Today we are thrilled to be conversing with Matt Flood, the powerhouse lead vocalist of the badass English hard-rock band – Caskets. Renowned for their electrifying performances and emotionally charged lyrics, Caskets has left an indelible mark on the rock music landscape. Now, they’re set to blow minds again with their highly anticipated new record, Reflections, slated for release on August 11th.
In this engaging interview, we’ll delve into the creative journey behind the album, uncover the inspirations that fuel their music, and get a sneak peek into what’s next for the band. We’ll also learn about some of their early struggles (such as being forced to change from Captives to Caskets) and get a personal look into Matt’s own journey. We’ve loved this band ever since we first heard “Lost In Echoes,” and if you haven’t heard them yet, we know you will too. Check out our interview with Matt below:
Derek Oswald/Altwire: With the tremendous success of your debut album Lost Souls, how does it feel to release your second album, Reflections? What are your expectations, and how did your time on the road shape its creation?
Matt Flood/Caskets: I try not to expect anything when it comes to releasing music, just so I don’t put any added pressure on myself. You know what I mean? I already worry about everything anyway. So I hope for the best and expect the worst. That’s what I like to tell people when it comes to releasing music because if it doesn’t go very well, then you [already] expect it not to go amazing.
But to be fair, being on the road did shape this album because it gave us less time to be able to get demos done and to get into the studio. So, the time frame was a lot shorter, and it meant we had to work twice as quickly and twice as hard. But I feel like we’ve come out with a very different album to the first one.
In perspective, we’ve added a lot more layers to the music. We didn’t want it to just be another Lost Souls album. We wanted to add more pop elements and synth-wave elements, layer it up more, and try to give our listeners a different side to our sound that no one’s really heard yet.
Because a lot of the people in the band are really, really into synth-wave, the eighties, and acoustic music so we try and join all of the stuff we love together, and we kind of did more of that on this album than we did the first one.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Lost Souls was mainly driven by your personal experiences. With Reflections, what made you decide to expand the narrative and incorporate the perspectives of all the band members? How did this contribute to the album’s overall feel and sound?
Matt Flood/Caskets: Well, I feel like just because I’m a singer and write the words, I didn’t feel it was a true representation of the whole band. As you said, a lot of the meanings and lyrics in the first album were more about my background and what I’ve been through.
So we obviously wanted the rest of the band to have a say. The reason why we called it Reflections is because each song is a “reflection” upon… an event or a time in one of our lives in the band. So it’s not just about me and what I’ve been through. The band isn’t just me.
It’s not just my message. There are five of us, so there are five different messages that we want to get out. So we tried to do that in this album and give everyone their little bit to shine. James, our drummer, comes to me with lyrics now, which I don’t think he felt he could have done when we were doing the first album because we didn’t know each other as well.
We’ve [now] had the chance to live with each other basically; now we know each other in and out. We know how to grind each other’s gears and how to sort each other out if we’re going through bad times. So we wanted it to be a representation of all of us and not just me.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Reflecting on the interpersonal differences and challenges that you faced while creating this album, how has this process helped you grow as a band? Has embracing these challenges and maintaining your collaborative environment pushed your music beyond its previous boundaries?
Matt Flood/Caskets: It’s massively changed. After we did the first album, we went on some long tours. So it was the longest amount of time we’d spent with each other, and we learned a lot about each other. We learned what people like and don’t like, which made us closer as a group and as brothers.
It was a lot easier to sit down in a studio and have us all be open with each other about what we wanted out of the album and where we wanted it to go and whatnot. What each member wanted their part to be, and what they wanted to say. And in the first album, I don’t think it was like that.
It was more based upon my previous experiences and what I’ve been through. So every band has their little niggles and disagreements and stuff. And on the one hand, that can ruin a band’s future if people don’t talk to each other right and with respect.
