“Last year sort of changed us a lot as a band,” Gadacz explains. “With everything we’ve had to deal with, there’s been some negatives and we went through a lot of rough patches. Our drummer (Aaron Fiocca) was in hospital with cancer for a couple of months.”
It’s a lot to deal with for a tight-knit group of young guys who’ve been practically living on top of one another for the last four years, touring and recording.
“It’s made us grow up,” Gadacz states. “Now we’ve all recovered, his cancer is gone, we’ve been in Europe for a while. We’re writing new music, and after what happened last year we have a lot to write about. I’m feeling really good about everything. We’ve got cool things coming up. The next little period we’re trying to get out to more and more people.
“The last year has been pretty exciting too though. Our bassist had a baby and he wanted to embrace that with his girlfriend. He wanted to be there, be a father, be a good father – don’t be on tour when you’re having a kid. Who knows what will happen in the future. He might be back, no one left on bad terms or anything. We’ve gone through so much bad stuff as well in the band…we’ve never taken them as bad situations, we just took them and tackled them and became stronger from it.”
The band released their second album, Loveless, in mid-2013. “I think it has been really well received by people,” says the singer. “Some people still don’t know we have that album out, which is weird, but you take your time you know? I’m feeling really inspired about it. Our main goal with it was to connect with people, to help people.”
The album was also the first studio album with rhythm guitarist Zachary Britt, who also contributed clean vocals to the recordings. “Zack is artistic,” says Gadacz of his bandmate. “He’s definitely been a great addition to the band. He’s a great person – he’s been through a lot in his life.”
The early recordings by the band reached stellar levels of success. They quickly secured a worldwide record deal, toured with The Amity Affliction, Avenged Sevenfold and the Devil Wears Prada, and ended up in Florida to record their debut album, Heartbound. By comparison, Loveless may seem to be a slower burn, but the band is happy and confident with their direction.
“A lot of people in the industry and stuff are still really behind us,” asserts Gadacz. “This has been our best record yet.” He explains that the band feel they’ve achieved a higher level of musical skill and creativity than they’ve felt before, and that Loveless is their “truest” recording yet.
“For now, we just want to shape Dream on Dreamer – move in a direction we can feel confident in. We want to become better musicians, better artists. We don’t want to be put in genres – not a metalcore band, not a hardcore band – we’re just a band. There are plenty of people out there who do music better than us, but we just want to be Dream on Dreamer, we just want to be us. That’s what we want to do. Whether fans like it or not…we’re just writing to express ourselves. We hope they can relate.”
BY JOSH FERGEUS
