Asian Man Records continues to break up-and-coming bands that rise to the top of the underground (The Abruptors, Joyce Manor). And Alkaline Trio has never stopped doing what they set out to do in the beginning. The rest of the music industry remains ever-fluctuating, but these musicians are still doing it the way they’ve always wanted.
Despite a few lineup changes within the life of the band and Skiba’s seven-year stint replacing Tom DeLonge in Blink 182, Alkaline Trio has never stopped touring, nor have it broken up, announced an official hiatus or gone more than five years without releasing an album of new material. Like the driving rhythms of vocalist Dan Andriano’s lush bass lines, Alkaline Trio never misses a beat.
They’ve always said they’d be a band until it’s not fun anymore. And with the recent release of their 10th studio album, Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs, Alkaline Trio might be having more fun than ever.
Skiba says that he still can’t fully comprehend it all.
“I mean, Dan and I went to a Superchunk show in Chicago and saw them play in front of 500 people, just as we were starting Alkaline Trio," he says, speaking on how the band's made it this far. "And we were like, man, wouldn’t that just be the dream? If you could play a show in like, a cool bar or a club, and you tour around and play to 500 people, and that’s it right there. That was [going to be] heaven if we reached it. And we did, and it was. But then we just kind of kept going.”
And one of the ways they kept going was in the studio.
“So a 10th studio record is just, I don’t know,” Skiba ponders over a fresh cup of coffee in his LA home, days before the beginning of a three-month North American tour and European leg to follow. “I still can’t really wrap my brain around it. I can’t wrap my brain around how old I am, or how long the band has been together. I still feel kind of like a little kid, so it’s a trip.”
Though this new album is a milestone of longevity, it also marks the end of an era for the band as their last to feature the indispensable contribution of Derek Grant, Alkaline Trio’s drummer of 22 years. Grant announced his retirement last summer, citing the need to prioritize his mental health.
Grant has spoken openly about living with ultradian-cycling bipolar disorder, a subtype of the disorder causing an increased frequency of symptomatic mood fluctuations. Almost 20% of patients experience rapid-cycling subtypes of bipolar disorder. It’s not conducive to tour life.
But mood disorder patients are highly represented in the arts and humanities with good reason: statistics show they’re prone to higher-than-average levels of artistic creativity. So it’s highly unlikely that Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs will be the last we see of Derek Grant’s work, as he plans to spend this new career era focused on music production and visual art.
Though it wasn’t explicitly known to the band that this would be Grant’s last album until after it was finished, Skiba believes the drummer’s exit could very well have influenced this new album. There's an underlying vulnerability and emotional fire that runs through the soul of Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs that hardly seems coincidental.
“I will say that this did not come out of nowhere,” says Skiba, his voice noticeably shifting to a protective tone. “There were a lot of long discussions about it. When somebody’s struggling, it’s not always in the studio, but not never in the studio. So yeah, it affects everything.”
Bands that have been lucky enough to stay active as long as Alkaline Trio inevitably become somewhat of a family, a musical home to each other. And when one member of a family experiences something, so do all the others. Especially considering that the band chose to scrap almost all prepared demos before entering the studio for this album, opting instead to write it all from scratch in the room together, this was a truly collective process as a tangible, present, real-time collaboration.
“I was afraid of us doing the same thing again,” says Skiba, “We had demos written and they were good, so I was like, ‘Yeah these are good, these are Alkaline Trio songs. People will hear them and they’ll [sound like] Alkaline Trio songs … It’s just boring, let's start over.' And we all kind of agreed. We went into the studio and started over. The way that we operate as a band is very much like a three-piece. There isn’t like ... nobody’s in charge. The three of us all want to be happy with everything, and we don’t do anything until we all are.”
To be fair, Alkaline Trio songs always sound like Alkaline Trio songs, even when other bands try to emulate their distinct style. They’re a look at life through the dark lens of macabre irony and brutal satire. It’s not true pop-punk according to the genre’s defining formula — three crunchy chords over a 4/4 time signature fueled by the unrelenting pop of a gunshot snare-drum. Instead, Alkaline Trio stretches that punk sensibility like a primed canvas over the more angular frame of sophisticated guitar pop, painting it with tongue-in-cheek laments, laced with old-school horror references.