So we just learned how to be a group and how to stay humble with each other and know, again, what each other likes, and what each other doesn’t like. Like, I hate being woken up in the morning, like drastically. Do you know what I mean? Like, I hate that. And it happened to me once on tour, and I absolutely flipped my lid because I can be quite mardy, mate, when I just got up.
So that happened, and now they know not to wake me up drastically, or else I’ll be a right mardy git with them for the next three hours. So just little stuff like that adds up to us bonding, our bond being a lot tighter and a lot closer as a band. And I think that reflects in this new album.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: What if the bus is on fire? Would you want to be woken up then…or?
Matt Flood/Caskets:Holy shit! [laughs]. It’s probably me setting the bus on fire, dude, to be fair.
I’m not gonna lie; I’m a nightmare, dude. Honestly, I’m a nightmare. But yeah, I’d definitely want them to drag me out of that bus if anything was on fire.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: So don’t let you around the matches or the gasoline; that is what you’re telling me.
Matt Flood/Caskets: Yeah, don’t leave me near any lighters or any matches or anything like that. I’ll not come out at the gas stations; I’ll just stay in my bunk.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: [laughs] I wanted to talk about the early days. Can you share the story behind the formation of Caskets? How did you all meet and decide to create music together?
Matt Flood/Caskets: Yeah, sure. Chris and Benji were in a band beforehand called Faultlines that had just kicked off, and it was doing really well. And then all of a sudden that singer decided that he was leaving. Chris and Benji had come to see me perform with my old band, and that’s how we met each other.
And then probably like a year, two years down the line, that band fizzled out into nothing. And then I got a random message one day asking if I wanted to try out for the band. Probably one of the scariest days of my life. But yeah, it went well. So I decided to join the band, but we decided to start fresh.
We changed the name to Captives [and] we’ve had a few member changes over the years, which is not a good thing, but we’ve got Craig in the band from it, which has changed our sound for the better as well. So yeah, we just started as a band, we put out our EP, we got Connor, our manager, on board, and it’s just been going up and up and up since. It’s been crazy. So yeah, that’s literally it. It was as simple as that, man.
Lee, our bass player, left due to personal issues, and we knew we wanted Craig in the band because he’s a guitar player, and he’s…absolutely phenomenal.
But we’d already had two guitars, so Chris was like, I’ll jump on bass. So we have this insane guitarist, and he’s really into his 80s rock and stuff like that. So that’s why we have guitar solos in our music and stuff like that now, which has put our music to another level, I think.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Now I understand that the whole reason why you guys went from Captives to Caskets was because of a legal dispute.
Matt Flood/Caskets: God, yeah.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Do you find yourself missing your old name, or are you pretty fond of the new name?
Matt Flood/Caskets: It was strange to begin with. Quite a few times on stage, I said we were Captives, not Caskets. I got worried about that, but nothing came of that, thankfully. It was a crazy time, dude. We got a cease and desist on the music video shoot of “Lost in Echoes.”
So we’re in this massive warehouse, freezing cold, and then awesome news, you’re getting sued, boys! So yeah, that was crazy. But it felt weird at the start changing the name to Caskets, but Caskets was in the list of names from when we first started the band. So we knew we wanted to keep the logo. We knew we wanted it to be a one-word band name.
So we just fell into Caskets, and stuck with that. We were really worried because the longer that went on, like, we lost our Instagram, our Spotify went down, and just about everything went down. I thought we were done, to be fair. But thankfully, because we’ve got absolutely awesome fans, they stuck with us.
As time’s gone on, I’ve [gotten] really, really used to Caskets now. A fan said to me the other day you should have had it be Caskets from the start. It sounds way better than Captives. And I was like, I don’t know, but it’s just the name, do you know what I mean?
Like, that’s how I try and see it. It’s just the name of a band. It doesn’t affect how we play, what we play, why we play, or why we perform. But yeah, man, it was a very weird and scary situation at the time.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: “Lost In Echoes” was the first song I heard from you guys. I had Spotify shuffle on, and Lost In Echoes came on, and it was such a good song that I ended up listening to your whole first album after that. And I’ve wanting for months to get you guys, so I’m glad we were able to finally get this scheduled.
