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After a hectic, fun filled year AxeWound made up of Liam Cormier (Cancer Bats), Matt Tuck (Bullet For My Valentine), Mike Kingswood (Glamour Of The Kill), Joe Copcutt (Rise To Remain) and Jason Bowld (Pitchshifter) have made their mark on the music scene in their own right.
We caught up with frontman Liam Cormier to discuss all things AxeWound and how AxeWound was created in such a short amount of time...
AltSounds: First of all how did AxeWound come together?
Liam Cormier: Originally the whole thing started with Matt Tuck wanting to write a more metal kind of album. He started to work on some ideas for Bullet For My Valentine and then kinda got thinking maybe more of his Slipknot/Pantera kinda side. I think anyone who’s in a band kinda knows you have those moments where you’re working on things and you realise they won’t fit with your band. I know for Cancer Bats we have songs that we totally bail on because we’re like ‘this is cool, but that’s not what our band is’. When Matt called me and told me that he wrote a metal album, and that it was something completely different from Bullet and was wondering if I wanted to sing on it, I was like ‘ohhhh awesome!’ So basically it was that and we all had some down time in between projects. Matt was about to start working on the Bullet record and kinda wanted to get all of this Pantera out of his system, and we’d just finished recording Dead Set On Living so I was just waiting to go and start press, and we were gonna leave for tour in like a month and a half so I had tonnes of time.
AltSounds: The name AxeWound, I read Matt’s girlfriend came up with it?
Liam Cormier: Yeh, it was actually him and Charlotte goofing around talking about what would be the best name for a metal band, and you know how you’re just throwing around band names like with your friends and someone says something that totally clicks. It was her just like ‘You should call the band AxeWound’ [laughs] and Matt was like ‘Omg that is a good name for a metal band’. I thought it was so fitting too because it’s for a fun, brutal, metal side project, it’s like yeh what better name than AxeWound.
AltSounds: When you started out then, along with Matt’s metal ideas, as a band did you have an overall feel of what sound you wanted to create?
Liam Cormier: Matt and Jason (Bowld) wrote the entire album before I was even asked to join, so they did it just as a couple of friends jamming out some ideas and that was the original kinda vibe you know like:
AltSounds: Being all members of other successful bands do you feel it makes the process easier because you all know what to expect and how things work in the music world?
Liam Cormier: Yeh I think that’s what made everything, especially the studio side of things as effective as possible. Matt and I recorded the vocals in five days and both of us have recorded a bunch of albums, the two of us could just walk in and get everything done the way we wanted, like super quickly. I don’t know if I could do that with other people, I think because everyone’s not like best friends, but been around the block, we can do our best under these time constraints and have it turn out to be something cool.
AltSounds: As you’ve said this time around Matt had previously written the whole album, do you think that when the band comes to write material the next time around their will be any conflicts in musical backgrounds and styles, or do you feel you all fit into the AxeWound sound well?
Liam Cormier: I dunno. We all wanna make another record; there is part of me that wants to make sure there’s still like a time constraint. I think that’s part of the beauty of this band, we’ve shown that we work well under that pressure, so I think that’s like a key element of making it cool still, the fact that we’ll still keep a tight time frame and just bang it out. I know none of us are gonna get less busy in the next three or four years [laughs] We’re still gonna be doing this in between projects, I think that will ensure that it has that intensity.
AltSounds: Would you say that the distance in where you guys are all from works to an advantage in this writing style?
Liam Cormier: Yeh, I mean that side of things I listened to the demo and literally flew over in six days. They asked me and then I had to go as quick as possible.
AltSounds: Do you find it more exciting, being sent tracks that you then have to think ‘ok what am I gonna do on this’?
