Melbourne based metal outfit Alpha Wolf are one of Australia’s hardest working touring bands.
They are recognized as a band who will take their music to whatever part of the world that will feasibly have them, delivering time and time again with a live show that beautifully reflects their commitment to metal.
Following the success of their 2020 album A Quiet Place To Die, Alpha Wolf once more set about consolidating their reputation, touring as much as pandemic restriction would allow them, but rather than rest on the laurels of past achievements the boys instead decided to release more new music.
But this time they brought some mates.
Welsh post hardcore icons Holding Absence, who have played with Alpha Wolf before and kept in contact, decided they needed fresh material to keep themselves in the public spotlight, so the two bands decided to join forces for a split EP which features two songs from each band.
The resulting material, The Lost And The Longing, was released earlier this month, providing not only a merging of musical cultures, but also the propensity to appeal to a larger audience on the opposite side of the world.
Guitarist Sabian Lynch joined HEAVY from their current US tour to talk about the EP.
"It's been crazy,” he enthused about the response to the EP. “I don't think anyone expected us to do anything like that, but we love the Holding Absence boys, we love the EP and the response has been phenomenal, especially the last track we just dropped, 60 centimeters of Steel seems to be popping off and we've just added it to Triple J rotation... it's crazy. For a heavy band getting that sort of response is phenomenal."
A growing number of bands in the modern age are linking up with another band to release split albums. While the obvious advantages are there of cross pollination of existing fan bases, we pose the question to Lynch of why you would invite someone else to represent your music rather than release an album or EP comprising all your own material.
"We were spitting ideas with the band in the early stages of how we wanted to go about it,” he explained. “We definitely wanted to feature on each others tracks and we both carefully picked out songs that were already kind of written and had on the back burner that might suit the other band. So, Holding Absence picked what they thought were their heavier songs and we picked what we thought was more our softer songs that they would most suit on. Between a bit of back and forth and chit chatter with the other artists, it's just been a great collaboration all round."
In the full interview, Sabian talks more about the songs Alpha Wolf contributed to the split EP, runs us through all four of the songs individually, the clever marketing strategy that whipped fans into a frenzy before the official announcement, their upcoming CVLT Festival, the current overseas tour and more.
Intro song BEAST MACHINE 'Look What You've Done'