Matt Flood/Caskets: Of course, man. Of course. It was a crazy time during the first album cause it was through lockdown, and we only had the opportunity to be together in one place until the lockdown had been lifted. So, we got locked down, and then there was a two-week gap or something like that where we could go out and do things, and then we got locked down again, and that same thing kept happening. In those two-week gaps, we were all getting together in Chris’ shed, in his back garden, and that’s where we did the album. So, it’s been nice being able to be in the actual studio with the boys and write an album where it should be written without having to worry about lockdown and COVID and stuff like that.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: It’s pretty incredible when you listen to the first album, the fact that it was recorded in a shed because it sounds professionally recorded. What were the most significant differences between recording in your shed and a professional studio?
Matt Flood/Caskets: The space for one. It wasn’t a very big shed. We had everything in it to be able to write an album, but the space wasn’t great. But it’s all we could work with at the time. If we’d not had that space, the album would have been delayed for a long time, I reckon.
But I’d never had the opportunity ever to be able to go into a real studio and do music for myself. So just, the experience alone was crazy for me—the availability of all these different instruments and plugins and stuff like that.
So I spent a lot of my time in the studio. If I wasn’t singing, [I was] asking questions about plugins I didn’t know anything about, what they did, and how to work them. Or I could get up and walk to the piano and play the piano if I wanted to. Just little things like that make a massive difference to me.
And obviously, it really helped my mental health as well, doing this latest album. Because in the first one, we were all put together in a shed, and then I’ve got to travel two hours home and travel two hours back every day. So it was just nice not to have those worries, and it was just a nice, relaxed environment to do it in.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Given the differences, do you ever miss the feeling of doing it at home?
Matt Flood/Caskets: Well, to be fair, I still love writing demos and getting the baseline for songs. I love doing that in my bedroom or with Benji at his house because it’s more of a relaxed setting. There doesn’t need to be all this stuff around us to be able to just write demos.
So I much prefer to be…in a smaller, quieter place doing demos but doing the actual tracking for the album in the studio.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: So, besides getting served a cease and desist on your video shoot, what are some of the biggest roadblocks and most significant bumps in the road that you’ve experienced so far?
Matt Flood/Caskets: As a musician, personally, I really struggled when we started with the band because I’d never really done anything like this before. I’d been in a pop punk band for a while. But that fizzled out, and then before that, I just did acoustic music mainly. So going from singing a lot of major happy stuff to learning how to write melodies in minor and augmented scales was a big challenge for me, as well as performing live.
The difference in performing on stage doing an acoustic show compared to doing one with Caskets it’s like being in a different universe. So I had to get used to that. I blew my voice out a lot when we first started doing shows because I didn’t look after my voice and my throat – like I do now – back then because it was just easy acoustic music. So that took me quite a while to be able to handle. So it can be quite daunting when I’m seeing like, oh man, I’ve got six shows in a row. I know I have to rein myself in on the first few shows.
But obviously, the name change was probably the biggest hurdle we’ve had so far. We never expected when they first said, you’ve got to cease and desist; you’ve got to change names. We wanted to fight it at first, but then we realized we legally didn’t have a leg to stand on.
So that wasn’t a very nice time, dude, to be fair, I’m not gonna lie. Everything was up in the air, and we didn’t know what was happening. So…once all that had settled down and we had a new name, and we started gigging again, everything fell into place. Because I spent a lot of time before that trying to hone my technique, I knew that I could play a gig and not wake up the next day and be hoarse or have no voice at all.
But I’m still learning, dude; I’m still learning how to be a frontman. Every time we go on tour, I’ll watch all the other vocalists, what they do, how they move, how they react, how they talk to the crowd, and how the crowd reacts. So I’m always finding obstacles every day to jump over.
It never stops, man, and that’s part of the fun because you get yourself through these struggles that you find yourself in, and you come out the other end and realize that, yeah, I am strong enough to be able to get through that or to do that or to realize then I always had it in me to be able to do that.
