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There are moments in time that serve as real forks in the road. Places where something occurs that serves as a new foundation for everything that follows. And though, from where we are standing right now, Alexisonfire have never been firing on all cylinders, for George Pettit and Dallas Green, there is a particular period in their storied and sensational history that stands out differently.

“We’ve smashed through a lot of what people thought was possible for us, and right now, we are as big as they’ve ever been, but for some reason in my mind’s eye, ‘Crisis’ always has this sensation attached to it that we were doing something really important,” George comments.

 “I think that record was us trying to buck against the things that we didn’t like about modern screamo at that point. And it’s a lot to think about when you consider that the distance between ‘Crisis’ and now is the distance between Elvis Presley and Tears for Fears. But it has always felt like a high-water mark for Alexisonfire, and you can still feel that today.”

“I really love singing and writing catchy choruses, and I really love hearing people sing them back to me, because it’s a beautiful exchange of energy,” Dallas adds.

 “And we really tried to hone in on all of the parts of this band that we started to realise we could achieve and doubled down on them on ‘Crisis’. Let’s make the sing-alongs bigger, let’s make the choruses catchier, let’s make the musicianship tighter, let’s really discover what we’re singing about. And it’s really great that we were able to realise that we just sound like us.”

That’s an important aspect of so much of this, in retrospect, because even 20 years on, there is still nobody who has been able to truly emulate or even attempt to harness what the band were doing on this record. As much a culmination of everything they had learned in their young years as a mark of protest against the labels being placed on them, the result still feels monumental. As crushing as it is soaring, brimming with as much tension as tenacity and home to some of the biggest sing-alongs that rock music has ever produced, it’s as much a benchmark for everybody else as it is a reminder that marching to your own beat will always reap the biggest reward.

THE SOUND

Looking back at the state of the scene in the early years of the century, it is clear how frenetic a melting pot it was. With pop-punk and post-hardcore enjoying a mainstream moment, and hardcore and metalcore expanding into unknown pastures, a lot was going on, to say the least.

And in the middle of all of this is a little band from Ontario, being placed in spaces and on tours that didn’t really align with who or what they wanted to be. Their 2002 self-titled debut, made whilst they were still teenagers, had allowed Alexis to build a cult following of sorts, despite being little more than a marker of what they were capable of as a collective. Following it up in 2004 with ‘Watch Out!’, a record which they are the first to admit is much more scatterbrained than they would probably allow things to be now, the band were picking up steam in a way that made sense within the surge of love directed towards the alternative community.

But in being out on the road and pigeonholed into places that they didn’t resonate with, it forced the band to really figure out exactly who they wanted to be, and fast.

“I think we’re really inspired by things we don’t want to do,” Dallas remarks. “The scene we were being roped into, that’s not what we are. The more bands we toured with where you could tell they were just writing songs to get to their breakdown part, the more we realised it wasn’t interesting to us to do that. So by the time we wrote ‘Crisis’, we had discovered the band that we wanted to be, and we unabashedly tried to write songs that matched those ideas.“

 “I feel like we had an idea for an aesthetic by then,” George adds. “We wanted it to still have dynamics, a heavy, fast record. But we were really thinking about writing songs with the audience in mind. A more fully realised idea of a record. The first couple of albums, we just wrote and wrote and wrote. We knew we had to be a lot more strategic.”

Though there was disillusion in the ranks thanks to the bands that they were accompanying on the road, there was one tour that really put things into better focus, and that was with Hot Water Music. Not just in the manner in which they were able to write songs that bridged the gaps between scenes and styles without diluting who they are, but also in how they carried themselves (“You had the feeling that they could fight, but, they weren’t bullies,” as George so exquisitely puts it), left a lasting effect, and showed the band that you can be exactly who you want to be, and be revered and rewarded.

 It’s for this reason that ‘Crisis’ is such an enigmatic listen. From the scorching riffs of opening assault ‘Drunks, Lovers, Sinners and Saints’ and timeless chaos of ‘Boiled Frogs’, to the patient anthemic perfection of ‘To A Friend’ and tight melodies of ‘We Are The Sound’, it is as varied as it is volatile. A blur of energy, more than anything, it is only in the years that have subsequently followed that it has truly sunk in what carving out their own lane has allowed.

