Wollongong metal band Walk With Kings premiere their new line-up plus all-new material when they hit the stage at Dicey Riley's in November.
Starting in late 2015 as a casual jam band between three mates, Walk With Kings finalised their line-up earlier this year in August after spending two-and-a-half years searching for a permanent drummer and vocalist.
“We're pretty fussy with band members,” lead guitarist Nick Whiting says.
“We see the band as a bit more of a family situation rather than just a bunch of guys who get together to play music, so we took who we had in the band very seriously.”
After releasing their debut EP 'A Conscience Is A Curse' in late 2017 with their initial lead singer and then releasing a series of singles featuring guest vocalists (including Chris Rand from Segression), Walk With Kings welcomed Cale Storer to the drum stool and Joel Jennings to the microphone.
“Joel brings a bit of a younger and fresher element into it,” Nick says.
“A little bit of a younger energy in the band is pretty cool because we're all kind of older dudes. That's where we're at at the moment, just writing new songs, preparing for this next gig and getting some new material ready for another EP.”
The upcoming show at Dicey's, which also features From Love To Violence and By The Horns, will be the first live performance for the current line-up of Walk With Kings.
“We've been playing together for quite a long time, the drummer and the singer are the new guys on the block so it's taken a little bit of extra practise to get them up to speed and feel comfortable as a band but I think we're in a pretty good position,” he says.
Nick says their set will be a chance for Walk With Kings to showcase the new material they've been working on.
“This whole set will be all new stuff,” he says.
“The EP we put out with the other singer, we're still pretty happy and proud of what that is so that's going to stay as it is. Those songs are not going to get reworked, so we just worked on new material with the new guys and Joel's done really well to write six songs in a matter of a couple of months. It's all new material and nobody has heard these ones, so it's quite cool.”
With a concrete line-up and new material in the pipeline, Nick says the next focus for Walk With Kings is working on their next release: a new EP and also another single.
“We've got new material and we're trying to finish off the writing process for songs that may go on that EP, and we're looking at maybe releasing that in the first half of next year somewhere. By some point in the first half of next year we should have another EP out and possibly a single before that.”