It’s just; it’s normally in your head, do you know what I mean? So that’s mainly the hardest part of being in this band so far is getting out of my own head.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: I feel like that is everyone’s worst enemy. There are a lot of times, even when I’m editing a podcast. And I overthink certain things about it, like, should I ask that question, edit that part, or keep it? And I’m constantly overthinking it, and I’m constantly challenging myself.
So I think it’s a natural part of the human emotion to second guess yourself and be your worst enemy.
Matt Flood/Caskets: It’s good, though, because if you’re doing podcasts and you have to think about every question you ask, it means that you care so much that you’re willing to think through every little minute thing that could go wrong or is wrong.
If you didn’t care, you’d just do the podcast, just like if we didn’t care, we’d just write a piece of music and release it.
So, I understand; I agree with what you’re saying. Everyone’s always in their own head, but it means you care. You want it to be perfect, even though nothing is achievable, perfection-wise, to be completely perfect.
It’s like when you’re recording a song; a song is never finished. You could always keep going, adding, deleting, and taking stuff away. You just got to know when the right point is to put your hands down and go, right, this is where it needs to be. So I have that problem. I have that problem a lot with writing melodies and doing this and doing that to make it better. But then you have to think, well, I’ve got to sing it live also. The worst part of being in a band is doing something that requires you to spend hours and hours and hours doing little minute things to barely change anything.
But it just shows how much you care. There’s no point in writing songs that mean nothing to you. The whole reason for being in the band is to show other people that musicians are just as vulnerable as everyone else, and for them to notice what I’m singing and for them to feel and hear the genuinity [sic] in music is the most important thing for me.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Given that you have that perfectionist mentality, what is the process when you’re recording a song and the process that you and the other guys go through to decide what song makes it and what gets scrapped? What do you guys do to decide what song will make the record?
Matt Flood/Caskets: The last album, we took, like, 17 demos, 18 demos, maybe a bit more, into the studio and whittled that down to 10. There are some songs as a band you know you want on the album. When we first wrote “Guiding Light”, even in the demo stage, we got to the end of the second verse or something, and Me and Benji were like, this is definitely the first roots of the next album.
So there’s them, and then there are other songs that might just have a verse or something like that. And we’ll normally sit down in the studio, we’ll take all the demos to the studio, and we’ll sit down with Dan Weller, who did our production – who’s an absolute god, by the way, big up, Dan. – and we’ll talk through it ourselves.
We need to speak to other people that are outside the band to get someone else’s point of view. Sometimes Dan will be like, “Ah, that’s not good enough.” – even if I think it’s the best one, Dan will be like, that’s not good enough. I’ll take that and be like, right, okay, that’s fine because I trust his ear a lot more than I trust my own because of the reputation he has. So normally, you probably have three or four finished demos, like full-length demos, and the rest will be like half demos.
We’ll pick which ones we want to work with, but not all of them will be used because we could take something out of one demo that fits into another song if you know where I’m going from. So it can be quite stressful, man, but at the same time, we also get other songwriters in to help with melodies and stuff like that because it’s more brains thinking different things, so different melodies will come out. So it can be quite intense.
With this album, we did the drums; first, I believe, and then we did them at Marshall Studios. And then after that, we’ll sit down in the studio, track everything, and then we’ll keep going back and back and back through the songs until we get them little nitpicky bits right, the annoying bits that just annoy you.
It can be one note, one bend on a guitar, or something like that. So we’ll just keep going back and back and back and back over each song until we’re all like, I can’t find anything else I’d want to change with this. But we also have a lot of other people from outside that aren’t in the band working on the songs as well.
Like, we have a lot of people from America help work on the strings and the orchestra, so It’s a big job. It’s a very big job, and as a singer, I probably spend the least amount of time on the album as anyone else in the band, doing what I do because so much more emphasis is put onto the guitars, the guitar licks, and stuff like that.
