For Aaron Bruno, this moment has been a long time coming.

The last few years have been spent building The Barbarians of California, infiltrating the modern hardcore scene, and making sure everybody they come into contact with has as much fun as they do; this is all he has ever wanted.

Though most of the last decade has seen him reaching stratospheric heights with AWOLNATION, Barbarians has allowed him the chance to reconnect with the kid who used to go and cause havoc at Refused and Snapcase shows. To be cheeky and chaotic at a time when so much music feels calculated and forced.

And with one listen to the band’s new record ‘MEGATONS’, you can see and feel just how brilliantly they have achieved that. A bludgeoning, no-holds-barred tour-de-force of riffs, breakdowns, barks and yelps, matched with a hilariously off-kilter sense of storytelling and sensationalism, it is the most joyously brash and bonkers thing to come out of heavy music this year.

A record to truly let loose to.

To find out more about how the presence of The Barbarians Of California in his life has affected it, Rock Sound sat down with Aaron for a little catch-up.

Rock Sound: What comes to mind when you consider what Barbarians has been able to do for you up till this point?

Aaron: My go-to feeling is still excitement. A lot is going in our favour emotionally. We’ve all fallen in love before; we know those butterflies you get, and I still have those butterflies flying around in my stomach right now for this project. I don’t think it’s a project; it’s a band we created. And you know, I try to be pretty realistic. I’m my own worst critic, and at the front of it, I thought, ‘Okay, this may be an uphill battle to convince people who like hardcore music to accept the AWOLNATION guy. They hear ‘Bomb To A Knife Fight’ and they think, ‘Well what the hell’s he doing coming into this?’ And even though I fell in love with the hardcore scene back in high school, I guess I had a fear that people would call me a tourist. But I also think we do it pretty well. We love Sepultura, Slayer, Metallica, Meshuggah, but the band’s youthful, rambunctious, sarcastic spirit is maybe rooted in something like The Dead Kennedys. The influences are all over the place, and I’m just still shocked that we’ve been accepted so well.

People can tell when something is genuine and is being made with good intentions. And when you have lived this as much as you have, you can see what it means. And the fact that you are literally having so much fun, almost satirising the whole genre, makes it even clear how much this means to you.

Aaron: I had to scratch the itch of aggressive music just because it’s in me. It always finds its way out on each AWOLNATION record to a certain degree, in some records more than others, and live definitely more than usual. But it’s been great to be able to categorise or compartmentalise this into an actual full band. It’s also helped me become a better songwriter, for AWOL and Barbarians. Separating them is a nice thing, like two different sports. Barbarians are probably MMA, and AWOL is baseball or something like that.

The thing is that I’m really just trying to make these guys laugh. When you hear a breakdown that’s so ridiculous and so heavy that you smile, some people take it very seriously, but if I hear something in any genre of music that is that heavy, I start laughing because I feel so much joy from it. I approach these songs with that mindset. And then, of course, at times I’m tempted to say the most aggressive, angry thing because the music feels that way. But I’ve found that sarcasm and humour are my new heavy. How many satanic lyrics do you need to listen to? How many dark lyrics do I need to add on top of already dark, insane music? I’ve just found that a bit of sarcasm goes a long way, a lot of the time, more so in the punk rock scene. In the early ’80s and even the ’90s, bands did it well. And so my feeling is I’m just joking around, but if the lyrics really mean something to you, then I’m dead serious.

In showing off this part of yourself in such a vibrant way, how would you say such a release has affected your life outside of music?

Aaron: Well, I would answer this in two ways. One, it’s who I’ve always been. Now I have the music to show for it. So in a lot of ways, this project is more reflective of my personality. But also I’m a parent now. I’m a dad of three, and I was blessed and shocked to have identical twin boys first. So that was a big grenade of responsibility thrown into my life. The greatest thing I’ve ever experienced, or ever will. But I had to quickly learn, in many ways, the death of self as I knew it, because everything’s now about them. At the same time, I needed to multitask because there were two of them. Now I also have a baby girl who’s nine months old, which has helped me feel more comfortable with the chaos of so many different things going on.

To answer your question, being a parent helped me manage both projects, and both projects helped me prepare to multitask. I have a million ideas in my head all at the same time, and I put them on different shelves of my mind. So I could go, ‘Okay, that would be a great riff. Don’t forget about that. Put that over there’. But then at the same time, ‘Here’s a melodic idea with a very earnest lyric that is appropriate for a new AWOL Nation song’. It’s become even more all about balance.

RS: And what has it been like expressing yourself with Barbarians from a live perspective? A very different sort of crowd you are used to playing for, what has it meant to release your inhibitions in another way?

Aaron: Well, it’s just a different part of my personality. I’m very comfortable in this. In fact, with AWOL stuff, I was holding back from screaming a lot on stage. I’ve had this pretty long journey to get to anything resembling success. And when that finally happened, it was obviously very exciting. For most of my 20s, I had little glimpses of hope with different bands and different opportunities, but ultimately all these ideas fell short, which stung in a lot of ways. Although I never doubted that was my journey, I didn’t know that I would end up being as wildly successful as, in my opinion, AWOL ended up being.

So jumping into Barbarians shows, it’s so exciting to see that people care, and it’s even more exciting in some ways to play for people who have never heard us. Because I’m walking out there thinking, ‘You’re standing now, but fuck that’. You’re not going to stand this whole show. I promise, I’m going to get to you guys with it. It’s fun to have to prove yourself again in a completely different way. I think I’m very comfortable in that role. I feel like the underdog again, and that’s what I spent most of my life being.

We did a Deftones tour, and that was Arenas, and here I come playing the heaviest music I’ve ever been a part of, opening up for a massive band in arena in an arena setting. And I was like, ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’m ready to do this because I’ve done this with AWOL’.  It’s almost like a cheat code in a lot of ways. But then we did a tour with Converge and Poison the Well, and we were first of four bands, which is the polar opposite of the Deftones experience, and that was also fun in a different way. The one time I didn’t get a pit going was when we opened for Guns N’ Roses in Florida, which is a crazy sentence to say in itself. But the crowd was definitely not budging on that. So that was my only failure, and I was bummed.

RS: As you consider where you are now, what does it mean to have Barbarians playing such a particular role in your life?

Aaron: The thing is that there’s a certain kind of camaraderie within this community and scene that’s a bit different. With AWOL, the weight of the connections between the songs and lyrics, and the fans and people I’ve met over the years, is pretty intense. I take it very seriously, though. I could talk for hours about the most wild things I’ve learned from people’s lives because of these songs reaching into their homes, their bedrooms, their offices.

With Barbarians, I could walk into the place, hang out, and then play. Maybe talk to a few people and then get it done. And that’s been very rewarding as well.

A lot of people in hardcore say, ‘Oh, I don’t even care if you know, I’m just doing this for me’, and that can be true. But you know, they’ll also say, ‘Well, I don’t care if it’s successful or not’. People don’t release music unless they think it’s good. First and foremost, I’m trying to impress these guys I’m playing with because they have good taste in music. And if I do that, I think there’s at least a small group of people who may feel the same way we do.