Liam Cormier: I dunno it’s hard to say, I just didn’t even think about anything, I just thought ‘metal record, write metal lyrics’. Matt was super awesome to work with because he had his input once we were in the studio but he didn’t dictate what he wanted the songs to be about. He gave me free reign in terms of writing lyrics, and he was pumped on everything that I did. So that side of things made it really easy and made the whole thing fun. It was like I wrote these eight songs that I had and he was just like ‘cool, all of those rule, like this is the best.’
AltSounds: Would you say then that the distance in where you guys are from compared to each other and the time constraint works in an advantage to AxeWound’s writing style?
Liam Cormier: Yeh, and it’s like I wanna step it up cos I wanna impress them aswell. I wanna show them that they didn’t make a mistake asking me to be in the band [laughs] So I’m like ‘ok I’m gonna bring my A game’ and it’s cool to show up and Matt be all like ‘this is super cool’. I obviously come from more of a hardcore background and in a lot of ways I approached these songs in more of a hardcore way, so it’s cool to see Matt’s more metal side influence how I’m singing and him pushing me in the studio to try different stuff. I find that side of things really fun about the project because in certain ways I don’t think about the song structure. ExorChrist is like a perfect example because I wrote that chorus originally and didn’t expect it to be kinda like Judas Priest, like a rock anthem, but it was just in the way that Matt had arranged it, it then becomes like this total [laughs]…sing along, stadium kinda style chorus which I was like ‘I wrote those words but it was not in that context’ and it’s so rad that you can just sing it a little bit differently and have it go from being like this brutal, hardcore chorus to this cool song, and then we still mix it up with me screaming it and Matt singing it. To me, especially that song, is the two of us coming together and affecting each other’s style.
AltSounds: You’re first single was Post Apocalyptic Party, what made you choose this as the first song to release?
Liam Cormier: We all really liked that song just because it was so different from anything else that our bands do. It didn’t sound like Bullet For My Valentine and it didn’t sound like Cancer Bats, but also the fact that there is no clean singing in it. Matt really liked the fact that that song was all me, he wanted to push ‘Yeh you’re the frontman in this band, I want the first song to be you fronting the band’. The other reason why we chose that one was cos that’s the only song on the record that has no swearing, so we were like maybe we’ll have an easier go [laughs] at putting the word out there if we have a song that we don’t have to edit too heavily. It was funny because the next song that we chose was Cold to show some of the Bullet For My Valentine fans that Matt sings aswell and that we have this dynamic. Cold was full of swearing, [laughs] so it was like kinda funny to have this super edited one be our second song. I think a lot of people don’t realise that that middle line is ‘mother fucker’ though, I think that’s where we got away with it because it’s so brutal in the way it’s sung.
We just did a BBC session and we played that song, we made a clean edit where we change the lines to ‘you can’t’ and it still works, I kinda like having a clean version cos I think it’s funny, makes me think of old Jay-Z songs [laughs] when he has to really edit the song around. It’s one of those things. When you’re in the studio you don’t think of singles or the commercial side of your brutal, metal band and then it actually starts happening. Blood Money and Lies is one of my favourite songs on the record but it’s got sooo much swearing in it [laughs] It’s like no way could we ever use that as a single…[laughs]but like aaah man that’s such a strong track [laughs].
AltSounds: When you brought AxeWound out to the world did you feel any pressure to please or fill expectations?
Liam Cormier: No, I mean for me, I was definitely in a really good spot, Cancer Bats had just put out DSOL (Dead Set On Living), we put out what I feel is our best record, so it’s like if anyone’s not feeling AxeWound as my side project, you know it’s like I definitely have this thing with Cancer Bats fans. When we did the record my thinking was ‘I think everyone’s gonna be down with this, but for anyone who isn’t it’s like we definitely have a banging Bat’s record’. For me if we didn’t have that then it maybe would’ve been different. From Cancer Bats' fans there’s definitely nothing but support, which is awesome, like everybody was super pumped.
AltSounds: Does either mean more to you, having Cancer Bats fans following and supporting AxeWound or acquiring complete new fans?