It’s stressful, but it’s always worth it when you come to the end product and you listen to it. I always think, like, I would go through what I’ve been through times two to get this same product.
So it’s all about what you’re willing to put in as well. You have to work your ass off, but it’s well worth it. It’s the most fun job in the world.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: To go on the flip side, we discussed the challenges. Now, what have been the most rewarding moments for you as a band so far?
Matt Flood/Caskets: The fact that we have a fan base. We’re nearly five years into this band, and I’ve still not come to terms with how well we’re doing. I don’t know if it’s like imposter syndrome or something like that. But I’ve talked to fans, and they’ve traveled from different countries to come and see us play.
And to me, that is absolutely mind-blowing. Do you know what I mean? Like crazy, crazy, crazy. Because when I was a kid, I loved listening to bands like Blink-182. But I’d never imagined going to a different country to go and see them play. So the fact that people do that for us…and we’re not Blink 182, man, like we’re still a new band.
So the fact people do that for us is absolutely mind-blowing. And that makes it all worth it. The stressy days, the long drives, the long hours, to see how what you’ve made, the music you’ve made, how it makes other people feel is one of the main reasons why I want to be in this the rest of my life.
I want to make them feel with my music how I felt with the music I was listening to when I was growing up. So that’s the most rewarding thing. Also, to be able to travel the world to sing songs it’s absolute madness, dude. It’s madness. And the fact that we’re here doing it now and have been for quite a few years, I always have to take a step back and try and look at the whole picture and see how far we’ve come because it’s easy to forget.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: You’re about to go on a big American tour too. How do you feel about that?
Matt Flood/Caskets: Imposter syndrome again. It’s a completely new kettle of fish, this tour. When I heard we got it, I thought our manager, Connor was taking the mick. He’s like; I put you in for a nice big tour. It’s for Bless the Fall, the anniversary tour. I’m like, shut up, man, we’re never gonna get on that.
And then we got main support for Bless the Fall, a band I’ve listened to since I was a kid. It’s nuts, dude. It’s nuts to know that. I’m going to get to spend time with a band that I genuinely love, as well as getting to meet other bands that we’re touring with that are doing so well and are awesomely talented.
I’m one of the luckiest guys in the world. There are millions and millions of people that would want to be where I’m right now. I always try not to forget that. I obviously never want to take it for granted or anything like that. So I try to be as humble as I can. Like, Bless The Fall man, come on, it’s nuts.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: It IS absolutely nuts. And you guys should be very proud of yourselves. This is a huge opportunity. It’s not just performing with a band that you listened to growing up. You’re going on an anniversary tour for them, and that’s a whole other beast. When a band does an anniversary tour, they’re celebrating something that was a big moment in their career. And they’re bringing you along on that; that’s pretty fucking awesome.
Matt Flood/Caskets: Yeah, man. For us to be a part of it is crazy. Like, I feel like we should be the first band on. I’m not going to lie. Kingdom [of Giants] and Dragged Under are two awesome bands. Like, awesome bands.
I dreamt of this for so long when I was a kid, and then from about 20 till 25, 26, I just completely stopped doing music.
I had come to terms with the fact that it would never happen. And now I’ve just turned 31, and it’s starting to happen. It’s still hard to believe it’s real. And to take a step back, we’ve already done a seven-week tour in America last year with Dayseeker, which was insane.
And now we get to go back a year later on a Bless The Fall anniversary tour; I just don’t feel like it’s real.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: I’d be pinching myself too. Let’s talk about your new single, “More Than Misery,” a collaboration with the lead singer of The Word Alive. How did this collaboration come about, and what impact did it have on the song?
Matt Flood/Caskets: Me and Telle have talked to each other for quite a while through Twitter; that’s how we know each other. We’ve never met in person, actually -not yet, but we knew we wanted to get some features on a few songs off on the album, but after going through it, We didn’t feel any of the ones warranted a feature apart from “More Than Misery.”
