We’re pulled over at the side of the road right now. Our wheel is coming off our trailer. It’s a pretty typical thing,” he laughs. Hopefully they’ll avoid this while traversing the harsh terrain and massive distances between major population centres in our wide brown land this month. The band are doing a pretty extensive tour of Australia, as well as a few dates in New Zealand for the first time ever, and Russin couldn’t be happier to be returning to Australia.
“We’ve only ever been there once before, and we’ve never been to New Zealand. The last time we came it was a lot of fun. But now we’re coming back, I hope the venues we’re playing are of the appropriate size! Last time we came it was really cool, we were treated very nicely and professionally, but we didn’t have the experience that we’re used to; we had small venues and no barriers. That was kind of our goal for when we came back, that we have a normal tour for ourselves.
The band promise a loud, crazy and interactive show for fans of heavy music. “We play music that we like. It’s aggressive music, I guess you could say,” he describes. “We do our part to have as much fun, and express ourselves as much as possible, and I think that a lot of people get involved because of that. We’re not the kind of band that just likes to stand there and play and people watch us. We a band that, if you like us, we want you to come up and sing along. So hopefully there’ll be people going off, excited to see us, and we’ll do the same thing we always do and that’s play and have fun, and play as loud and as fast as we can.”
The band’s most recent album Floral Green has only been out for three or four months. Russin says that although the release has a different sound and was a slight departure from their debut album of 2011 Shed, the reaction to it has been phenomenal – from fans and critics alike. “It really surpassed expectations,” he states. “We had no idea how it was going to go over, because we really tried to push ourselves and do something different. And we were kind of worried that people were gonna say ‘Oh, this isn’t the same Title Fight that I like.’ We were kind of afraid of that, but not afraid of it enough to not do it.
“So we wrote these songs and we had no idea how they would go over. We put out the first single and bang, people liked it. It blew our minds, and so we said, ‘Let’s see what happens with the rest of it’. We put it out, and our friends told us that they liked it, and then once it really came out, our peers and critics and all these people were really into it. It really surprised us.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