“It’s hard to really zero in on the genesis of some of the ideas here,” Dallas admits. But when I look back through the lenses I’m wearing now, whilst creating our last couple of records, especially ‘Otherness’, it dawned on me that we’re a different-sounding band now. But we’ve actually always been that way.

“I’ve spent a lot of time being confused by the music industry, and the music industry being confused by me and when I look back and I think about those years where we were becoming popular but no one knew where to put us because we we were too light for the heavy bands and too heavy for the light bands, what I’ve realised is that the confusion just lies with everyone else.” 

THE LYRICS

When you are fuelled by passion more than anything else, the result of what you are making is probably a lot less fleshed out than it would be if you attempted the same thing today. That’s not to say that it’s the wrong thing to do, but when George looks back on the manner in which he was writing lyrics around ‘Crisis’, he is the first to admit that he may not have been as much of an authority on the things he was saying as he may have liked to be.

“I feel like there were a lot of moments in the band where I was reaching for ideas that were beyond my grasp a little bit,” he laughs. “Like I’ve been there before, where I have a rudimentary understanding of a thing, and then I’ve tried to kind of create a song out of it. It worked a lot of the time, but there are times when I think I have my own mental failings when it comes to that sort of stuff.”

“But I think the best part about music is that it’s an exercise,” Dallas offers up support.  “You take these unanswerable questions, and you try to ruminate on them for four or five minutes, and add a catchy chorus.”

Though it is the immediacy, the want and need to get an emotion out, that makes what the band were saying on ‘Crisis’ feel so real. Take closing track ‘Rough Hands’, for example. Though George may find the admissions of adoration a little wet now, it’s a track that came to be from being a direct response to the way that other bands around them were being so insincere in their own songwriting. And in the same breathe, look at the opening gambit of ‘Drunks, Lovers, Sinners And Saints’, a remit on that same sincerity, and making sure that people knew that Alexisonfire weren’t here to blow smoke up anyone’s rear.

 “We’d be playing all these festivals, or we’d be playing with a band, and I’d be like, ‘Is this really from your heart, or is this just what you saw someone else do at some point? This is not real’. And compared to what we were doing with Alexisonfire, there was something there. We tapped into something live and prided ourselves on delivering a visceral experience. So, writing that was a strong line in the sand. Sincerity is where we are, and everything else can kick rocks.”

A unique element of the way AOF functioned back then also came from the three-pronged vocal assault of George, Dallas, and guitarist Wade MacNeil. Three different tones, three different experiences and three different approaches, all hitting a sweet spot in the middle. Though the process is now much softer and collaboration is much more common, back around ‘Crisis’, it was a case of speaking your piece and standing by it. But whilst the result of not budging on your offering at this time allowed for more chaos to unfold, it also made the moments when streams crossed that little bit more special.

Be that musing on the only way for humanity to move forwards is for everything that has been before to be erased on ‘This Is The End’, to comparing how what you feel locally to how the same feelings are felt on a global scale on ‘This Could Be Anywhere In The World’, it’s all about connection, both internally and externally.

 “I think both George and I got into this scene when we were kids because we liked the music that it offered to us, but we wanted to listen and be moved by something,” Dallas muses.

“And now, with all of these different people connecting to us and us being able to say that we have moved people and continue to, that to me is all I ever really wanted to do. Just contributing something that makes somebody feel something is enough. And I think that’s what we’ve learned about this band, it’s a really great time to be in a room together, making music with these goofballs, but we’ve made things that have connected. That’s why we can now play a hardcore festival and a pop festival. We can do it, because it’s just great music.”

THE ARTWORK

One of the most striking aspects of ‘Crisis’, aside from the sonic ebb and flow that is found within, is something that you see before you even hear a second of music. The album cover, depicting an individual whose hands have swelled to incredible size, is as curious as it is discomforting. Presented without context and alongside a word like ‘Crisis’, it feels like a call-out to the world. A reminder of what the body can do when it is put under immense pressure, and that there is danger around every corner in this life, and just because it isn’t happening on your doorstep, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening at all.