And I knew that we needed a screamer, but I didn’t want to get like some proper Deathcore screamer or anything like that. I wanted someone with one of those nice “shouty screams,” I call them. And the fact that Telle doesn’t do a lot of screaming anymore, or he hasn’t for a while, I thought it’d be an awesome opportunity.
So we just hit him up and asked him, and I was like, we’ve got this feature that we want you on. But we want you to do mainly screaming and stuff like that. And he took it, you know, he was like, 100% definitely. We got the stems back from his feature, like so quickly. The guy’s an animal.
I knew what type of scream I wanted, Benji and I knew what we wanted, and the first thing we heard him come out with was exactly what we wanted. I loved it more for the fact that not many people have heard this guy scream for quite a long time, so I thought people would love that, and they have. But also, us collabing obviously opens us up to new fans, and it opens them up to new fans, so that’s a cool aspect of it.
But the fact that, again, we Telle Smith from The Word Alive on one of our songs on our new album is mind-boggling. Absolutely mind-boggling. So we’ve decided that when we come to America, we’ll get him out to some shows and get him up to do the song with us.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: And aside from Telle, who are some other artists you’d love to collaborate with?
Matt Flood/Caskets: There are quite a few I’d love to collaborate with. I’d love to do a song with Tom & Dan from Bury Tomorrow. That’d be cool. Tom helped on this album. Obviously, the big ones, like a song with Bring Me The Horizon would be awesome. But there’s some like, if it was up to me and it wasn’t anything to do with the band, I’d love a feature with Charlie Simpson.
I love that guy so much. I love his voice. So that. That’d be dope. Also, like, uh, While She Sleeps would be cool as well.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: What was the best advice you were given as a musician so far in your career?
Matt Flood/Caskets: The best bit of advice I was given was from someone not even in the music industry but one of my old housemates. He said to not worry about what anyone else is doing, to stay in your lane, focus on yourself and focus on your own art. Don’t worry about how successful this person’s getting or what’s happening over here.
Stay out of all the crap that’s happening on Twitter nowadays, and stay away from all that toxic stuff. Just stay in your own lane. That’s the best bit of advice I could give anyone, especially in the music industry.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: You’ve already released some good songs off this new album. What song hasn’t been released yet that you would love to talk about and would love for the fans to hear?
Matt Flood/Caskets: It’s got to be “Silhouettes.” That song’s the song we spent the most time on, I think, which is weird because it’s the “slow song” of the album. Craig basically wrote a demo and it was just like midi beats [Matt beatboxes the drum beat], with some atmospheric chords, some atmospheric-like fills in it, and stuff like that.
It was like a minute of just the same thing over and over again, and I like dissected it into four or five verses, but with four or five completely different melodies to each verse. So there was no like structure to it or anything. It was just “verse, verse, verse, verse, verse…” and Dan, like the god he is, saw the potential in it. And we just worked around it. We took the beats out and changed it for real drums, put some piano in there, some nice guitar, and it’s turned into, in my opinion, the best track on the album.
But it’s just mad how much that song changed from its demo period to the finished period. Because one of those verses is actually the chorus. When I was writing the vocals and all that, I didn’t hear any of them as a chorus. So I was so surprised when we tried it, and it worked so well.
It’s just weird also because Craig’s not normally the guy that comes out with the MIDI beat demos. So it was a massive shock. And from it being just some random chords and a beat to what it is now, it’s just insane how much it’s changed and how much it’s been improved.
We spent a lot of time on that track making sure it was right because it’s, it’s a nice open, slow song. So there’s so much space to utilize, and I think it’s one of the top two most emotional tracks on the album, and you know, I used to love acoustic music. I love really emotional music, piano music, acoustic, whatever. So I hope – it’s not been decided yet, but I hope it gets released as a single. We’ll have to see.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: I really hope that after the album’s out, you guys release the demo. Because one of my favorite things is when a band releases a demo of a song that the fanbase is completely used to sounding one way, and then the demo comes out, and it’s completely different than what it ended up being.
