Groupe:

Walls Of Jericho

Date:

18 Juin 2016

Interviewer:

Deicide5000

Interview Candace & Dustin (face to face)

Hi guys, I am a longtime fan of yours but in case some of our readers don’t know you yet, what would you tell them?

Dustin : We’re a hardcore band

You mean the best?

Candace : Nah, we’re not that kind of band that would say we’re the best at anything.

You’re shy, c’mon you’re American, you’re expected to be eating the world, right? Ok, I’m teasing you...

(Candace got the trick and laughs)

Tell us about the line up? I guess you guys didn’t change. Is it the same as in The American Dream?

Dustin : I joined the band at the very end of All Hail the Dead in 2004. Dustin : when Bobby cannot make it, Chris fills in and vice versa. Candace : the only thing that has changed is with Chris. He’s been on and off. We have a new member, Bobby. He’s our other guitar player. Instead of bringing in fill-in members, we decided to bring on a new band member. It’s really great to have him be part of the family. But he wasn’t on the record, Chris was. Chris still plays with us.

No One Can Save You from Yourself is your new album. How did you come up with this name? What’s the concept?

Candace : it’s a very deep record,with personal political, social themes. We address a lot of different issues on this record. And to sum it all up. If you want change in your life, in the world, it’s only up to you. Nobody can do it but you. We think it’s really important people start to make themselves accountable for their actions and what’s happening in the world and in their own lives. So No One Can Save You from Yourself…

You came back after a long break since 2008, some people would call it a hiatus. What have you been doing in between?

Dustin : It was never a hiatus. It’s not like we went away, we were still touring. We played Hellfest twice since the hiatus…. (laughing) so it’s definitely not a hiatus. We stopped being a full time band. People have families. We changed everything new this new that, new labels, etc. It’s not like our regional agent here, we’ve been with him forever. And it was just time for us to go away and not put out another album every two years, it was time to give it a rest. At that point we were just grinding ourselves into the ground.

Candace : And if you break it down, I mean, being older, the years go by faster, there is no way around that. We were constantly touring then going back in the studio for a new record, ate that point I knew I wanted to start a family. That itself took two years. It changes how you do things. We slowly came back into it. You know, I didn’t know how much I wanted to be away. We knew it was going to happen. And that’s what we did. We didn’t allow ourselves to be pressured by anyone else. We were tired of hearing people telling us how it had to be. So, we don’t have a label, we don’t have people breathing down our spine. We did it our way. And you know, we knew we could do this, that we were going to keep playing. We were excited to start again to write a record. That took a couple years in itself. Actually, close a year and a half, and then it took some months to get the record out. That’s how it goes, that’s how quickly time flies by. So no real a hiatus. We were just doing our thing.

So this new album, how does it stand up to the stuff that you’ve done in the past? Is it better, would you say?

Candace : Sure, we like it better.

Dustin : Every band say their new album is better than the rest.

Candace : As you said we had 8 years to kind of perfect it, we were prospecting onto what is it that you want? what kind of record do you want ? what you felt could be improved in the last record. We had time to think about that so w e created the songs we like to play live and to get that energy live transfer into the new record, that’s where the ma jor changed happened.

Your new album just got released in March. What has been the welcome so far on stage to the new songs?

Candace : Great!

Just great?

Dustin : It’s always when you’re watching the crowd and then you see people sing along to those songs, we know that people are really paying attention.

Can we expect a lot of shows in Europe, anything planned yet?

Dustin : We’re actually 4 weeks into our tour.

Do you like playing in the south of France, I actually saw you back in 2010 opening up for Sepultura and Napalm Death in Sete.

Dustin : That’s actually one our best places. We jumped off the cliffs there. We played in Mont-pe-llier (well, pronounced not too badly) in Secret Place which is close. We want to go back there, but we’re not the ones to choose.

Walls of Jericho have been around for a while now, do you get treated to certain luxuries that you didn’t have access to in the past? Special riders, individual dressing rooms and the like?

Candace : Oh yeah we actually get food. When we first got on tour, we would get our own sandwiches. The very first time, they gave us a loaf of bread, peanut butter and jelly. It was like “oh shoot we made it”. We were sleeping on floors, in people’s houses. Now it’s more like we’re adults, we get to sleep in a bed. Dustin : we don’t really ask for a special treatment, we’re people just like anybody else.

Is there anything you want to add?

Dustin : No, just keep it true.