On July 2nd, Bridge Nine Records announced Nothing As It Seems, the debut album of Violent Sons. Six days later the record was released digitally, a fast and remarkable process for the new band with from members of Verse, Suicide Pact and Raindance. We asked founding member Sean Murphy (Verse) a few questions about Violent Sons. After about a year of talking about starting a band, he and Mikey Belcastro (Suicide Pact) finally got around adding Evan White (Raindance) and Andrew Fortin to the pack. Read on if you want to learn more about their new band.

You guys all play in different bands; what’s the reason you decided to started Violent Sons?

“Well, initially the project just started out as a result of Suicide Pact and Verse splitting up. I told Mikey I wanted to do another aggressive band that encompasses a wide spectrum of music, not sticking to any particular template. He was very into the idea, so we started writing music in my bedroom basically. From there it was pretty obvious that we should start putting a band together, so we did. I think we just felt like something was missing from our lives, as cliche as that sounds.”

How did you come up with the band name?

“This might come off as pretentious and even naive, but my idea for naming the band “violent sons” was to express what I feel is a huge problem through out the world, dominant males with an unwarranted sense of power. I’m very anti-macho culture these days, I think that people with a tendency to flex their muscle or social power should be kept in check, or enlightened in a way that is not off-putting. Because I don’t think that completely dismissing or shunning a person because of how they act currently (within reason), is a smooth road to the future.

The band being called “violent sons” is very open to interpretation, obviously anyone that knows any of us knows that we are very much not a bunch of tough guys, but the name is used in a way to bring attention to the lyrical content essentially. Violent men are ruining the beautiful world we live in, we are trying to express that without completely alienating people. We are aware that we might fail miserably, but it’s worth a shot.”

Please define your sound in three words and elaborate on that.

“Aggressive: We love fast and heavy music. Everything from Crossed Out / Gauze to Tool / Converge. We have a wild amount of influences when it comes to our sound, some that I’m almost scared to share with people haha.

Musical: We are all multi-instrumentalists, we all write music constantly and we want to show everyone that we are capable of writing beautiful sounding pieces of music and making them flow with more discordant dark sounding chord structures/progressions.

Limitless: We started this band to write cohesive music without boundaries.”

You played a number of shows in New England; what were those like with only one track up your Bandcamp-page?

“It was fine! We weren’t concerned with people being familiar with everything we were playing. It was nice to just get up there and blast through our set with minimal knowledge of who we are as an introduction of our band. Side-note: We actually have ZERO merch right now. It’s kind of awesome. I wish it were possible for bands to just play shows/tour with just a record to sell, but that unfortunately is not the world we live in.”

Pre-orders for “Nothing As It Seems” are up. What’s next?

“More shows, touring as much as our lives allow us to and connecting with people.”

The LP release of Nothing As It Seems is slated for release in September – pre-orders are available here.

Violent Sons: Facebook / Order Nothing As It Seems