Liam Cormier: I think it’s really cool that (especially doing this tour that we just finished) there was a lot of kids that came to the show that were Bullet For My Valentine fans first and who never got into Cancer Bats, or maybe just heard the Sabotage cover or whatever and them genuinely being like ‘now I’m a Cancer Bats fan aswell’. That side of things I thought was really cool, I kinda thought maybe some of that might happen, but I didn’t think about it in terms of that being like part of this project. Like when I was a kid listening to Faith No More that’s the only reason I picked up Mr Bungle [laughs].
AltSounds: Is there anything different you hope to achieve with AxeWound?
Liam Cormier: I’m already really stoked on how things have gone with this whole process, I mean when we were all touring just for like a week in the UK and we were all saying how much fun it would be to actually do a support tour, maybe do more with AxeWound now. All of us get along really well and it was super fun touring and it’s like ‘ah this fun side project I really wanna do more.’ It’ll be cool to see how AxeWound ould fit with others, like on a really metal tour, supporting like Lamb Of God or someone like that if you know what I mean?
AltSounds: You played Download Festival earlier this year and have also just finished the UK shows, how do you feel they went down?
Liam Cormier: Our Download response for AxeWound was crazy, we’d done some festivals beforehand and you could see people texting each other as the show was happening and people would show up and be like ‘oh AxeWound is Matt Tuck from Bullet For My Valentine’ and like ‘oh this band’s actually really cool’. It was cool to see that like the word had spread a bit more obviously for Download and to have like kids who knew a couple of songs. We had a full tent when we played, it’s crazy to see that that many people were interested in what the bunch of us were doing, that all of our collective bands have resulted in that kind of interest, which is crazy.
AltSounds: You’ve done quite a lot in one year, are you planning to rest next year or have you got more planned?
Liam Cormier: Right now we’re trying to figure out plans, I mean obviously the new Bullet For My Valentine record is gonna come out next year so that side of things is gonna get really busy for Matt. Cancer Bats has a tour booked up until March so there’s still a lot that we’re doing with our main bands, so that side of things is really busy still. I think because its gone as well as it has, we all really wanna figure out time when we can do more AxeWound stuff, and that’s how we kinda left the UK tour. We have another six shows in North America and it’s like ‘aaah we’re finishing, like we still need to play Cardiff, we still need to play Newcastle’ I wanna play more cities than we have.
AltSounds: Do you find it slightly frustrating that you’ve now got to put AxeWound on pause?
Liam Cormier: I find it exciting, I just hope that kids will be patient with it and I think they will. Genuinely all the people that I’ve met, like Cancer Bats fans are the best, they’re the nicest kids I’ve ever met, and then doing merch and hanging out for AxeWound stuff and seeing just how rad everyone is coming to these shows it’s like, what?! I feel like the vibe is there that everyone’s just having fun and being really cool. I think that everyone gets it and they’re willing to be patient in terms of hanging out. I think when shows happen people will be pumped and we’ll make sure that it’s not a secret kinda thing, we’ll make sure that everyone knows about it so that they can all come take part. I’m trying to think of any days off I have that we could maybe book like an extra show [laughs] like maybe after the Enter Shikari tour or something. That’s where my minds at right now I’m like ‘when can we fit in some more of this fun thing that we do?’ [laughs].
AltSounds: Does it make it more exciting having the two bands to write and play for and does it mean more as an artist to be able to be creative in these two different ways?
Liam Cormier: Yeh it is kinda exciting, especially like, I think doing this tour that we just did made us all really confident in how we can crush it as a band. It’s one of those things. You record an album and then you play some shows and everybody kinda gets used to each other on stage, and then this tour was just us kicking ass every day and kinda like showing how "for real" this band is. After doing this week I’m like "we can fuck up any club," we’re at that point when we’re like a real band [laughs] So I’m like stoked and I feel confident.
