Sydney band Justice For The Damned have plenty to be excited about. They have released one of the heaviest Australian albums of the year and are currently touring the country. Soon after they will be touring across Europe with Thy Art Is Murder. We caught up with Justice For The Damned to talk about the album and the tours.

SCENEzine
Firstly congrats on the new album. It’s been getting awesome reviews. You must be stoked with how people are responding?

Justice For The Damned
Thank you! Responses to the album have been nothing short of overwhelming so far! We believe we hit the mark with this release and it’s been so rewarding to have encountered so much positive feedback.

SCENEzine
Were there any lyrical themes you really wanted to explore with the album?

Justice For The Damned
We tend to dig deep with our lyrical themes, and over the album we definitely covered a range of topics, some notable themes we explored were loneliness, social exclusion, love and thoughts that dwell on the ending of a life and what comes next.

SCENEzine
Did you have many tracks in the writing process that didn’t make it onto the album?

Justice For The Damned
Yep certainly! Our writing process involves picking and choosing our tracklisting from a larger number of demos, so there are definitely a lot of tracks that didnt make it.

SCENEzine
One of our favourite tracks from the album is “bearing the crown of lies”. Can you tell us how that song came about?

Justice For The Damned
‘Bearing The Crown Of Lies’ is a cool one! At first our guitarist, Nick, sent that over to the rest of the band and at the time it sounded very different. It was in a lower tuning and sounded more like a heavy mosh track but after hauling it back to our regular tuning and with a few revisions it became the song it is today.

SCENEzine
The video for the song features footage from you playing Unify festival. How was the experience of playing Unify?

Justice For The Damned
Unify was a crazy experience and so very different to what we’re used to. The event was obviously much bigger, so the level of organisation for the event and the size of the crowd were both big things we had to contend with. Nonetheless we put on the best show we could and had a fantastic weekend with a lot of good friends!

SCENEzine
Your are currently doing a headline tour around Australia to support the album. It must be a rad feeling to be playing a lot of new tracks from the album live?

Justice For The Damned
Definitely. We are super excited to finally have a fresh arsenal of songs and to be playing a set that contains material that much more accurately represents where we are at both as individuals and as a band.

SCENEzine
After the headline tour you’ll be heading to Europe with Thy Art Is Murder how did that tour all come about?

Justice For The Damned
Early this year, our label heads were showing our album to a few close circles and generating some buzz. One person they happened to show it to was Andy Marsh of Thy Art Is Murder. He took a liking to it and rather graciously offered to take us on a run across Europe and we of course could not have been quicker to accept!

SCENEzine
Is there any particular city in Europe your excited to play?

Justice For The Damned
A few places that we’re dying to visit would be Germany, Amsterdam and everywhere on the UK run!

SCENEzine
Coming from such a heavy band do you guys have any guilty pleasures that you listen to that might surprise some people? Taylor Swift maybe?

Justice For The Damned
We have some favourite artists that lie outside of the world of heavy music, but those pleasures are far from guilty. The Weeknd gets some solid rotation when we go on tour for starters, as well as DeadMau5’s ‘4×4=12’. Our bass player Ben has some unconventional interests most notably being a strong love of Slim Dusty. Since he started playing Slim Dusty we’ve even gone as far as to regularly sing a version of one of his songs in which we have added our own band members names to the lyrics. Its a lot of fun!

SCENEzine
Lastly being a Sydney band what’s your opinion on the current lock out laws?

Justice For The Damned
It’s a pretty crazy subject! It’s no secret a lot of people are unhappy about it. You could easily argue that locking people out of venues will only lead to more trouble in the streets and like any sane person, we haven’t failed to notice that it’s rather dodgy that the Star Casino is nestled comfortably just outside the jurisdiction of the lock-out laws!

(interview by Christian Ross)