“I was in Dusseldorf with my kid – but at the moment, life is a little bit different than watching Peppa Pig with my daughter,” he says. “I’m in New York City right now and things have been going at a different pace for the last couple of years.”
To say that the Melbourne born and bred four-piece has been busy lately would be a whopping understatement. “2017 thus far has been pretty full on. First we hit the ground running in Australia on New Year’s Eve with The Amity Affliction, and we spent most of January touring the country. Then we spent February with Comeback Kid and Hellions touring across Europe. After that we did the UK, then we found ourselves in Russia for a week, then a couple of weeks across Eastern Europe, before we had a few weeks off,” he says, pausing for a breath.
“Then we went back to the UK and toured with Suicide Silence, and we only finished that run of shows two days ago. This whole year has been like a blur of amazing shows.”
In light of their relentless tour schedule, most bands would be taking a well-earned sabbatical, sipping margaritas on some far-off island somewhere – but not Deez Nuts. Staying true to form, these hard-working hardcore stalwarts have just released their fifth studio album, Binge & Purgatory, only two years after their critically acclaimed, record-breaking release Word Is Bond. “I won’t lie, it was a pretty whirlwind process,” Peters says. “But we made it our goal to put out a new album almost exactly two years to the day from the release of Word Is Bond, by emulating the same process.
“We spent the better part of the month on Staten Island, New York, writing the album. We locked ourselves away in a rehearsal studio and banged out songs until we knew we had the album completed. Then we jumped in the car and drove up to Cape Cod, just outside of Boston, and knocked out the album in about three weeks, to make it home in time for Christmas.
“It was a hectic process, as always, but we’re one of those bands who work best under pressure. In order to get the creative juices flowing we need to have an end date or delivery date for an album, or else we’d sit around for another couple of months until the record company set us a date,” Peters laughs.
Binge & Purgatory is Deez Nuts’ heaviest yet most melodic offering to date. Peters says it was inspired by friends and the sounds, sights and seduction of the Big Apple. “I felt comfortable to broach new topics and go in new directions lyrically. It wasn’t necessarily that I’d dumbed things down in the past, but I wanted to experiment and flex my vocabulary and my writing ability on this album, and hopefully people enjoy it.
“We’re so happy with how the album turned out and I think a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that we worked with the same team as on our previous album,” Peters says. “We had Andrew from Comeback Kid producing again and our good friend Shane Frisby as engineer, and I think we got a fucking cool result.”
Fans of the band know it wouldn’t be a Deez Nuts release without a couple of fresh collaborations. “We were able to get Scott Vogel (Terror) and Jamey Jasta (Hatebreed) to feature on a couple of the tracks. We’re in the blessed position to call them our friends now. Even before they were good friends of ours we were fans, and they’ve both been a huge influence on our music over all these years,” Peters says.
A decade on from calling it a day as the drummer for I Killed the Prom Queen, Peters remains humble regarding Deez Nuts’ worldwide success. “If you asked me ten years ago, when I was putting out that first demo, if I’d still be doing the same thing ten years on, I would have said ‘No way,’ because I didn’t see the longevity of the band at the time.
“It’s always been about doing what we love and we will keep doing it until the wheels fall off.”
By Natalie Rogers