We caught up with frontman Liam Cormier to discuss all things AxeWound and how AxeWound was created in such a short amount of time...
AltSounds: First of all how did AxeWound come together?
Liam Cormier: Originally the whole thing started with Matt Tuck wanting to write a more metal kind of album. He started to work on some ideas for Bullet For My Valentine and then kinda got thinking maybe more of his Slipknot/Pantera kinda side. I think anyone who’s in a band kinda knows you have those moments where you’re working on things and you realise they won’t fit with your band. I know for Cancer Bats we have songs that we totally bail on because we’re like ‘this is cool, but that’s not what our band is’. When Matt called me and told me that he wrote a metal album, and that it was something completely different from Bullet and was wondering if I wanted to sing on it, I was like ‘ohhhh awesome!’ So basically it was that and we all had some down time in between projects. Matt was about to start working on the Bullet record and kinda wanted to get all of this Pantera out of his system, and we’d just finished recording Dead Set On Living so I was just waiting to go and start press, and we were gonna leave for tour in like a month and a half so I had tonnes of time.
AltSounds: The name AxeWound, I read Matt’s girlfriend came up with it?
Liam Cormier: Yeh, it was actually him and Charlotte goofing around talking about what would be the best name for a metal band, and you know how you’re just throwing around band names like with your friends and someone says something that totally clicks. It was her just like ‘You should call the band AxeWound’ [laughs] and Matt was like ‘Omg that is a good name for a metal band’. I thought it was so fitting too because it’s for a fun, brutal, metal side project, it’s like yeh what better name than AxeWound.
AltSounds: When you started out then, along with Matt’s metal ideas, as a band did you have an overall feel of what sound you wanted to create?
Liam Cormier: Matt and Jason (Bowld) wrote the entire album before I was even asked to join, so they did it just as a couple of friends jamming out some ideas and that was the original kinda vibe you know like:
‘Yo we’ll just have some fun, just the two of us will jam out these ideas and we’ll see how it goes’.It went so quickly that they had like a whole record and were like ‘oh shit let’s figure out who we can get to sing on this’. They wrote the whole thing in pretty much like two weeks, so it kinda went crazier than they expected. I feel like everything to do with this band is crazier than expected, like everything that happens we’re all like ‘this is insane’.
AltSounds: Being all members of other successful bands do you feel it makes the process easier because you all know what to expect and how things work in the music world?
Liam Cormier: Yeh I think that’s what made everything, especially the studio side of things as effective as possible. Matt and I recorded the vocals in five days and both of us have recorded a bunch of albums, the two of us could just walk in and get everything done the way we wanted, like super quickly. I don’t know if I could do that with other people, I think because everyone’s not like best friends, but been around the block, we can do our best under these time constraints and have it turn out to be something cool.
AltSounds: As you’ve said this time around Matt had previously written the whole album, do you think that when the band comes to write material the next time around their will be any conflicts in musical backgrounds and styles, or do you feel you all fit into the AxeWound sound well?
Liam Cormier: I dunno. We all wanna make another record; there is part of me that wants to make sure there’s still like a time constraint. I think that’s part of the beauty of this band, we’ve shown that we work well under that pressure, so I think that’s like a key element of making it cool still, the fact that we’ll still keep a tight time frame and just bang it out. I know none of us are gonna get less busy in the next three or four years [laughs] We’re still gonna be doing this in between projects, I think that will ensure that it has that intensity.
AltSounds: Would you say that the distance in where you guys are all from works to an advantage in this writing style?
Liam Cormier: Yeh, I mean that side of things I listened to the demo and literally flew over in six days. They asked me and then I had to go as quick as possible.
AltSounds: Do you find it more exciting, being sent tracks that you then have to think ‘ok what am I gonna do on this’?
