ASKING ALEXANDRIA

With Danny back on vocals and a new fire burning, Asking Alexandria are rising up and taking back control of their future. But will people like their new direction?

Ben Bruce reveals why the band hit rock bottom, and how they’re climbing back up.

“it’s almost like this is our first album again,” admits Asking Alexandria guitarist Ben Bruce. “We hit our rock bottom and started again.”

When singer Danny Worsnop returned to Asking Alexandria last October, fans rejoiced that the classic lineup – founder/guitarist Ben Bruce, Danny, guitarist Cameron Liddell, bassist Sam Bettley and drummer James Cassells – had reassembled and were talking about new music. Yet even as fans hailed the reunion with dewy-eyed ecstasy, it was clear that over the past two years – a period during which Ukrainian vocalist Denis Stoff fronted the band and they released 2016’s The Black – AA’s progress had stalled; venues grew smaller, and instead of carrying their own headlining tours they found themselves opening for the likes of Parkway Drive.

So when AA finally hit the studio this past spring, they faced the very real task of rediscovering their musical identity. After all, it had been four years since this lineup had written anything together. Moreover, Danny had released two albums of decidedly non-AA material – his country album, The Long Road Home, and We Are Harlot’s 80s-inspired, self-titled rock album. His recovery from his highly publicised battles with alcohol and drug addiction had also coloured his perspectives on not just the future, but his own dark past.

Could they pick up from where 2013’s From Death To Destiny left off, as if no time had passed? Hardly. What would be the point? The Black had already cemented AA’s mainstream aspirations – there was no going back. As the five guys entered the writing phase of their fifth album, their most important task was answering just one question: who are Asking Alexandria?

On December 15, the world will find out, when they release Asking Alexandria – easily the poppiest and most polarising statement of their career. Bursting with glittery choruses, skyrocketing atmospherics and ginormous pop hooks, the new album is as controversial as it is catchy, due to its unabashed mainstream appeal.

“I’ve always thought we need to push the envelope and better ourselves with each record,” says Ben. “I looked at everything we’ve accomplished and I thought, ‘I want this to be bigger. I want this to be better.’ I wanted it to be more exciting than anything I’d done before, so I set the bar to our previous records and asked, ‘What did we accomplish on those records and what songs really spoke to me? Now, how do I top that?’”

We’ve interviewed Ben and Danny many times over the years, and they’ve always radiated an electric chemistry, delivering sharp, thoughtprovoking insights while simultaneously cracking jokes and riffing off each other’s wisecracks. All of this occurs again today – masturbation jokes fly out of the gate as soon as we begin speaking – and yet there’s an undeniable softness to their interaction now that suggests a deeper emotional connection. That sense of playful schoolboy competition has been replaced by a deeper sense of brotherly support – an awareness of what each other have been through.

“It felt like 2008, when we did Stand Up

And Scream,” Ben says. “While that’s a very different album to this one, the headspace we were in was that we were excited. We just created an album as five friends, because that’s what we love to do, and we were excited about it for the right reasons. That is how this new record felt. There was no fear – it was nothing but the album and the five of us, and that’s all that mattered. It was the most enjoyable record I’ve made.”

It begins with Alone In A Room, the start of a three-track story following Danny in the wake of his 2015 departure.

“It’s looking back on writing my first solo album,” says Danny. “I sat down to write it, and for the first time I was by myself. That experience of being in a room, alone with my own thoughts, forced me to face things that I wasn’t comfortable with and that I’d been keeping down inside. That leads to Into The

Fire, which is about coming to terms with accepting myself. I’m an addict, and if I can keep myself away from the drink and drugs, my addiction can be bettering myself. It can be working on my business and my music and my health; trying to recover what I can after years of destroying myself. From there it’s Hopelessly Hopeful, which is the song about where we’re at now that I’ve put all my chips down. I’ve gone all in, betting on me, hoping I’ve done the right thing and that I’m right about myself.”

On one of the darkest tracks, Room 138, Danny revisits his near-fatal overdose in a motel several years ago. “It’s written from that point of reflection when you think you are going to die,” he explains. “I couldn’t move. I was convinced that that was it. There’s so much going on in your mind at that time. It was a very scary song to write.”

Today Danny is several months sober, brimming with a newfound sense of ease.

“I feel incredible,” he says with pride and relief. “I’m an addict, period, so I replace one thing with something else. That went from heroin into cocaine. Now I’ve turned it into a positive because I spend my time in the gym. Possibly too much, but I work on myself and my health and that hopefully is the balance I’ve found.”

in a change that had less to do with consciously charting a new direction as simply shaking things up, Asking Alexandria marks the band’s first release without producer Joey Sturgis. This time they turned to Matt Good (From First To Last, Memphis May Fire).

”It wasn’t because Joey’s not good, or because I didn’t enjoy writing with Joey; it was because I wanted to work with someone else who might be able to push me in a different direction – and that’s what Matt did,” says Ben. “I went into the studio every day with no ideas. He’d click record and say, ‘Play whatever you’re feeling.’ If I was angry, riffs like the ones in Eve would come out, and if I was in a joyful mood, I’d riff around on my guitar and something like Into The Fire or Rise Up would come out. It was fun for me to go in there blindly and to create for the sake of creating, instead of being told what to do, like painting by numbers. This time I had a blank canvas and I threw paint at it.”