Melbourne heavy fusion band Twelve Foot Ninja are about to embark on the next crazy phase of their career, with the release of their new album Outlier lined up for Friday. Their new tour starts in Adelaide tonight at Fowler’s Live, the band itching to share their new music with fans and also, see how the Outlier material works in with 2012’s Silent Machine on the live front.
Speaking with vocalist Kin this week, he admits to some nerves, but the blanket of the unknown that currently covers Outlier is one that is exciting him at the same time.
“We’re a little bit nervous, as we always are with a new release.” he says. “You don’t know how it’s going to go down; we certainly don’t know. I think we’ve been a bit too close to it to know, so we’re a little bit nervous about it, but we’re also excited and relieved to be able to just let go of it. Just set it free. It’s been so long in the making and we’ve gone through a lot with this album; to be able to just let it go and just put it back out to our fans and let them be the judge, it’s going to be a real relief.”
“Usually the second album is the make or break moment for a band,” he adds. “We don’t know which way it’s going to go for us at all and I think that’s exciting as well. It could do really, really well and we could expand and we could keep touring in the States and expand into Europe and we grow exponentially, or we get to that point where we’re actually unable to do it financially and continue. I’m eager to know, in a way.”
Of the band’s upcoming tour dates down the Australian east coast, Kin is keen to be able to get the album off the ground on the home front before the band heads back overseas to perform some lucrative festival sets alongside the likes of Slipknot, Alice in Chains and Avenged Sevenfold.
“Just to be able to play some new songs in the set is interesting,” he admits. “We’ve been playing the same songs for three or four years now. It’ll be nice to throw a couple of extras in there, just to create a new flow. It’s always nice to have some fresh songs in the mix, because it starts to get stagnant; you’re playing the same sets, even if you change up the sets, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same sequence of songs or the same songs themselves.”
Following on from the success of Silent Machine, the band has developed significantly on all fronts. With the addition of a new guitarist in Rohan Hayes during the making of Outlier, Twelve Foot Ninja embraced a new creative vibe in studio and it’s one that bled into way the final ten album tracks were wrapped up.
“Rohan wrote quite a lot of the music for this album,” Kin explains. “It brought a new dynamic and a new energy, to our band. I think the work he did was awesome; I’m excited to see how the audience take it, I think they’re going to like it. It feels a little more disciplined and a little more consistent to me. Even though we change it up and everything, it’s still eclectic and it’s still a bit ADHD. It just seems a bit more focused, so I’m interested to see how the audience responds to that, I think that’s really exciting.”
“Writing for Twelve Foot Ninja is difficult at the best of times,” he laughs. “Each song is like trying to arrange a jigsaw puzzle. You’ve got to work on the framework first and then once you’ve got the frame, then you start building it towards the centre of the picture. I mean, we wrote just over 60 ideas for songs; some were song beds, others just incomplete ideas and it took that many to settle on ten.”
Working with Forrester Savell on Outlier‘s recording, mixing and mastering duties, Twelve Foot Ninja were somehow able to exercise some kind of group restraint in not putting all the material they’d written during initial sessions out on record.
“It was actually pretty disciplined of us to do that and not just go, ‘Let’s release a triple album!’,” Kin says. “A double album is cringeworthy enough! I think it would be within the spirit of the band to go, ‘Alright – let’s double a double album or let’s put out a triple’. Luckily we were disciplined enough to say, ‘Let’s just keep it to the ten, let’s cap it there’. I mean, further on down the track, there’s plenty of material that we could easily resurrect, I guess, but I think the ten we’ve got…they’re good enough.”
“The picture became clearer, the further we went on.” he remembers of Outlier‘s creation. “At the start, we didn’t really know what we wanted to do and we threw hundreds of ideas out there just to see which ones would catch and a lot were thrown by the wayside, but I think the ten we’ve got are the best we could come up with at the time.”
With Outlier‘s release coinciding with the band’s hometown launch show as well, Kin is open about the pressures that come with the release of album such as this.
“I think a lot of people talk about ‘sophomore syndrome’,” he says. “I think that syndrome, from what I’ve learned, is very much a self-imposed pressure. I follow a lot of bands and I’ve heard a lot say that the expectation is that of their fans and they always seem to put it on an external source, that the pressure comes from elsewhere.”
“I actually think it’s internal and it’s inter-personal as well. I definitely put a lot of pressure on myself and I know the guys put a lot of pressure on themselves as well. I think that’s self-imposed pressure and to try and move beyond that, to be open enough to create and open enough to decipher or discern what’s good and what will serve the band, from what’s not so good and won’t serve the band, is really difficult. I think we got closer and closer as a band, the further we went on and the more unified and galvanised we were as a band towards what we wanted to say with the album.”
—
Outlier is released this Friday, August 26th.
TWELVE FOOT NINJA TOUR DATES
August 25th | Fowlers Live, ADELAIDE
with ACOLYTE
August 26th | The Corner Hotel, MELBOURNE
with ACOLYTE
September 2nd | Cambridge Hotel, NEWCASTLE
with ACOLYTE
September 3rd | Bald Faced Stag, SYDNEY
with ACOLYTE
———-