Liam Cormier: I dunno it’s hard to say, I just didn’t even think about anything, I just thought ‘metal record, write metal lyrics’. Matt was super awesome to work with because he had his input once we were in the studio but he didn’t dictate what he wanted the songs to be about. He gave me free reign in terms of writing lyrics, and he was pumped on everything that I did. So that side of things made it really easy and made the whole thing fun. It was like I wrote these eight songs that I had and he was just like ‘cool, all of those rule, like this is the best.’
AltSounds: Would you say then that the distance in where you guys are from compared to each other and the time constraint works in an advantage to AxeWound’s writing style?
Liam Cormier: Yeh, and it’s like I wanna step it up cos I wanna impress them aswell. I wanna show them that they didn’t make a mistake asking me to be in the band [laughs] So I’m like ‘ok I’m gonna bring my A game’ and it’s cool to show up and Matt be all like ‘this is super cool’. I obviously come from more of a hardcore background and in a lot of ways I approached these songs in more of a hardcore way, so it’s cool to see Matt’s more metal side influence how I’m singing and him pushing me in the studio to try different stuff. I find that side of things really fun about the project because in certain ways I don’t think about the song structure. ExorChrist is like a perfect example because I wrote that chorus originally and didn’t expect it to be kinda like Judas Priest, like a rock anthem, but it was just in the way that Matt had arranged it, it then becomes like this total [laughs]…sing along, stadium kinda style chorus which I was like ‘I wrote those words but it was not in that context’ and it’s so rad that you can just sing it a little bit differently and have it go from being like this brutal, hardcore chorus to this cool song, and then we still mix it up with me screaming it and Matt singing it. To me, especially that song, is the two of us coming together and affecting each other’s style.
AltSounds: You’re first single was Post Apocalyptic Party, what made you choose this as the first song to release?
Liam Cormier: We all really liked that song just because it was so different from anything else that our bands do. It didn’t sound like Bullet For My Valentine and it didn’t sound like Cancer Bats, but also the fact that there is no clean singing in it. Matt really liked the fact that that song was all me, he wanted to push ‘Yeh you’re the frontman in this band, I want the first song to be you fronting the band’. The other reason why we chose that one was cos that’s the only song on the record that has no swearing, so we were like maybe we’ll have an easier go [laughs] at putting the word out there if we have a song that we don’t have to edit too heavily. It was funny because the next song that we chose was Cold to show some of the Bullet For My Valentine fans that Matt sings aswell and that we have this dynamic. Cold was full of swearing, [laughs] so it was like kinda funny to have this super edited one be our second song. I think a lot of people don’t realise that that middle line is ‘mother fucker’ though, I think that’s where we got away with it because it’s so brutal in the way it’s sung.
We just did a BBC session and we played that song, we made a clean edit where we change the lines to ‘you can’t’ and it still works, I kinda like having a clean version cos I think it’s funny, makes me think of old Jay-Z songs [laughs] when he has to really edit the song around. It’s one of those things. When you’re in the studio you don’t think of singles or the commercial side of your brutal, metal band and then it actually starts happening. Blood Money and Lies is one of my favourite songs on the record but it’s got sooo much swearing in it [laughs] It’s like no way could we ever use that as a single…[laughs]but like aaah man that’s such a strong track [laughs].
AltSounds: When you brought AxeWound out to the world did you feel any pressure to please or fill expectations?
Liam Cormier: No, I mean for me, I was definitely in a really good spot, Cancer Bats had just put out DSOL (Dead Set On Living), we put out what I feel is our best record, so it’s like if anyone’s not feeling AxeWound as my side project, you know it’s like I definitely have this thing with Cancer Bats fans. When we did the record my thinking was ‘I think everyone’s gonna be down with this, but for anyone who isn’t it’s like we definitely have a banging Bat’s record’. For me if we didn’t have that then it maybe would’ve been different. From Cancer Bats' fans there’s definitely nothing but support, which is awesome, like everybody was super pumped.
AltSounds: Does either mean more to you, having Cancer Bats fans following and supporting AxeWound or acquiring complete new fans?
