Interview: Bleeders 'As Sweet As Sin' 20th Anniversary Tour

West Auckland icons of 21st century Aotearoa hardcore punk, Bleeders have reconvened for a nationwide tour this coming June, celebrating the new 20th anniversary vinyl LP edition of their certified gold, multi-award-winning 2006 debut album As Sweet As Sin. Adorned with gorgeously ghoulish cover artwork by Chris Knox, this is the first time As Sweet As Sin has ever been released on vinyl (the '00s were the era of the CD), complimented by a tempting array of Bleeders t-shirts sporting art by the aforementioned kiwi legend.

Co-founding frontman Angelo Munro (Erase Everything) chatted all about As Sweet As Sin and more with interviewer Lucy Beeler (aka Mercury Fèng, currently on tour in the UK / EU with Hemi Hemingway). Christchurch has already sold out, time to get tickets if you haven't already and read onwards...

Bleeders - As Sweet As Sin - 20 Year Tour

Friday 19th June - Space Academy, Christchurch w/ this dog, S.E.I.S.M.I.C (sold out)
Saturday 20th June - The Crown Hotel, Dunedin w/ Ramraid, Strap, Seek Help
Thursday 25th June - Last Place, Hamilton w/ Courtnay & The Unholy Reverie, The Vile Maxim, Boilermaker
Friday 26th June - Asgard, New Plymouth w/ Courtnay & The Unholy Reverie, Plagueditch
Saturday 27th June - Double Whammy, Auckland w/ Courtnay and the Unholy Revelry, The Boondocks, Heavy Flow

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR

Lucy Beeler: Twenty year anniversary, that's awesome. How are you feeling about that?

Angelo Munro: Oh good, good. When you start a band and then you're still going all these years later, you feel like the twenty year anniversary seems to just trickle along. I think a couple years ago we had twenty years of our band starting, and then of our EP, and then now it's this album. The label wanted to put it out on vinyl so we thought, oh well we might as well make a fuss about it and do some shows too.

And so it hadn't been on vinyl before now.

Nah CD only, good old CD.

That's awesome. What's the story behind getting Chris Knox to do the album art?

We have always admired Chris Knox with everything he's done with his music and his art. We didn't really think that it would be possible to get him to do art for us, but our manager at the time was quite good friends with him so he just sort of hit up Chris. We wanted to do an illustrative pop culture looking thing. Funnily enough, he drew the cover which blew us away. Then we wanted the inlay to be horror images from old movies with some sort of digitalisation to make them funky, but because they're proper movies we couldn't really get the rights to it, so he just hand drew everything.

That's amazing. I really like the kind of callback to the 1950s horror type poster.

Yeah man. It's so cool.

I know what you mean by about twenty years passing by quickly. Can you think back to, in the twenty years since As Sweet As Sin came out, a particular Bleeders moment for you — either while you were recording or something that happened on tour or…?

We're not one of those bands that have all the crazy stories, but one thing that was kind of funny and cool was from when we were making the record in New York. During the day we would record and then at night we would just go out and eat good food, or we'd go buy records and go to bars and stuff. We had some friends over from New Zealand that were visiting and hanging out. One night when we were out, they waved down a limo and we all hopped in and got a ride home. They were stealing drinks out of the back of it and stashing it in their bags.

Yeah, we're not really one of those debaucherous bands with crazy stories. It's about as crazy as it gets. But [New York] was just a cool experience, a cool time. Playing music, recording, but then all the fun that New York City brings is in the nighttime. And me being the kind of nerdy, straight edge vegan guy, I would spend my money on records.

That sounds amazing. That's ideal to me, yeah.

It's a different time, eh? 2005 we recorded As Sweet As Sin.

What was it like working with [producer] Sal Villanueva?

It was really fun, really cool. We didn't know what to expect. We were fans of what he'd done. He'd produced albums for Thursday and Taking Back Sunday. We weren't necessarily massive fans of those bands, but we liked his production style and he was someone we had on our list that we wanted to approach. It just so happened he was already in New Zealand working on some stuff with the band Elemeno P.

He was great to work with because he was just fun. He was just a really good human and he was just funny and he got the best out of us, made us comfortable in our own skin. It wasn't an intimidating experience — no doubt a lot of people have different experiences with hotshot producers that just destroy them and make them feel like they're shit.

