The Devil Wears Prada,  and no they're are not named after the film, recently made their way to the UK for the first time and as a warm up for their performance at this years Download festival they played a short run of dates across the country, the perfect opportunity then to catch up with them and find out what all the fuss is about. 

You are currently taking part in the Road to Download tour, how is it going? 

Mike Hranica:  The whole tour is sold out which is amazing, couldn’t get any better. 

Chris Rubey:  The only way it could be better is if we were playing bigger rooms.  But since we are playing Download I think there is a clause. 

MH:  Yeah there is a restriction. 

CR:  Certain size things but the shows have been fun. 

Passionate crowds? 

CR:  Yeah for sure.  I mean over here I don’t think the kids know us as well as they do in the US, so it’s obviously a little bit harder for them to get into it, but they try. 

Have you been to the UK before? 

CR:  No. 

So what are you expecting from Download, are you excited? 

MH:  We’re all a bit nervous, I know I’m really nervous because it’s a mainstreamish crowd.  I know it’s not all mainstream metal bands by any means and I have some people like ‘dude it’s going to be the best thing ever’, and then other people are like ‘well I guess it could…’.  I just don’t want to get stuff thrown at us.  We’re all anxious to play for a bunch of people, so anxiety I suppose. 

CR:  I’m not nervous, I’m never nervous.  I honestly think it will be really cool. 

You are still supporting the Plagues album which came out in August 2007, before that you released Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord in August 2006, we’re two months away from August 2008? 

MH:  Nope. 

CR:  Don’t even think about it. 

Daniel Williams:  It was supposed to. 

MH:  No it wasn’t. 

DW:  We were originally supposed to record right after Warped so it wouldn’t have been August, it would have been like September I guess. 

CR:  It wasn’t supposed to. 

MH:  Regardless it is definitely not 2008. 

Have you got any material for your next album? 

CR:  It’s brewing, I’m stirring the pot.   

MH:  You’re stirring the pot!! 

CR:  We’ve just got to find all the ingredients, you know.   

DW:  Nice metaphor. 

MH:  We just need to find the right recipe. 

CR:  Yeah that’s true actually, we don’t know what we’re baking.  We don’t know what flavour stew it’s going to be.  We know it’s going to be TDWP (The Devil Wears Prada) stew but we don’t know what ingredients we’re gonna use, how about that. 

Do you know yet whether there will be any change in direction at all, the second album seemed more approachable?

 DW:  Hopefully heavier. 

MH:  Yeah, that’s still undecided as well, where we want to take it.  When we wrote Plagues it was supposed to be heavier parts heavier and catchier parts catchier, and we’ll probably try to do that again but… 

CR:  We don’t want to write the same record. 

MH:  …right, so maybe just generally heavier. 

CR:  Personally I hate it when bands ever go lighter because it’s really a tough line.  Like Underoath, with They’re Only Chasing Safety, they did it right, like the songs were catchy enough to make up for the lack of heaviness, but I don’t know, we’ve got to figure out what we’re gonna do.  We’re just trying to make it good, we know what our fans want to hear and we know what we want to write, so we’ve just got to do it. 

Your song titles always seem interesting. 

MH:  Stupid. 

DW:  That’s because we only make them five minutes before they’re due.   

CR:  They have nothing to do with the lyrics or anything. 

DW:  They have nothing to do with anything actually. 

CR:  They do too. 

MH:  There were three serious song names on Dear Love.  Our song names are stupid period.  

CR:  We just write stupid song names because we don’t want to name our songs…  

MH:  …Eternal Disease… 

CR:  …Eternal Slumber Of The Black Sun Cult… 

DW:  …Goatwhore. 

CR:  I don’t know, we’re goofy dudes, obviously, so we just hang out and have a good time and name our songs after wild things. 

MH:  After Reptar. 

CR:  Yeah you know. 

DW:  See we had the CD finished and we didn’t realise that we didn’t have songs. 

CR:  They were named 1, 2, 3, 4… 

DW:  Yeah they were named 1-10 which is the order that we wrote them, and our label owner was like ‘we need song names’.  We were like alright we can do that. 

MH:  We just come up with stupid phrases and then we put the phrases with the songs. 

So it takes a lot of effort to come up with them? 

All:  Yeah 

CR:  We put a lot of deep thought into it. 

DW:  Takes a couple of months at least. 

CR:  Per song. 

You’ve been going for a couple of years now, do you feel you have managed to find success relatively quickly? 

MH:  Yeah, we’ve definitely been blessed compared to some bands that tour for eight years and then get signed.  We’re not the next pop sensation, but we’ve definitely been blessed and as far as only being a band for like not even three years and already be on a bus in the States, and doing our own headline run and stuff, it’s definitely been awesome. 

