“It’s pretty important to me because I was born in Germany,” he explains. “I only just came out to Australia about four years ago. I love Australia, I think it’s great here, and it’s been the perfect place for this band to happen. My goal was always to move to Australia and start a successful band and bring it back to Europe, and I think a band like this could do really well back at home. It’s also important for me to go back because my family is still over there so it would be exciting to see them too. There are some amazing venues in Berlin especially, I remember I used to go and see Darkest Hour and Parkway Drive in some of the best venues in Germany and those guys played a big part in inspiring me to get my own band together.”
Dream On Dreamer is certainly one band with international ambitions, despite the fact that Gadacz insists there is an Australian flavour to the hardcore lads. Having been spotted and picked up by US management company Artery Foundation early in their career, Dream On Dreamer landed the opportunity of a lifetime when they got to record their full-length debut album Heartbound in the ‘States with Cameron Mizell [Memphis May Fire, Woe Is Me, I See Stars].
“It doesn’t feel like things have come to us easily, though,” says Gadacz. “If you’re spending all your time working your butt off, time really flies, and you feel like you deserve the rewards at the end. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in saying that. I think success is what happens if you really put your heart and soul and sacrifice your whole life if that’s what it takes. We’ve been working so hard as a band since day one, we always knew we couldn’t afford to have any fuck ups and we were professional before we even had management. Once we got that, then that was our first chance to say, ‘great, we’ve achieved a little goal here, let’s head for the next one’. It never stops. We still rehearse twice a week. You can’t get left behind, which is very easy to do, you hear about it happening all the time.”
According to Gadacz, even though working with Mizell in the ‘States was an incredible opportunity to make one of the year’s biggest hardcore albums, the trip also brought up some issues among some of the band members – something the singer claims only made Dream On Dreamer stronger in the long run.
“It was a pretty stressful time, maybe things came to the surface because we were working so hard,” he claims. “It was enjoyable too when we got a bit of time off, the whole trip was far from a nightmare, don’t get me wrong. But the experience gave us some time to reflect on some things that have been going on with us personally. It’s not like were fighting with one another, it was more that some personal stuff had been happening back home, also stuff from the past resurfaced, it made for a pretty rough time in the US. It’s funny how some of the sadness that we went through made us so much stronger as a band, though. It’s stuff like that which influenced the light and dark shades of Heartbound.”
