Protest The Hero blew everyone’s mind when they crowdfunded $340,000 for their new album Volition. Even the band was shocked by the overwhelming support, especially since their goal of half the amount was raised in just one day. Volition came out a few weeks ago and we caught up with guitarist Tim Millar while on the band’s current tour with Affiance, The Kindred, and The Contortionist. He talked about the new record and offered his reaction to the band’s successful Indiegogo campaign. And what he said might surprise you.
How does it feel to be back in the US headlining?
The tour’s been going great! It has been over a year since we’ve gone out and two years since we’ve been in the United States. When you go out, you always wonder if people will still come to the shows and want to see you, but we’ve been getting positive responses. We’ve got a long road ahead of us but we are really looking forward to it. We’ve got some great bands joining us: Affiance and The Kindred. It’s an overall great tour.
Your new album, Volition, was recently released. How have the fans responded to it?
Yeah it seems pretty good. I guess the album has been out for about three weeks now so it seems like when we play our new tunes, they know what’s going on and are singing along. We have a pretty good balance of stuff off every album. Hopefully there is something for everyone but yeah it seems like songs are going over well and that’s always a sigh of relief.
Was there a theme for the record, if any?
There are always two things going on, the lyrical and musical content. Musically it’s got a lot coming from the same place to make the album sound like one whole thing from start to finish, and we really like to take the time together to make everything flow. So overall the album just flows from beginning to end. Lyrically there wasn’t much of a theme. It was just ideas. Rody [Walker], our singer, wrote all of our lyrics so it was kind of just whatever he wanted to talk about.
I know your crowdfunding goal for the album was $125,000, and you ended up raising $340,000. What was your reaction to the overwhelming amount of support?
It was something that definitely blew us away. We took a long time figuring out what we needed to make the next record, and the fact that it happened for us in less than a day made it simple for us and to not worry about how we were going to make it. It gave us the opportunity to make the best album we can make. It blew us away and we are very thankful of the people being so supportive and believing in us.
Chris Adler from Lamb of God did drums on the entire record. How was that arranged?
Yes, it was really just one phone call. Our manager happens to manage his band and we asked if he could reach out and he was pretty interested in the idea. So we got lucky that we didn’t have to call everyone we knew and he was the first person we got into contact with and he said yes. So it was smooth sailing from there.
And now Mike Ieradi from The Kindred is your new drummer. How did that come about?
He’s doing double duty on this tour, playing for both bands. He’s just a long-time friend that we’ve toured with and the used to be a Canadian band called Today I Caught The Plague. We kind of just started looking around and we had some interested people. We got a lot of great videos, people sent us some submissions, but most of the people we didn’t know personally; and that was way more important to us than their ability. We felt more comfortable playing with someone that we know is a friend and that there wouldn’t be any surprises. He is a phenomenal musician but his friendship is just as important as his skill level. He was the perfect match on both of those levels.
Do you have any personal goals or goals as a band with this album cycle?
There’s always stuff that I would love to do. On this album cycle I would love to play at some new places, travel a lot, and see a lot of the world. There are a lot of places we haven’t been that have a lot of potential. There are some places metal bands don’t really go, so when you do play there people come out and appreciate the show more.
What’s in store for Protest The Hero in 2014?
Pretty much all touring. We have a European tour starting in the beginning of January, and we are following it up with another US and some of Canada tour in March sometimes. Those are concrete plans but pretty much for the rest of the year we are trying to do European festivals and North America during the summer. The idea is to just keep touring.
Do you have any closing message for your fans?
The album Volition would not be anything that it was if we didn’t have the overwhelming amount of support from everyone. So the people who didn’t donate can definitely thank the people that did. It’s kind of amazing to see that it actually had an impact on the final product. I guess I’m biased because I got to decide on everything… and everyone is really happy with the results. Hopefully more people will get involved and more bands will try it out as well. It’s just nice to see that by taking a chance people were actually able to have a hand in how the album turned out. I feel like that was a huge accomplishment for everyone.