The Covid-19 pandemic acted as a major deterrent to the music industry. American metalcore band Wage War has been no exception. After their streaming success on their third LP “Pressure” which was released in 2019, plans on using this momentum were kept on hold. Frontman Briton Bond was quite hopeless, stuck at home and thinking what could be done in this situation like many other artists. “Will I ever tour again? Am i ever going to feel like I’m in a band again?”: these were the questions in his mind. The scene was so bad that he even thought of starting from scratch.
Dark times: Will they make it through?
Briton and bandmates Cody Quistad (vocals/guitar), Seth Blake (guitar), Chris Gaylord (bass) and Stephen Kluesener (drums) were all going through a similar situation. “We were all thinking that we’d have to start from ground zero again,” Briton says. “I thought we’d be back to playing really small clubs – it looked like everything was going to shrink and we’d end up where we were several years ago. That was my biggest concern when it came to the pandemic, in terms of Wage War.”
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As the band says, none of them had any “Plan Bs”. On top of all these, they were also having a difficult personal life. Briton had to deal with his grandmother passing away. “If I’m going to be inside and not doing anything for a while, I’m going to try and work on myself,’” was Briton’s way of coping with the isolation. He took the time to deal with his personal problems. Briton’s process of writing comes from the dark times he had faced in his life. His trauma, when put into music was the main ingredient behind their songs. But the new question that arose was what if there was no band, no tours or even an industry. How will they be able to sustain it?
Turning trauma into art
The band, Briton particularly used the lockdown trauma to create. His grandmother passing away mad him write their single, “Never Say Goodbye”. “Manic”, their fourth album was majorly influenced by such difficult lockdown experiences. But for this record, the band, particularly Briton needed a break. Briton needed to work on his mental health first and foremost. The band decided to go for a series of cabin retreats in the mountains that surround Chattanooga, Tennessee. The decision proved to be very useful in bringing their energies togther. Briton now considers his mental health to be the best after a lengthy period of refection, thanks to the lockdown.
“Manic”:Wage War reflects on their career-best album
“Manic” turned out to be the best album of their career. This made the band more hopeful than ever, with goals of joining metal’s big leagues.
“In light of what happened, we wanted to get new music out as soon as possible,” says Cody. “Manic was spawned from those frustrations, and all the inspiration we gained from the early success of the Pressure tour, as well as the knowledge that it had to be cut short.”
This is how Briton explains the thought process behind “Manic“: “You’re not walking alone through all this. Sometimes, there’s not a perfect answer to fix everything in our lives, and sometimes you’ve got to fail to figure out where you’re going. There’s some days where I wake up and I’m just like, ‘I don’t even want to get on stage.’ But you’ve just got to keep trying to fight through it. That’s a big thing I want our fans and listeners of this album to know: just don’t give up, because you might be in the trenches, you might be getting your butt kicked, but it will end and there will be a time that you look back and think, ‘Yeah, that time sucked, but it allowed me to grow.’ That’s what Manic is about – it’s that journey of going through a lot of really bad stuff, but knowing that you can deal with it and you don’t have to deal with it alone. There’s always a way to make a better tomorrow.”
Wage War’s album Manic is out now via Fearless Records.
