Alkaline Trio Set The Record Straight

Nostalgia may be hitting the music industry in a big way through reunion tours, but some bands would rather bury and forget their past material. So it's kind of refreshing to see a group like Alkaline Trio return to their roots by remastering and re-releasing their original 1998 debut album, Goddamnit, which still holds up as a defining record for the pop-rockers.

"If anything, we have a better perspective and stronger heads on our shoulders now," muses frontman Matt Skiba. "I think that having your shit together emotionally and mentally makes for stronger creativity.

"But when we wrote our first record, we wrote it completely free of any sort of expectations. There were no records of ours before it, so we had nothing else to compare it to, nothing to base our sound off of. And now we've almost come full circle, because that's what we did for this new record."

The new Agony And Irony EP's July 1 arrival is already being heralded by Alkaline Trio fans as the Chicago trio's next instant classic. According to Skiba, the new record may not be a return to any sort of predefined form for the band, but that's the way they wanted it.

"We didn't base this new record off of anything we've done before. We just said that we're gonna make a record that we ourselves would listen to, and that we would love. In that respect, I kind of feel like we've done what we've always been doing. But by now, compared to 1998, I feel a little smarter, a little wiser and a little stronger."

Along with various lineup changes over the years (though Skiba tersely notes that the current group has been together for six years and is "the happiest and best we've been as a band"), Alkaline Trio have also managed to survive the "restructuring" of their now-defunct former label, V2 Records. The label dumped all of its signed acts when it crashed. This came at a rather inconvenient time for the band, as they were still working on the new record.

"It did come as a surprise to us," Skiba admits of the label going under. "We didn't have a back-up plan, but luckily the guy that signed us to V2 had secured a new job at Epic Records.

"So we were kind of freaked out at first, but then he called us and said, 'Don't worry, I have a new job and I want to take you guys with me,' so there wasn't too much time to panic or anything. We didn't have a plan, but luckily other people did for us, so that was nice."

An added, though rather unorthodox, bonus to being on Epic was a guest appearance in an episode of MTV reality show, The Hills. One wouldn't expect Alkaline Trio's dramatic music to appeal to the audience of a teen tabloid drama, but since MTV isn't exactly living up to its acronym these days, perhaps this sort of cameo on a popular show could be a new way to get television exposure.

"I never really thought of it that way," muses Skiba. "See, we got asked to do the show because one of the girls [Audrina Patridge] on the show is an intern at our label, Epic, and her sister just had a baby and named her Sadie after one of our songs. We never saw the show — I've still never seen the show, not even the episode we were on.

"If they had told us that it was some show that nobody watched and would probably never see the light of day — but look, this girl works at your label and her sister named her kid after your song — we still would have done it. We were like, 'Oh, that's rad. We'll totally do it.' Then a bunch of people got really upset and were all 'That show sucks!' and 'Why would they do that?' But the people that were bummed about us doing it were watching it anyway.

"We don't ever make any apologies for the decisions we make. It was fun with the people from our label. Audrina was really sweet. It was cool to have them come in and document us recording our album, and it wasn't a big deal. We were just going about our business in the studio, and then they came in with the cameras and said 'Hi' and filmed it, and then it was on the show. So I don't know why everyone was making a big deal out of it."