HEAVY LIFTING
Righteous Vendetta playing harder tunes from new album
Touring with Hellyeah meant lots of rehearsing for Righteous Vendetta and playing more songs from its new, heavier album, “Cursed.” “We just rehearsed as much as we could,” Righteous Vendetta frontman Ryan Hayes said. “Luckily, we had been on tour prior to this tour for a few months, so we were pretty wellrehearsed. You know, we just did everything we could to make sure we sounded perfect, as perfect as we could, and worked hard to make sure our stage presence was great.”
The set list is more of the new and less of the old on this tour.
“We’re actually only playing two old songs, and the rest of them are off of this new album,” Hayes said. “The reason we did that is just because the new album is quite a bit heavier than the old one and we were going to be out with Hellyeah so we were like, man, we’ve got to play the heavy stuff. So the set list is catered to more of the heavy crowd.”
Making the new album helped the band grow.
“Cursed — it was a two year process for all of us, and during that two years not only did we learn a lot about ourselves, but we were in a really dark place just because of how bummed out about how things were going and so naturally, ‘Cursed’ just came out,” Hayes said. “We actually felt like we were cursed. … We were trying to please this record label, and they didn’t like anything we were writing, but everyone else thought that what we were writing was absolutely awesome, so it was just like this tug of war and the whole time it was such a dark negative time for us, because we’re doing everything we possibly can to make the best record we can and, you know, when people come back to you and say ‘it’s terrible,’ it was like, what do you do with that?”
The criticism paid off.
“We literally just got better; it just made us get better and better, because we took it and it kind of fueled us,” Hayes said. “It made us mad, and it got us to a point where all we wanted to do was prove people wrong. That’s how far it got with us. It actually, like, helped us get better at what we were doing.”