Later this month, Brisbane rockers Violent Soho will release their highly-anticipated third album, 'WACO', the follow-up to 2013's runaway sophomore success, 'Hungry Ghost'.
“I don't think I've ever been more anxious in my life, for people to hear it,” vocalist Luke Boerdam says. “I didn't know how it was going to end up when we started recording it; it could have been pretty shit really,” he adds with a laugh.
“I'm just relieved and content it's completed and done, and I think I can speak for the band; we've heard the tracks but now we want all the Soho fans to hear it and see what they think, and enjoy all the massive throw-down riffs.”
Treating their previous record as a skeleton, Luke says the band built 'WACO' around the themes of control and illusion using the 1993 Branch Davidians siege in Waco, Texas as a central source of inspiration. “It wasn't a conscious effort to make the songs heavier than 'Hungry Ghost', it just went that way,” he says.
“We wrote the songs and for every song on the record there's a trash can of Soho songs that didn't make the record. If you enter that trash can it's the stuff we found boring, or was just replicating shit off 'Hungry Ghost', or not interesting enough.
WACO artwork“The way I view 'WACO', is it's 'Hungry Ghost's older sister; it's a heavier and darker version of 'Hungry Ghost' which was just scratching the surface of this idea of this other reality that's constructed around us, whereas 'WACO' gets into the nitty-gritty of it. It's more looking at the human side of that and the darker reality of it all.”
For Luke, the Waco siege – the notorious raid by the FBI and its aftermath – provided a catalyst for exploring the album's central themes, encapsulating the power of faith and belief in constructing individual realities. “Not to sound like a try-hard, pseudo-intellectual or anything, but we create these worlds around us and weird illusions about what the world is, where there's this dark reality and underbelly,” Luke explains.
“These people from the Waco siege legitimately believed… they were living out the second coming of Christ, that's how they saw the world and that's the reality they constructed for themselves to try and gain control over it.
“All these things that are going on around us more so than ever but we just live in this illusion of 'that doesn't exist and I'm perfectly entitled to what I have', so I think 'Hungry Ghost' lightheartedly spoke of this shell you become because of that, but 'WACO' just really tries to dig in deeper and that's how I feel about it.”
With the new album just weeks from release (18 March), Luke and the band are currently preparing for a national 'WACO' tour, which will feature support from two of Violent Soho's favourite bands: DZ Deathrays and Dune Rats. “We've got such huge respect for those bands, they're really hardworking and they're going to make our job tough,” Luke says.
“DZ's in particular put on a fucking awesome live show, they're a really great band to watch and they've got years and years of touring behind them. They're probably one of the more mature bands we've ever toured with.
“Those two bands, they're the two hardest working bands I know, so we'll definitely have to step up our game,” Luke laughs. “We always make it tough on ourselves: we pick bands that tour more than us [but] we're pumped and can't wait to play the songs live, and have fans hear the new album.”
'WACO' is released nationally 18 March.
Violent Soho 'WACO' Tour Dates
Fri 13 May - The Tivoli Theatre (Brisbane)Sat 14 May - The Forum (Melbourne)
Thu 19 May - Thebarton Theatre (Adelaide)
Fri 20 May - Metro City (Perth)
Fri 27 May - The Enmore (Sydney)