Though when it comes to this particular image, it was actually very close to home for the band. Pulled from a book that sat on George’s shelf growing up called ‘White Death: The Blizzard of 77’, it is made up of images and stories from when a particularly horrific blizzard hit upstate New York and South Ontario back in 1977. This particular image is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the terrors that are documented in said book, but what stood out the most for the band was that such a thing happened as close to home as you can get.

Though deeper than that, it’s the fact that such a thing could happen on the same streets they thought they knew so well. But the reality is that the world is constantly moving, and you only get a small snapshot of things.

 “It’s not the only blizzard to knock out the power in a region, but the fact that it was about this event that had happened where we grew up, we’d seen versions of that in our own lives within those pictures,” Dallas comments. “But it also registered for us within the songwriting too, especially when it comes to a song like ‘This Could Be Anywhere In The World’. I kept leaving, going on the road, then coming home and feeling like the place I grew up was changing while I was out there living this new version of my life. The shock of not only dealing with the fact that I was probably changing too, but then also kind of seeing visually and feeling emotionally that this place I was born and raised in was shifting without me.”

“Yet it’s so universal, though, too,” George adds. “Everybody has that sensation of either watching their town change or feeling like things aren’t necessarily changing for the better, or we’re sliding into some sort of dystopian idea of what things should be. nd then, I think that’s a very common thought for a lot of people, and I think that that’s why we latched on to it.”

THE COLLABORATIONS

Now, how often do you see a band invite a special guest to appear on one of their songs, and then that guest ends up singing the whole thing? It’s unconventional, but so much of what Alexisonfire do is, and always will be.

But when it came down to bringing in Gared O’ Donnell of the legendary Planes Mistaken For Stars to provide grit and atmosphere to the stirring ‘You Burn First’, it was pretty much a no-brainer for the band to just let this play out.

Meeting on the road whilst they toured with Hot Water Music, another reason why that particular run was so influential, bringing in someone they admired so much to add their own sparkle to proceedings was one thing. But spending even more close and personal time with them proved to be even more special, a sentiment that seemingly started at the airport when the band were picking him up.  

“Gared O’Donnell was a truly unique individual in the music scene, with the most distinctive voice and presence. He was just a fucking wild, really beautiful, very fun, kind of dangerous person to be around,” George laughs.

 “We flew him to Toronto, and he was detained by customs because he didn’t have any luggage with him. He just had like a fanny pack with a pack of cigarettes and a flask in it. He didn’t bring a toothbrush; he didn’t bring anything. Just the clothes on his back. And then in the studio, he smoked a cigarette, had a little nip and then created such a fucking vibe.

 “I really feel like at the time, he and the Hot Water Music guys were extremely positive male role models in our lives. There was no posturing. It was very, ‘This is who I am’, which is a very vulnerable way to play. That was really infectious for all of us.”

THE FUTURE

As George explained early on, it’s interesting for Alexisonfire to be in a position where they are bigger and bolder than ever before, but still feeling like ‘Crisis’ served as a pivotal moment for them, despite being so long ago. But the truth is that all of the following of the heart has allowed them to be the band that they are today. As they fast approach the next chapter, with new music very much on the horizon, they are appreciative of everything that this wild, wicked journey has allowed them to be, then, now, and forever.

“I feel like the way we approached it when we were younger has allowed us to find the place we are now,” Dallas proudly states. “And after all these years, it’s really great that we’ve found a place to realise that we just sound like us, and that’s what it is. It’s us, together, talking about music, sharing our experiences and ideas, and seeing what the final recipe creates. That’s it, and that feels good.”

Alexisonfire are set to headline Outbreak Fest, playing ‘Crisis’ in full later this month. They will be joined by Hatebreed, Converge, Basement, Touché Amoré, Trapped Under Ice, Trash Talk, La Dispute, Fiddlehead, The Front Bottoms, Balance & Composure and many MANY more.

Outbreak will be taking place between June 26-28 at the B.E.C Arena. Last remaining tickets are available from right here.