CR:  We’re very appreciative.  We don’t think we deserve anything that we have…we’ve worked for it.  Like we put work into it but definitely a lot has been…we are lucky. 

DW:  A lot of people think that we didn’t work hard and we just jumped onto it.   

MH:  Which is not true. 

DW:  We toured for the last year straight basically, missed our families, our friends and everything.  Not only that but a lot of people are like ‘your families probably gave you all of your equipment blah, blah, blah’.

 MH:  Which isn’t true at all. 

CR:  A lot of people will sit there and bash us saying that we did not pay our dues, but I think doing an entire tour booked by Dan, in a van… 

DW:  … with no air conditioning… 

CR:  …that will only run with heat on in the middle of Summer. 

DW:  … and we didn’t get paid, we paid with the money we saved up. 

CR:  We had to ride in the van with not only no air conditioning, it would overheat if we didn’t full blast the heat in the middle of Arizona.  We did an entire US tour… 

DW:  We were all in our underwear in that van the entire time.  It was sexy! 

CR:  … and then after that tour I had to go to High School for another year. 

Having now left school is it quite different with the band? 

All:  Yeah 

CR:  It doesn’t suck. 

Was it easy to make the transition to becoming a full time band, rather than having to worry about other things? 

CR:  Yeah, this is always what we wanted it to be.  This was always the goal, being full time and everything.  So we just had to stick out High School because we didn’t want to drop out because we were so close to graduating anyway.  So when we first started getting the kind of success that would merit a drop out or something like that we just stuck it out and I’m glad that I did personally because we are obviously doing fine.  But it is so much better not being in High School 

Obviously you are seen as being a Christian metalcore band, and you have previously quoted Still Remains and Underoath as influences.  Is this just musically or because they manage to merge the religion and music? 

CR:  Both 

MH:  Yeah as far as Underoath it’s the fact that they were, in our scene, in our day and age, one of the first like Christian hardcore bands.  As far as Still Remains it was kind of the same, I think Still Remains are more musically influenced, especially nowadays.  But back then it was like ‘they write really good metalcore’.

 CR:  I mean that’s all it was.  We were just really impressed by it and we’re just easily impressionable kids who didn’t think that the music that we were gonna make was going to get us anywhere at all, so why not be even heavily influenced by these bands.  We were just like any other kids ‘we love Underoath, we love Still Remains, let’s make a band like them’.  Then it just so happened that we came to the point where we were like ‘ok we have to be our own band’.   

MH:  Our stuff has never really sounded directly like other bands, it was influenced and then what we made out of it is different.   

CR:  It’s foolish to say that we weren’t influenced by those bands because we definitely were. 

MH:  Yeah but we never ripped off anyone or anything like that. 

CR:  We write our own stuff for sure.  Honestly we make sure we’re not like stepping on any toes as far as actually ripping off parts because it’s probably an easy call out on us because we’re so similar in style.  So we definitely make it a point to write our own music and to try and find our own style.   

Has being religious caused you any problems with the band, with touring and things like that? 

MH:  Yeah it has.  Last year we did Sounds Of The Underground Tour during the Summer and it sucked.   

CR:  Basically we try to respect everybody and their beliefs even if they directly conflict with ours.  Since a lot of other people that don’t agree with what we believe don’t necessarily have the same morals as us they’re going to be disrespectful and that’s when the problems normally arise, just when people are disrespectful to us.  Which you shouldn’t be to anyone. 

MH:  For the most part we get along with everyone. 

I read that some of you are straight edge, do you find that religion helps you live this life style where people will be throwing things at your feet, especially as you get bigger? 

CR:  I think for some of us it’s harder because obviously there is the temptation and if we didn’t have these religious beliefs and these morals that we are supposed to follow, then we would just go off and do whatever we want.  Temptations are temptations because they’re things that you have to, you know find your balance, you have to do everything within moderation.  I’m glad that we all have the same basic structural beliefs because it keeps us grounded in our decisions and everything.  Definitely if we didn’t have these beliefs, like a lot of other bands, we’d probably have way more problems you know because we hold each other accountable, we try to at least.  We all respect each other and respect what everyone else decides what they want to do, but we definitely do all hold each other accountable to a certain degree.   

I won’t go into too many questions about your band name, but basically it is about materialism… 

All:  Yeah 

…obviously since you formed a few years back The Devil Wears Prada became a film, does that make it more awkward 

All:  Oh yeah 

CR:  Just because your everyday person has definitely heard of the movie because it’s more mainstream, whereas the original idea behind naming it The Devil Wears Prada was ‘oh nobody is ever going to know that it’s a book, they’re just going to think it has a cool ring to it’, that was the original idea.  The fact that it was a movie does make it more difficult, but it’s not that big of a deal, we don’t really get too much flak for it. 

MH:  Especially now the movie is… 

CR:  … faded away kind of.

Darren Brushneen