No Regrets With DANNY CASE Of FROM ASHES TO NEW

Interview by Kris Peters
Prequels and such talk are usually reserved for the film industry.
The blockbuster before the blockbuster, if you will, but in all
honesty has it ever really worked?
I could drag out a myriad of examples and create all sorts of
conjecture here, but at the end of the day you have to admit it is
not a word commonly used in the music industry.
But then again From Ashes To New are not your run of the mill
common band.
Since breaking through with their debut album Day One in 2016, the
US rock outfit has gone on to amass four Top 10 singles, over 600
million all-time streams and more than 75 million video views to
date. So when they announce their intent to make a prequel to an
already successful concept album then who cares to stop and argue
the semantics of contrasting industries?
From Ashes To New are far from a safe band.
By weaving hard rock, hip hop, electronic and alternative music
into a tapestry of sonic enlightenment FATN have set themselves
distinctly apart from an ever clustering swarm of by-the-numbers
rock outfits that class experimentation as deciding on which degree
of seperation they are feeling on any given day.
And so enters the fray an album titled Blackout which acts as a
conceptual prequel to Day One, encapsulating the trivialities and
nuances of a pre-apocalyptic world that was glimpsed through
realistic eyes during the 2020 pandemic during which the album was
written.
With the release date of July 28 looming, HEAVY sat down with
vocalist Danny Case to venture down the rabbit hole that has
consumed his thoughts during the making of Blackout.
"We've been comparing it a lot...," he measured, "...it's a quote,
unquote prequel to our debut album Day One. When we were writing
the record it was early 2021 when the lockdowns were just starting
to end - for us at least - and touring still hadn't come back but
we were writing. It was in your face every day. One of the first
songs we worked on was Armageddon because it seemed like every day
was the end of the world. That was the song that came about early
on and we were like, hey, we have our very first record day One.
The art on it has a kid on a planet looking back on the old planet
as it is falling apart. So why don't we take this record and make
it where the kid is on that old planet before he leaves for the new
planet. Another thing we were trying to do was capture the same
kind of heaviness that the first album had. We wanted to take a
step back and look at what do we really wanna do? What do the fans
really want from this band? And we found that we really enjoy
writing heavy music and that was what put this band on the map. It
also tied in with the music we were making in that it was kind of
like an apocalyptic record almost."
In the full interview Danny talks more about the musical side of
the album, writing to a concept, the singles released and how they
represent the album, the concept in greater detail, how FATN has
changed since he joined the band, the different styles that make up
their music and how they successfully integrate them together,
future plans and more.