ALL THAT REMAINS Frontman: 'We Don't Do Theme Records Or Concept Albums'

Wes Styles of 97.7 QLZ radio station in Springfield recently conducted an interview with ALL THAT REMAINS guitarist Oli Herbert and vocalist Phil Labonte. You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below. Speaking about the musical diversity of the material that appears on ALL THAT REMAINS's eighth studio album, "Madness", which is due out on April, Herbert said: "Here's the thing: you write one song one way and you're, like, 'Well, let's not repeat what we just did, 'cause that would be boring. You change it up. So then you get an assortment, because you keep changing up your mood, and you get a hodgepodge of musical materials." On the topic of the album's lyrical themes, Labonte said: "We don't do, like, theme records or concept albums. Everything on there, lyrically, is stuff that I thought about — literally, just things that I thought about or experiences that happened in my life. A lot of stuff's personal, because I'm an 'emo' moron like that. If you've listened to ALL THAT REMAINS, you know that there's always something that's real, and it's something that actually happened. And it's not a made-up story about… You know, I don't wanna write 'The Trooper'. And I'm the biggest IRON MAIDEN fan — I've been an IRON MAIDEN fan since I was a kid — but I can't do those kind of historical things." "Madness" was recorded at West Valley Studios in Woodland Hills, California with producer Howard Benson, who has previously worked with such acts as MOTÖRHEAD, PAPA ROACH, THREE DAYS GRACE, FLYLEAF, P.O.D. and HALESTORM. Labonte previously told Revolver magazine about ALL THAT REMAINS's approach on the new disc: "We wanted to mix it up a little bit and write from a vocal perspective this time. So I went to L.A. and came up with vocal ideas and melodies and then sent those chord progressions back to Oli and he wrote riffs in response to that. [Doing it this way] turned the record into a vocal album as opposed to a guitar album. And that affected some things. Like, there might be less intricacy in the riffs because they were written in response to my voice." Labonte added that the majority of the new ALL THAT REMAINS songs feature "significant programming and electronic sounds. And that's something we wanted to have flowing through the entire record. So you're gonna hear that kind of influence on most of the tracks."

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