THE ACACIA STRAIN
Frontman Vincent Bennett called it quits while the deathcore mainstays were on the up. It took a personal reckoning for him to return and push them forwards
At the end of 2017, after 16 years of being the frontman for The Acacia Strain, Vincent Bennett decided that he didn’t want to be the singer in a metal band anymore.
“I quit. I told the guys that we would do Warped Tour and then I was out,” he tells us today. “It wasn’t that the band weren’t doing well, we were doing good numbers, I just didn’t want to do it. I thought my sauna had run out of steam, I thought I had nothing to say anymore, and sometimes you just need to take a step back and re-evaluate, not just what you’re doing, but who you are as a person. I didn’t want to be the kind of person I had acted like in the past; I didn’t want to wake up miserable every morning.”
It’s a surprising revelation considering, as Vincent rightly indicates, The Acacia Strain had successfully carved out a niche as one of the most reliable, go-to bands for modern, downtuned brutality. Growing steadily with each release, their seventh album, 2014’s Coma Witch, peaked at No.31 on the US Billboard 200 – a spectacular feat for a group so extreme. With its successor, 2017’s Gravebloom, continuing the savagery and earning them a place on the Warped Tour, this was certainly not a case of a band becoming irrelevant.
Despite this, Vincent had made his decision. He would give up the role of touring musician and join the nine-to-five grind, running a merchandise webstore, a job he says he “really enjoyed”.
“It opened up at just the right time, and I was basically one person doing four people’s jobs,” he laughs. “Which was intriguing to me, because I had never done anything like that before. I was doing customer service, restocking, orders – I ran the whole thing. It was satisfying, but at the same time my brain hadn’t fully come to the realisation that I was letting go of this thing that I had spent my whole life building up.”
During this period of normality, Vincent began to unravel years of negative behavioural patterns he had learned while fronting the band. During the making of Gravebloom, he had been snapping at people and telling them they weren’t good enough, his motivation so low that he wanted to ruin everyone else’s. Following the realisation he had spent years “playing that part”, he tried to rebuild himself into someone more positive and approachable.
“Making lifestyle changes really helped me put my head on differently, helped me become reborn as a new person”, he says. “My outward actions to people are much better. No longer am I the person that doesn’t get invited to places because I’m going to bring the party down. I was this self-proclaimed angry guy with no room in his heart for anyone, but once I understood that I have a platform and a position to these people that listen to my band, who don’t know where to go, don’t know what to do, who just feel bad about themselves… that changed. If you’re a dude onstage going, ‘Yeah, you should feel bad, you suck!’, that isn’t helping anyone, you’re not doing good.”
After a period away from the spotlight, and with plenty of soulsearching and self-reflection, he realised that The Acacia Strain wasn’t the problem. It was him. “I started to remember that I had a pretty sweet deal being in this band”, he smiles, visibly enthused by the memory.
“Why am I giving up something that has momentum? Why am I giving up something I still have passion for? Once I had purged all that despondency and cynicism, why wouldn’t I come back?”
It’s here that The Acacia Strain’s rebirth accelerated. Vincent, inspired and rejuvenated by his sabbatical, informed his bandmates that he wanted to return and get a release out as quickly as possible. He asked
guitarist Tom Smith, Jr. to go away and write an EP, resulting in The Acacia Strain signing a one-off deal with Closed Casket Activities and releasing It Comes In Waves.
“Tom had never actually played on any of our albums before. He’d been in the studio with us, but he’d never been given any creative outlet,” Vincent explains. “He’d bring me a few things he was working on and it sounded fine, but a little too much like very typical Acacia Strain. So, I said to him, ‘Look, let’s just do whatever we want – you just play what you want to hear.’ And that untied his wings and let him fly. He brought me the song Was and I said, ‘That’s it’. That sound gave us the inspiration for the rest of the EP. It brought him on as a player immensely.”
“I THOUGHT MY SAUNA HAD RUN OUT OF STEAM”
VINCENT BENNETT
eleased in December 2019, It Comes In Waves ignored the The Acacia Strain’s classic, mosh-heavy thump and instead brought a more atmospheric, blackened, gothic vibe that was totally unlike any of their previous work.
“The Acacia Strain are my favourite band ever”, Tom tells us with a mixture of pride and timidity. “So, I have to admit, writing for them for the first time was daunting. I was secondguessing myself and feeling a lot of internal pressure in my own head, to live up to the name. As soon as Vincent told me to just write what I wanted to hear, that freed me up so much.”
The EP set a benchmark for The Acacia Strain, both from the critics – many of whom proclaimed it was the best thing the band had ever put their name to – and from the band themselves, who were informed by their label bosses at Rise Records that they wanted to capitalise on Vincent’s return by getting out a full-length immediately.
“We did the EP and we were thrust straight into the writing process again right away”, Vincent smiles, “which meant we had all of that adrenaline of those creative vibes still coursing through us. We knew that the new record was going to be more atypical of our past work, but that feeling of excitement and of having no rules sat with us, and I think it shows.”
The new Acacia Strain album, Slow Decay, is a monster piece of work, full of the crushingly heavy death metalinspired hardcore of yesteryear, but with greater twists, wider dynamic range and more emotional depth.
It has also been released without warning, bit by bit, across five seveninch singles, each titled with a letter. Combined, they spell out D-E-C-A-Y.
“When I was young, most of the bands I liked released seven-inches and EPS on little DIY labels”, explains Vincent of the reason for the album’s unusual release strategy. “You never knew when it was coming out, or if you would even be able to find them in a store, so this was just a way of trying to recapture that excitement and surprise that I used to have when I was first getting into music. And I get people messaging me every Friday, going, ‘Is it today?’ ‘What does it spell?’ So that feels like it really worked.”
With an EP, an album and a unique piece of marketing all done in a sixmonth period, it seems the Vincent Bennett of 2020 is happy being busy and being in a band again. “It’s feeling like the furthest thing from work again”, he shoots back. “If you’d asked me to do all of this back in 2017, I’d just have said no and walked away. I point blank wouldn’t have done it.
But I wanted to be proof that you can change, you can be better. That’s what this album is about.”
SLOW DECAY IS OUT ON JULY 24 VIA RISE RECORDS