, anything someone wanted to try, everyone was open to it. There were no limits or boundaries, and that in turn helped us write in a different direction that we had never written in before.
CONFRONT: Do you have any personal favorites off the album to play live or just in general?
UNDEROATH: Right now my favorite song to play live is called ‘who will guard the guardians?’
UNDEROATH: Yeah that song and ‘A Divine Eradication’ and another song called ‘Driftwood’ are three of my favorites off the record.
CONFRONT: I also kind of noticed that you guys have a lot of contests and games going on on your website. You had a lot of stuff going on during the album release… How do you find that affects the band and the fan base?
UNDEROATH: It helps with just fan interaction and keeping people involved with your band. A lot of the ideas come from our record label and I’ll hear them and be like ‘oh that sounds really dumb’ you know? But it turns out that it’s great, so I’ve kind of learned over the years to take a step back and see what happens. I think it’s cool though, no matter how cool or uncool or quirky I think it is, kids just like the idea of being able to participate in something with the bands they love. It’s the same thing with bands that we love, but Radiohead just released a new album, and pretty much half of us pre-ordered it right away. We feel like that stuff’s cool with bands that we like, so people probably like it for us too!
CONFRONT: Yeah, definitely. Also… I think I read this right, you guys were streaming one of the new songs before it actually came out, do you see a good response to that? In terms of releasing music online before your album actually comes out?
UNDEROATH: Yeah, we got a really good response, I think it’s just something to kind of get everyone talking about the record and the song and whatnot months before the record. It’s no secret at this point that music is free, the only reason people pay for it is if you want to and if you want to support the band, so once you kind of grasp that, I feel like the possibilities of distributing, streaming and all that stuff really come into play. I think that it’s just a good thing to get people stoked, even if they do or don’t buy the record right away since they can get it online for free. It’s just good to have a long term plan of interaction like that with your fans, at least they’re listening to the stuff you’re putting out there. Another idea that we had that we were all kind of iffy on was to release each part of the track. Like just the drums, then the bass, then drums with keyboard and bass, and so on. It’s kind of one of those things where EVERY day you had to come back to hear the next piece, so it just created this thing where people were constantly logging on, and checking, and talking, and it’s just really cool. I think that’s where music is headed, it’s just an interactive community, instead of saying ‘we’re going to hold this from you and charge you this much, and then you get it’, that’s not really on the table anymore.
CONFRONT: Speaking of that, how do you feel about being able to download music for free these days?
UNDEROATH: We’re kind of just over it as far as… It just seems like a lost cause. It’s just how it is now, it doesn’t matter what your feelings are about it either way at this point, it doesn’t really affect it you know?
CONFRONT: Yeah it doesn’t change it at this point. That makes sense. So you guys just go with it? Because there are quite a few bands that really find it sucks, music piracy is super wrong, and that kind of thing.
UNDEROATH: I think some of us are. I mean at least half of our band doesn’t download music, they buy everything, and they feel like in a way they want that same respect given back to me and my art and stuff I work for. It does kind of suck to slave for 3 or 4 months to create this piece of music, but in turn it’s just worthless to everyone and you just use that music to do other things like tour and all these other things, you know? That’s kind of where a lot of apprehension comes from, from artists’ point of view, the music is the only reason we’re a band and now it’s just a marketing tool. That kind of hurts when you really think about it, but as far as ‘what if every kid that downloaded it, bought it, how much richer would we be? How much better would we be?’ all that stuff, you can think about it, but it is the way it is. You just have to go with it! I think Spencer is the only one in our band that doesn’t take any media without paying for it; the rest of the band would be hypocrites if they took a stance on it and said it was totally wrong. We all download and buy.
CONFRONT: That’s a good way to look at it! Now, you guys are a very open Christian band- how do you find that your religion and your beliefs come across in your music?
UNDEROATH: I don’t think it really does in our music, but I think the people who know that we’re Christian respect it more. I think our music is pretty universal though, in the sense that you don’t have to be a Christian to enjoy it.
UNDEROATH: Even lyrically, we’re not being preachy or anything. Most of the lyrics are just issues going on in Spencer’s life. A lot of times for him it may come out as a Christian perspective because he’s Christian, so Christian fans can really relate to it. Even non-Christian fans though when they hear the music I think they see this different perspective and maybe that’s really cool for them. It’s definitely up for interpretation.
CONFRONT: My last question for you guys; is there anything in your career that you regret so far, or anything you have left that you really want to accomplish?
UNDEROATH: Regretted? Hmm…
CONFRONT: Not necessarily regret, just something you could change, if anything?
UNDEROATH: Not really! There are tons of things I would never do again! But I feel like that’s kind of like a back to the future thing, if we didn’t do this, then we wouldn’t be able to do this. So there’s a lot of things that happened years ago when we were still trying to figure out who we were and how to deal with everything that goes on with being in a band, that we said ‘oh we’d rather never do that again’, but I mean aside from a dumb photo shoot or two, I’m not really embarrassed or regretful.
CONFRONT: Cool! Anything that you still want to do in the future with the band?
UNDEROATH: There are some countries that I still want to go to!
CONFRONT: Where have you not been?
UNDEROATH: Like… Asia, Singapore, Egypt, Greece, Spain.
CONFRONT: How fun would it be to play there? That would be awesome.
UNDEROATH: Yeah! I’d like to just tour with a couple bands we haven’t toured with yet, and tour with some other cool bands we’ve liked.
CONFRONT: Oh definitely! Like one big awesome tour with a ton of bands!
UNDEROATH: See?! It sounds so easy when you speak of it! *laughs*
CONFRONT: Just say it and it’ll happen?! *laughs* thank you guys very much! It was nice meeting you.
UNDEROATH: Thank you too!
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