Toxicon are (in their opinion) a fairly good-looking collective of musicians, hailing from from Geelong, Melbourne and Ballarat, who go mighty well with a plate of cheese & crackers, and a cheeky glass of red. Combining various elements of Groove, Speed and Progressive Metal, Toxicon provide a sure-fire way of giving your neck whiplash and your fingers a recurring case of Metal Horns.
Toxicon slaved away writing a bunch of pretty crap songs, all the while rehearsing in a paint shop for the first 6 months of their conception. The paint fumes were awesome. The band then eventually managed to upgrade to an ablution block out the back of a dodgy chicken shop. No bacon, slightly less awesome fumes, but way crunchier tunes. Nowadays they use a ‘real’ rehearsal room and subsequently have been foolhardy and naive enough to pump out an ambitious and unreal debut 52-minute epic concept album. It is Toxicon’s dream to one day become big enough to release something that will alienate fans of their earlier work. We grab a few words to find out all about it.
Metal-Roos: You released your debut album “Purge” on August 1 and it’s a concept album. Can you tell us who had the idea and why you are decided to do it this way?
Well, when we first started writing our music we didn’t have a vocalist so the music wasn’t really written around a concept. Once we found Wayne, he started writing lyrics to the finished songs. He found that a lot of what he was writing could be linked together. Between him and Paul, they came up with the story of the wanderer for the album. I think it works quite well as all the songs on the album are quite different from one another but the lyrics make it feel more complete to me.
Metal-Roos: Which song do you recommend from this album and why?
For me it’s track 9, Nowhere to Go. This is my favourite song to play live. Its bouncy, its got a sick chorus, you can mosh to it. Wayne did an awesome job with the lyrics for this one. All around great track. 😉
Metal-Roos: You guys start soon with your Australian tour, what are you expecting from this tour? And what you are looking for at this tour?
At the moment we are two shows in and it’s been great. We didn’t really expect anything from this, more just to travel to a few cities we haven’t been to before and a few we had so that we could play the album to people and get ourselves out there. First two shows have been awesome though. Adelaide and Ballarat, both had a lot of people out to support the local bands, which was great. We’ve picked up a few contacts so it won’t be long before we are doing the rounds regularly, I think. Right now though it’s all about the fun
Metal-Roos: Which bands do you want to play with here in Australia?
If we are talking Australian bands, we have quite a few that we really love most of which we have played with before. We really love Orpheus Omega, Envenomed and Naberus who are all from Melbourne a well as Alkira from Adelaide, Darker Half from Sydney and Damnations Day from Geelong. And The Beards. They fuckin’ rock.
International bands, though, it would be all our favourite bands. We’d love to even just open for bands like Lamb of God, Machine Head, Mastodon, Slipknot or Gojira. I know Paul would froth if we supported Opeth. I’d kill to meet Chris Adler from Lamb of God.
Metal-Roos: What is your plan after the album is released and the tour is over? Hitting the studio again, write a new album, … another tour maybe?
We’ve started doing demos for the next album already actually. We wanna try writing 20 or 30 songs and cutting them down for the next album and we have a good 10 ideas floating around already so everythings comin up milhouse right now. 😉 Like I mentioned before, we will probably still stay on the tour circuit too. We would like to make our way up and down the east/south coasts a few times a year so we will be touring on off for until we head back into the studio I think.
Interview Date: 2016-08-05
Interviewer: Michael
