Sauce

With a punishing debut album under their belts, Roadrunner’s Sanctity are on the road across the states, bringing their hard-edged sound to the eager ears of American metalheads. A long, long way from his native North Carolina, guitarist Jared spoke to me about driving down the Road To Bloodshed.

Has the tour been interesting in any other way, apart from music? Have you found things along the way that have inspired you?
Well, we get to see a lot of the countryside obviously, which is cool, but mostly just buying shit at truckstops.

And what about crashes? Have you seen any carnage on the roads?
No, not this tour … not yet! [Laughs] We had to change a couple of tyres on our van because they were going really bald, and it was getting pretty bad. But nothing too terrible this tour – not like the last tour!

Really? What happened on the last tour?
We actually did have a crash; we crashed our bus when we were over in the UK with Trivium.

And what were the consequences of that crash?
Well it wasn’t too bad. It was kind of a minor crash; it wasn’t, like, high-speed or anything like that. We just rode with the Trivium guys for a couple of days until our bus came back.

Yeah, because you’ve got the new CD, Road To Bloodshed – this is where my line of questioning has sort of come from. I thought maybe that you might be on the road to bloodshed, or you might have been inspired by some kind of incident. Where does that title come from?
Well, it is one of the titles; one of the tracks on the album. But when we were trying to come up with an album title, it seemed to actually be also fitting with where we have come from to where we are at this point, in terms of trying to, you know, get ourselves signed and write songs and all that good stuff. That’s kind of where it came from.

What was the hardest part, in terms of putting their new CD out?
Waiting; I’d say the hardest part was waiting, because we actually had all the tracks … the tracks were done about, like, almost six or seven months before the CD even came out. But Roadrunner wanted to … well, we all wanted to make sure that when it came out, it wasn’t going to be overshadowed by anything else. So we were kind of playing the waiting game. And meanwhile, we were touring for almost a full year before it even came out, so just waiting was really hard, because we really wanted everyone to see what we could do; we really wanted to get the disc out, but we wanted to make sure it was the right time.

What about the easiest part of putting this CD out? What was the easiest thing?
The easiest thing? Um … I don’t know. I would say “writing songs” – I guess, compared to everything else, writing the songs was kind of easy. At time is was tough … Our touring experience is actually pretty easy; we’ve had a lot of good tours, and have really enjoyed being on the road and playing our music for everybody. Playing live has been really easy for us.

What techniques or little tricks do you have to help you when you hit a block, in terms of writing the songs?
We take a break. Like, when we try to force ourselves, and write too hard … it seems that we start fighting ourselves … When we try to force it, there are times where it feels like nothing’s good enough, or that it just doesn’t fit, or the song doesn’t do what it wants to on its own. So we usually just take a break for however long – I don’t know, thirty minutes, or even a couple of days – and come back to it, and try and look at it with a fresh perspective.

Road To Bloodshed is out now.

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