Alkaline Trio tour has vibe of ‘fresh start’
Bassist Andriano cites level of excitement with new songs recorded for 10th album
Alkaline Trio’s founding guitarist Matt Skiba is done with his side hustle in Blink-182, and the pop-punk trio also has a new drummer in Atom Willard. So yes, bassist Dan Andriano says, the tour that kicked off in February will be a bit different.
“It certainly has the vibe of what seems like a fresh start,” Andriano says in a recent interview. “It’s sort of hard for anything like that after being in a band for so long. But it also just seems to be the way things are shaking out.”
Skiba, who replaced Tom DeLonge in Blink-182 from 2015 until 2022, had no distractions when Alkaline Trio went into the studio last year to record its 10th album, “Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs.” Longtime drummer Derek Grant played on that record but decided to leave afterward, so Willard, who briefly played in the band two decades ago, came back on board.
“Things are sort of back to normal, but also with a bit of new light coming from somewhere,” Andriano says of the changes. “Matt seems to be very focused and driven, like he usually is, but it just seems something more is happening.
“I think it’s just our level of excitement as we started creating new songs led us to a point where we were like little kids — giddy about it.”
The recently released album is the band’s first in six years, and the tour behind it is its first headlining run in that time as well.
Andriano, who shares lead vocals with Skiba, says it’s still hard to grasp how so much time slipped by since the previous Alkaline Trio album came out.
“It’s hard for me to picture this, six years having gone by since making ‘Is This Thing Cursed?’ ” he says. “Getting that record done, I mean, I think we all love that record, and it was a really cool experience that we had with Cameron (Webb, who produced it and the new album).
“But it was ... a different experience,” Andriano says. “It may be unfair to say it wasn’t the most fun record to get finished. It was just sort of a drag to make it, it seemed like. And that’s never a good thing.
“We loved the record while we were working on it. We were having fun and enjoying it. But it was all the little parts to go along with finishing a record or being taken away from home for that amount of time.
“So I don’t want to say none of us were excited to get back in the studio,” he says. “I guess I’m just being real honest here. Like, I think we were like, ‘All right, we got that done.’ ”
Alkaline Trio still played live — Andriano notes that tours with Bad Religion and Coheed and Cambria were particularly fun runs — but it wasn’t until after the pandemic eased in 2022 that the band got serious again about recording its
next album.
“I think it’s good we waited,” he says. “Because the record we made, I don’t think it would have been made if we just jumped into the studio a couple of years after ‘Is This Thing Cursed?’ This was a different animal from the beginning, and it had everything to do with everyone getting together to actually talk about making our 10th record and what we wanted to accomplish with that musically and artistically.”
The goal for “Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs” wasn’t to remake anything like the nine records that preceded it. Trying to recapture one’s early magic is a fool’s game, Andriano says.
“Those kinds of things, they always fall short because there is no recapturing that magic of when you were 19 and 20 years old,” he says. “Whatever was happening in your life, you’re so far removed from that. That mindset doesn’t work.”
Instead, the band tried to make an album that sounded like the music its
members liked to listen to today, while knowing that with Skiba and Andriano as songwriters, it would still sound like an Alkaline Trio album.
“We weren’t afraid all of a sudden we were going to have some sort of EDM/ country mashup,” Andriano says. “We knew it would sound like us, and we hoped we could create something fresh.”
Much of the new record was recorded at Foo Fighter Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in the San Fernando Valley, a choice Andriano says was made for very specific reasons.
“It’s only three of us, and we want the instruments to really shine,” he says. “We want to be able to hear everything about them, and that studio was built to be like the drum recording studio, basically. It’s Dave Grohl. He knows what he’s up to.
“I mean, he’s got this Neve console in there that came from a studio called Sound City,” Andriano continues. “He made a documentary about this board. All these killer
records in the ’70s were cut on this board, and it’s just got some kind of magic inside of it.”
Add to that the influence of Nirvana on Alkaline Trio, and all the Nirvana memorabilia that its former drummer Grohl has on the walls alongside Foo Fighter artifacts, and just being there provided a subconscious kind of inspiration, Andriano says.
“I was trying to soak up every minute of being in that room as just a fan of all that stuff,” he says. “Like, Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ was cut on that board. It’s such a cool circular thing he’s got going on over there. Just keeping the dream alive.”
The title of “Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs” originates with a phrase Skiba’s parents brought back with them from the Vietnam War where they served as a dentist and nurse.
Andriano says that it had been considered as an album title for previous records, and after Skiba wrote a song with that title, it only seemed natural to use it for the album, too.
“It’s something they would say over the radio whenever the proverbial (stuff ) hit the fan,” he says. “I just loved the imagery, and it kind of seemed to work perfectly.”
The band’s new tour puts the emphasis on new, whether that’s production and lighting elements, or the set list, Andriano says.
“With 10 albums, it’s a tricky business making a set list,” he says. “But we’re trying to really showcase the new album, and hopefully we can do that in a way where people are not like, ‘What’s this? What’s that?’ We feel like people are pretty excited about the new album.
“Then we really want to step things up and bring a different kind of Alkaline Trio show,” Andriano says. “We’re going to change up the set list a lot in terms of the older songs we’ll be bringing, because in recent years of tours, I feel like the set list hasn’t maybe changed enough. It’s probably fine, but now it’s time to change it up a little bit.
“So we’ll see what happens. But we’re pretty excited.”