ALL THAT REMAINS Frontman Discusses Latest Album

ALL THAT REMAINS frontman Phil Labonte recently sat down with PureGrainAudio.com to discuss the band's latest record, "The Fall of Ideals", as well as the singer's musical background, writing styles and more. Here are a few excerpts:

Q: Tell us a little bit about this new record and the progression from "This Darkened Heart" to "The Fall of Ideals".

Phil: When you listen to this record and the last record, you can hear similarities, but it definitely doesn't sound like we're just putting out the last record again. I think any artist strives to make music that doesn't sound like anything else. I'm not saying that we don't want to have people say, "Well this part reminds me of this," because I think it's cool and influences come from everywhere. With this record there is a lot of inspiration but it's not from your typical sources, because we all listen to a lot of different styles of music. I listen to country music and a lot of garbage pop. I'm not a James Hetfield and want to go ahead and turn our band into a country band and our new album definitely isn't country, but it's just there's a lot of good music out there. That stuff just fits right in.

Q: So you were the headbanger in high school with long hair and a SUFFOCATION t-shirt?

Phil: I did have long hair and I did own more than one SUFFOCATION t-shirt. [laughs] In fact when I met Frank Mullen from SUFFOCATION I got a little bit fan boyish. I'll see him at shows and stuff and he'll say, "Hey what's going on?" and I'll get like, "Awww shucks..." I'm a big fan of his and think that he's a phenomenal death metal vocalist.

Q: You wrote the majority of material on "This Darkened Heart" yourself. Has the writing process changed any with this release?

Phil: A lot of this record was written by Olie, who probably wrote about 70% of this record. Then he would bring it to us and we'd work the rest of it as a band. It was very much a collaboration when it came to putting everything together. We'd put the songs into a computer and them move them around and chop them up a bit. With this record while we were writing, we had a lot of things happen on the business side where we went and got new management. That's the stuff that I've always had a hand in and on the last record, even though I wrote the majority of the material, but it was still a collaboration. This time it wasn't that I was relinquishing control, but it was just that I didn't have as much time to write. A lot of the stuff that was written had been written months previous over the course of touring behind "This Darkened Heart".

ALL THAT REMAINS has announced that it will record its July 12 show in Maryland for the band's forthcoming debut DVD. The group will also appear on the July 14 Sounds of the Underground date before heading to Mexico for the first time, to be followed by another trip to Europe.