From First To Last Go Cinematic On Heroine

Being adamant pays off, especially when you're in an up-and-coming band. Goth-punkers From First To Last are living proof of that as they managed to rope in mega-producer Ross Robinson to work on their new album, Heroine.

"Basically, we were going to do the record with Ross, or we were just going to produce it ourselves," says drummer Derek Bloom. "We're very adamant, everybody in this band is very adamant about what they want.

"It's a band full of people who know exactly what they want and we'll never take no for an answer. We couldn't work with a producer who tried to write our songs for us. We can't let someone ask us to try something differently or let this part sound different, you know? That's why it was necessary to work with Ross or just do it on our own."

The producer has had a hand in a number of landmark albums from like-minded bands such as Glassjaw, At The Drive-In and The Blood Brothers, but he's most famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for jumpstarting the careers of Korn, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot.

"Everybody in the band pretty much grew up listening to his records," the drummer confesses, but the producer wasn't so willing to work with the band at first. "We sent him a copy of [our last album] and he didn't like it and he didn't want to work with us.

"We demoed three songs at Travis' [Richter, rhythm guitarist] old house in Georgia, and we sent it to him and as soon as he got it he called us back and was like, 'I love it, I'll do it.'"

Robinson's change of heart may be due to the fact that Heroine is worlds apart from their last effort, 2004's Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has A Body Count. Sounding almost operatic in its scope, the album documents a band desperately trying to distinguish themselves, moving closer to AFI's style of cinematic punk rock than the melodic hardcore of their earlier material.

"It's completely different," the drummer states. "Matt [Good, lead guitar], when he was writing the songs, his whole thing behind it was, for the month behind writing it, he was looking to film scores and things like that, trying to figure out how film scores are made with this whole purpose of kind of emphasizing a feeling, and evoking a feeling out of the viewer.

"And he thought, 'Well how is that possible? How do certain notes evoke this feeling from the listener or the viewer or whatever?' He got into that whole ideology and tried to figure out how it worked and ended up making a lot of the parts of the album, like the programming or just the additional instrumentation, even down to the guitar riffs. It sounds like a film score, like a Harry Potter soundtrack."

This change in direction was a direct result of the band knowing what they didn't want to do.

"That cuts out whatever else is there and what's left is finding your own path, or starting from scratch," says Bloom.

Heroine hit store shelves on Tuesday.

From First To Last will appear with Fall Out Boy at these shows:

April 9 Vancouver, BC @ Pacific Coliseum
May 11 Montreal, QC @ Stade Uniprix
May 13 Toronto, ON @ Ricoh Coliseum