SICK OF IT ALL

SICK OF IT ALL

United By Sound

American hardcore legends Sick Of It All will be out in Australia again as part of the New York United tour this week. Joined by fellow HC giants Agnostic Front, vocalist Lou Koller talks to JESSICA WILLOUGHBY ahead of their show this Friday, May 11, at Amplifier Bar.

Sick Of It All need little introduction. As one of the mainstays of New York hardcore punk for 25 years, their reputation proceeds them.

For many fans growing with them, the echoes of classic albums’ Just Look Around (1992) and Scratch The Surface (1994) still ring as true now as they did back in their day. Each new full-length also enlisted a wave of new people enlisted into the SOIA army. A young group of hardcore enthusiasts that identified with the newer material first-off, then used picks from the band’s balls-out live shows to trail back to eras’ they most enjoyed. A difficult process, according to frontman Lou Koller, when the earlier recordings leave a lot to be desired. “We picked up a lot of new fans from Death To Tyrants (2006) and Based On A True Story (2010),” he tells X-Press. “Younger fans actually. So when we’d play the older songs live, they’d always come up and ask what album these songs were from. I’d always feel really bad, because the recordings on the older albums just suck. These songs are so much better live.

“So we came up with the idea to re-record them. Me, personally, I love these new versions better than the originals. The originals had a lot of personal stuff attached – the writing and recording of them and what we were doing at that age. But, for pure musical enjoyment, I’m down with Nonstop.”

Nonstop, released last year, is a celebration of a quarter of a century of dynamic outfit. Re-inventing 20 tracks from their entire repertoire, the retrospective looks at ways they could improve some of their most loved songs in the studio. “There’s certain aspects of each record I like,” Koller explains. “But there’s also some things I hate. We chose based off a mixture of things. From me not being happy with my vocal delivery to the tempo being off or just general bad production. The songs have just changed so much over time. The only thing I wish is that we had touched more on the Yours Truly (2000) release. I wanted to re-do a few off this, but I was voted down because everyone else thought the production was fine.”

Laying low since November last year to spend time with their families, Sick Of It All plan to continue that trend for much of this year. Joining mates Agnostic Front for the New York United tour in Australia this month, they hope to lock away the latter half of 2012 for writing their ninth full-length. “We’re at the very beginning at the moment,” Koller says. “We maybe have two songs in the works right now. We’ve really fallen into our roles now. When we wrote our early albums, we’d get together and start from scratch. Now, we write most of our individual music before we get together and hash it out. I do long for those days when we just used to jam but things do change.”