He wasn't like that. He made us feel comfortable. I'd say the only thing that I probably took out of that recording session, and I wouldn't say I regret, but I was young and he really wanted to push me to sing really melodically and he kind of overproduced my vocals. I have a gritty voice and I think it would have sounded cool if he'd embraced that, rather than making me sound like an emo. But that was what was popular at the time I guess. That's how we produced my vocals, but I would probably change it if I got time back.

You met him in New Zealand and then you flew to New York and recorded with him? That's very cool. I wondered about asking if you could look at yourself from twenty years ago and give yourself some advice. But you've kind of touched on that, when talking about recording when you were younger.

Yeah, right? You come full circle and you realise we were kids, we were in our early twenties and we were given this opportunity to make this album on a major label with a big budget. It was just fun, you know. We evolved and did what we wanted to do. I kind of wish I'd been a bit more aggressive vocally on [As Sweet As Sin], but it sits in that time and place. It went gold in the first week, so we did something right.

I think if there's one thing I would say to myself though, is don't take things personally. I grew up in the underground punk and hardcore scene and some people that we respected, loved and that we considered friends talked shit on [Bleeders]. It hurt our feelings and it kind of made us a little bit resentful and bitter. I think if I had the time again I'd be like, it doesn't matter. That stuff doesn't matter. Most of them are my friends again now. There was a moment where they were like, "you're fucking selling out" and we were like, "fuck you". But looking back, none of that stuff matters right? You just do what you do. If people have a problem with it, it's not a big deal, they're allowed to.

I think you take things really personally when you're young. You really see it as a personal attack. We felt a bit like we were ostracised. But in hindsight the reality was most of those people who went to our shows from the hardcore days were still coming to our gigs, so I think it was kind of all in our heads.

Touching on that point about your gritty voice, I like how it is a distinctive point of difference in Erase Everything. It's surprising in a nice way, because the band is kind of shoegazey but then you have these more aggressive vocals. Do you feel like you brought anything from The Bleeders to Erase Everything artistically?

We're writing an album at the moment and I think vocally I have kind of started to lean back on the aggressive vocal. When we started Erase Everything, we were doing the shoegazy kind of post-punky kind of thing. I wanted to do the vocals differently because I felt like that's what served the music. But then I realised sometimes you've got a wheelhouse to play to your strengths. I'm actually embracing the aggressive vocals. We definitely didn't want to be by the numbers — there's a million bands at the moment doing this and they all want to sound like Nothing or My Bloody Valentine. I'm glad we're doing something a bit different.

What are you most looking forward to about this upcoming tour?

Just going on the road with my best friends, that's the best part about this. We've all grown up, got real jobs, had families. It's like, we [tour] for fun. This is about friendship. That's where it's all based. Going out on the road with my best friends and playing music and hopping on stage and having people sing the lyrics back at me, that still means something to me, twenty years later. I think that's amazing.

What would you say is your favourite song from As Sweet As Sin?

My favourite song is, hands down, 'Out Of Time'. I think it's our best song, but also the lyrics are written about my best friend that got killed in a car accident. He and his partner and baby all died, so that song's really special to me. It connected with all my friends, too, we'd just gone through all that grief together. I wrote that song a week after they died and I think we recorded it two or three months later. It all moved very very fast, the lyrics just poured out of me and it was something therapeutic for all my friends. So that's my favourite song on that album every time we play it live. It's just amazing. I really, really enjoy that song.

That's such a powerful, emotional place to write something from. I'm sorry about your friend and his family. That's really sad.

It's horrible, right? But life goes on, I hate to say it but life goes on twenty years later, right? We move on and we get on with life but we never forget our friends. We never forget our family and people connect to that song because they've lost someone, whether it's to suicide or to something else, you know, a tragic accident. People seem to connect with it really well and it means something different to each individual listener. So yeah, we're really proud of that song.

That's really special. Well I think that's probably gonna be heaps of material to work with, what a great interview.

No silly, cheesy questions. I hate those questions. Lucy, that was just a conversation. I love that.

Is there anything else that you wanted to mention about the tour or the album?

I would just say, come out and see us play live. We're gonna play a lot more songs from that album than we normally do. It's not fully that album set, we're still gonna play other songs, but it's gonna have like eight, nine, ten songs from that album. And the album is being released on vinyl, go check it out. We've got a pre-order on our Bandcamp.

So nice. Well thanks so much, Angelo.

Awesome. Enjoy, take care.