It’s extremely rare for a band to capture such a consistent singular style, let alone maintain it for this long. It allows them to keep their longtime following satiated album after album, while still exploring new territory through their unique voice.
“It’s something I didn’t ever really consider until this record,” says Skiba of the concerted critical effort to make sure they weren’t resting on their laurels with Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs. “Every band has a sound and a thing that they fit. I feel like we found ours a long time ago. But [a signature sound] feels almost like traffic lanes that you stay in, and it’s hard to get out of them. And sometimes you don’t know what’s causing them. I’m really proud of a lot of our records, but I listen to them, and at a certain point … there’s good songs on the records but they stay in this lane that starts to become wide and safe.”
Matt Skiba spent more time on the guitar work for Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs than with anything he’s ever recorded, refining his sound with the use of almost 20 different kinds of amps. And it paid off in spades. This album features possibly some of the best guitar he’s ever played, and he attributes this largely to his time in Blink 182 from 2015 to 2022.
“I feel like playing and learning all those Blink songs — I’ve never had to do that before, learn someone else’s music," he says. "So it definitely just taught me a lot about playing guitar. I wouldn’t say there was any Blink influence [on Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs], it just opened up all kinds of capabilities on the fretboard for me that I didn’t really think of before.”
"I can’t wrap my brain around how old I am, or how long the band has been together. I still feel kind of like a little kid, so it’s a trip.”– Matt Skiba
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The music definitely attests to that. The lead riff on “Hot For Preacher” opens the album with a surge of ripping metal stylistics we’ve never heard from Alkaline Trio. Stripped-down legato strums pulsate a feeling of exhaustion between spiky chords of mania on “Scars,” matching Dan Andriano’s lyrical confrontation of the residue that lingers after a life spent fighting to overcome self-destructive tendencies.
Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs serves well to usher in the next phase of this band, but a new chapter is also clearly marked by the rejuvenated energy of Alkaline Trio’s live performance — where they’re operating at their highest level yet. Skiba highly credits this sudden charge of lightning onstage to the addition of a new drummer, Atom Willard.
Willard is one of the most revered drummers in modern rock and a major score for any band’s lineup. His long resume includes Against Me!, Angels & Airwaves, Social Distortion, The Offspring, multiple side projects of Matt Skiba’s, and much more. Now, he brings his virtuoso-level talent to Alkaline Trio. He’s also the reason fans can look forward to hearing some obscure deep cuts from the band’s back catalog on the Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs tour.
“He’s just, like, really excited,” Skiba says of Willard. “He has a lot of songs to learn already, but he has this idea about playing a lot of old songs [on this tour] we haven’t played in a really long time, that he knows people want to hear, a bunch of, like, weird old songs that I guess people want to hear, but we haven’t played them in a long time. So we’re going to play a lot of old stuff on this run, and we’re going to play a lot of new stuff, which is going to be a lot of fun.”
In their long tenure as recording and touring musicians, Alkaline Trio have existed within multiple iterations of the ever-changing music industry, under multiple record deals. But they’ve also managed to exist within a bubble, which allows them to cut out the commercial noise and remain true to what they’ve always done.
“I honestly have no idea what the current state of the music industry is, the way that things are with everything streamed and digital” Skiba says. “It just seems like a lot of people are really psyched about this record at [current label] Rise Records, and all the people who help us do our thing. It’s a lot of fun when you have great relationships and you’re doing something that everyone’s excited about.
“So our [experience of the] music industry is fucking amazing, but that’s our own little microcosm. I keep my distance from social media, and I almost forget that it’s out there. So I feel very blessed that we get to do something where none of the technology has changed. It really hasn’t done anything to us that makes us do what we do any differently.”
Skiba's old dream is still very much alive, and he knows he's surpassed his wildest expectations.
“Like I said, I still feel like a kid," he says. "And I’m very thankful for that, I’m glad I still feel that way. I can’t imagine the hell of boredom. There’s way too many things to be curious about, to be any other way.”
Alkaline Trio plays Feb. 26, at House of Blues, 2200 N. Lamar St., with openers Drug Church and Worriers.