Liam Cormier: I think it’s really cool that (especially doing this tour that we just finished) there was a lot of kids that came to the show that were Bullet For My Valentine fans first and who never got into Cancer Bats, or maybe just heard the Sabotage cover or whatever and them genuinely being like ‘now I’m a Cancer Bats fan aswell’. That side of things I thought was really cool, I kinda thought maybe some of that might happen, but I didn’t think about it in terms of that being like part of this project. Like when I was a kid listening to Faith No More that’s the only reason I picked up Mr Bungle [laughs].
AltSounds: Is there anything different you hope to achieve with AxeWound?
Liam Cormier: I’m already really stoked on how things have gone with this whole process, I mean when we were all touring just for like a week in the UK and we were all saying how much fun it would be to actually do a support tour, maybe do more with AxeWound now. All of us get along really well and it was super fun touring and it’s like ‘ah this fun side project I really wanna do more.’ It’ll be cool to see how AxeWound ould fit with others, like on a really metal tour, supporting like Lamb Of God or someone like that if you know what I mean?
AltSounds: You played Download Festival earlier this year and have also just finished the UK shows, how do you feel they went down?
Liam Cormier: Our Download response for AxeWound was crazy, we’d done some festivals beforehand and you could see people texting each other as the show was happening and people would show up and be like ‘oh AxeWound is Matt Tuck from Bullet For My Valentine’ and like ‘oh this band’s actually really cool’. It was cool to see that like the word had spread a bit more obviously for Download and to have like kids who knew a couple of songs. We had a full tent when we played, it’s crazy to see that that many people were interested in what the bunch of us were doing, that all of our collective bands have resulted in that kind of interest, which is crazy.
AltSounds: You’ve done quite a lot in one year, are you planning to rest next year or have you got more planned?
Liam Cormier: Right now we’re trying to figure out plans, I mean obviously the new Bullet For My Valentine record is gonna come out next year so that side of things is gonna get really busy for Matt. Cancer Bats has a tour booked up until March so there’s still a lot that we’re doing with our main bands, so that side of things is really busy still. I think because its gone as well as it has, we all really wanna figure out time when we can do more AxeWound stuff, and that’s how we kinda left the UK tour. We have another six shows in North America and it’s like ‘aaah we’re finishing, like we still need to play Cardiff, we still need to play Newcastle’ I wanna play more cities than we have.
AltSounds: Do you find it slightly frustrating that you’ve now got to put AxeWound on pause?
Liam Cormier: I find it exciting, I just hope that kids will be patient with it and I think they will. Genuinely all the people that I’ve met, like Cancer Bats fans are the best, they’re the nicest kids I’ve ever met, and then doing merch and hanging out for AxeWound stuff and seeing just how rad everyone is coming to these shows it’s like, what?! I feel like the vibe is there that everyone’s just having fun and being really cool. I think that everyone gets it and they’re willing to be patient in terms of hanging out. I think when shows happen people will be pumped and we’ll make sure that it’s not a secret kinda thing, we’ll make sure that everyone knows about it so that they can all come take part. I’m trying to think of any days off I have that we could maybe book like an extra show [laughs] like maybe after the Enter Shikari tour or something. That’s where my minds at right now I’m like ‘when can we fit in some more of this fun thing that we do?’ [laughs].
AltSounds: Does it make it more exciting having the two bands to write and play for and does it mean more as an artist to be able to be creative in these two different ways?
Liam Cormier: Yeh it is kinda exciting, especially like, I think doing this tour that we just did made us all really confident in how we can crush it as a band. It’s one of those things. You record an album and then you play some shows and everybody kinda gets used to each other on stage, and then this tour was just us kicking ass every day and kinda like showing how "for real" this band is. After doing this week I’m like "we can fuck up any club," we’re at that point when we’re like a real band [laughs] So I’m like stoked and I feel confident.