Matt Flood/Caskets: I agree. I’ve got a few ideas. After the album’s out, I wanna do a stripped-back version of probably eight songs: four off album one, four off album two, that kind of thing.
I think that’d be a cool thing to do. I think that it would be cool as well to do an EP of demos from what they were to what they’ve become. But there’s gonna need a lot of autotune put on them, mate [laughs].
Derek Oswald/Altwire: You said something about “Silhouettes” that I thought was interesting. You said it is likely the most emotional song on the album. If you had to look over all the songs you’ve written throughout your career, whether it’s songs on these two albums or even stuff you wrote earlier, what would you say is probably the most emotional song you’ve ever written?
Matt Flood/Caskets: It’s one of three. It would either be “Hopes and Dreams” because I wrote “Hopes and Dreams” like seven years ago, and I always sat on it because I wasn’t in a band or anything like that. But that’s about someone being there if everything falls apart around you.
So either that or “The Final Say”, which is about a father and son’s relationship, which is quite dark, that one. But there’s a demo that didn’t make it onto this album. It’s simply just me and the piano. It would work really well for a funeral or something like that, but I think that’s why it didn’t make the album because it wouldn’t fit into what the rest of the album holds sound-wise. So I don’t know what to do with it at the minute.
But like the first lines are: “Is this a dream, time stood still. Breathing with ease, feels like I’ve killed this hold you’ve sealed. I’m finally free, you levitate away from me.” Something like that, but it’s really sad, so I hope everyone gets to hear it one day.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Well, you were talking about wanting to do an acoustic EP. Maybe that’s the perfect place to release it. Based on the lyrics you’ve said, it’s definitely something I’d love to hear sometime.
To switch gears: what has been the funniest experience that you’ve had in the band?
Matt Flood/Caskets: There are a lot of stories that I can’t tell you that are very funny. I’m trying to think…
So last year, we were touring in America and took a bandwagon, but we didn’t hire a driver. A few members took turns driving the bandwagon, but no one had ever driven a vehicle that big before, and it also had a massive trailer on the back.
So for the first week, it was an ongoing thing where everyone would just get out of the van, and whoever was driving, we would just watch them try and reverse this huge truck with a trailer into the tightest parking spaces ever dude, and it got bad.
When we played Download the other week, one of my old housemates was there and chucked a beach ball onto the stage. Benji picked the ball up and like went to kick it and absolutely flew right onto his back. He’s on some massive stage playing, playing Download in front of like 3,000 people or something, and he decked it HARD.
But also, there’s another one on video where he falls out of the stage sideways; it’s so funny to see. I don’t know why he falls, but he like falls back off stage, and then you see him come shouldering back again, and he’s got this massive red mark on his head. [laughs] I forgot about that.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: This is the same guy falling both times?
Matt Flood/Caskets: Yeah, yeah, yeah, his feet are useless.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: I think what he should do from now on is maybe just sit down when he’s playing and possibly be in a wheelchair because it sounds like the way he’s going, he’s gonna be in a wheelchair.
Matt Flood/Caskets: Dude, I’m sure he wears shoes a size too big for him anyway. It’s just the great big flippers he’s got under his feet. He’s falling over all the time. Bless him.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Bless his heart, bless his heart. I just wanted to close out by saying I am really excited to hear your new album. You guys are awesome, and I’m so thankful I had the opportunity to speak with you today.
Matt Flood/Caskets: Of course, man.
Derek Oswald/Altwire: Is there anything else you want to share with your fans?
Matt Flood/Caskets: So, we have our album coming out on August 11th, so put it in your diaries, put it in your calendar. I am going to be doing a few acoustic versions of our songs. My plan is to go live on Instagram, probably within the next few weeks, just before we go on tour because I’ve not done it in a while.
I’m going to be putting that out on my socials probably within the next few days; I need to get that sorted. Hopefully, you can join us either in Australia or America on tour. That’d be cool!
Check out a playlist of songs from their upcoming album here.
