Sit down with the members of Roses are Dead and hear their perspective on being a metal band in Boise. They share their thoughts on the struggles of starting out, finding their sound and preparing for a show.
Transcript
Zack: My name’s Zack. I am the manager and stagehand for Roses are Dead. So, I take care of everything social media-wise and off stage.
Alex: I’m Alex and I’m the vocalist for Roses are Dead.
Xander: So, I’m Xander and I play lead guitar – well I guess guitar – for Roses are Dead. And I’m a founding member.
Alex: Mastermind.
Xander: Mastermind. So, we’re at the Boise Hive and we’re getting ready for our show tomorrow which is at the Knitting Factory in Boise. We’re going to be playing with our buddies in Lifelong Liars, the Nixon Rodeo and We Were Giants. And we were here doing rehearsals getting ready for the next show and hammering out some final details. So, we’re a metalcore band - I guess a metal band - I don’t know exactly what we are.
Alex: Yeah, we’ve been meeting a lot of local scenes kinda what it’s about, for me anyways. I meet all these other people from the bands like We Were Giants, I met them, and Lifelong Liar is just a good group of people kind of making friendships and trying to make the scene better.
Zack: There’s a lot less exposure in Idaho. So it’s harder to get shows. You don’t have as many big bands coming through.
Xander: Early struggles of a band are like you’re broke, and you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
Alex: Do we know what we’re doing?
Xander: I don’t think so. We’re still…
Zack: It’s starting to work.
Xander: Yeah, it’s starting to work.
Alex: Yeah, we’re finding a sound. We’re also influenced by different bands.
Xander: We are. It’s kind of hard to… We want to get our album out. We’ve been pushing to get the album out for October. I don’t know if we’ll get to that date. Maybe?
Alex: We’re hoping for it.
Xander: Yeah, we’re hoping for it. So, maybe after the show we are going to hit the hard but tentative October release date, and then after that we’re going to get some more merch and then hopefully next year we’re going to get them to start doing some one-week tours, start promoting outside of the states that way we look better to either a label or to someone that would want to take us one professionally so that we have exposure, and we have experience under our belt being on the road. Also, just getting outside of Idaho is a huge deal for us. Because we play a lot of shows here and play to a lot of the same people and we just want to expand more and start gaining a following outside of here. Everything from like order – receiving the order – to payments has been really easy, really streamlined, super compressional, so it’s been like a really great experience going through select prints.
Zack: Definitely.
Alex: I love our shirts
Xander: Yeah, I was going to wear mine tonight, but I’m like “that would be so lame wearing my own shirt”.
Zack: Be like “Hey, check out our merch.”
Xander: I do. I wear that shirt around…