Having been active for active for nearly a decade, Praise’s brand of melodic hardcore that leans into the history of the D.C. area they call home has been shifting and growing for a long time. With songs about loss and being lost lining their back catalog, the band’s Revelation Records debut, All In A Dream, is out May 6th and leans into the hopeful aspect of cherishing those close to you at a time when we all need it most. We got to speak with guitarist Anthony Dye to find out more about the writing process, the influences they got to explore on the release, and how the pandemic affected it all.
Just to start off, how are you doing this year?
I think pretty good. As a band, it’s been pretty good. We finished up recording a couple things with the record last year, and then this year the record was done so we were just focusing on rollout, music videos, stuff like that. Now just starting to practice for a record release show.
Has the response to the “All In A Dream” single been good so far?
I hope so. I’m really bad at evaluating that kind of thing to tell you the truth, but I like both of the singles that have come out so far a lot so I hope that other people feel the same way.
With a lineup like yours sharing members with some of the most powerful forces hardcore has ever seen that span multiple movements and various levels of activity, what is the workflow like for writing Praise material?
Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s definitely all about timing, you know? The hardest part about operating our band is getting us all in the same room at the same time. I’m sure some bands get together every week or every month and throw around ideas that they’ve had, but we can’t do that because we practice a few times a year straight up. If we’re playing a show, we’re lucky if we get a practice in before the show. We definitely can’t just jam the way that other bands do so for writing we have to be pretty self-selective. So, for me, I write a lot of guitar parts for the band and the guitar parts are usually a jumping off point for writing a song, so demoing is really important.
To capture my ideas in a way that can be communicated to everyone else in the band effectively so we can all chime in. People will respond with feedback and maybe I’ll tweak the demo or Daniel [Fang] will program some drums to convey some idea he has about the song, so it all sort of happens that way. I do get together with Andy [Norton] who sings in the band. We’ll get together one-on-one and maybe another member of the band will come if they can but Andy and I live closer to each other than some of the other members so we’ll get together and throw around some ideas, play guitar with each other, but for the most part songs are pretty well developed by the time we play them in a room together and when we do practice we try to practice it a few times when we have new material but it doesn’t always happen.
When we do, we’re more so fine tuning. That’s just kind of the way it has to work because of everyone’s schedules. And then with this last record we introduced our friend Brian McTernan into the mix on pre-production which helped steer some song arrangement, too. It’s a pretty long-winded answer, but that’s all to say that things are usually kind of figured out at the time they can be and sometimes practiced. It’s good for me because – and this is not just music, this is everything in my life – I work better under pressure. I work better when I don’t have a ton of options in front of me. If we practiced every week and we jammed, I don’t think Praise would be what it is. Even though it would be great to hang out with my friends all the time, I don’t think I would work well that way. I thrive in situations that offer constraints.
In the six years since your last release, Leave It All Behind, how was the transition from that to working on the new LP, All In A Dream?
We probably didn’t get back together and jam for about a year. Well, there was one song that came a little earlier. A different recording of that song is on a compilation that came out in 2018 or something like that, so that one came a little earlier, then we definitely took a break. We were playing more shows back then in like 2016 then in 2018 we weren’t really busy in other parts of our life so it became pretty busy for [Praise].
We weren’t writing a bunch, we were just focusing on playing shows then the opportunity to do this compilation came up and we wrote that song called “Return To Life” and recorded it with Brian [McTernan] and then we kind of realized “Oh, we’ve got some juice left in us.” I think every time that we finish a release, we aren’t very productive right after. I don’t wake up and write a song every day, though I know people like that. I felt a little tapped out, I guess, and then when we did that song we realized that we had more left in us. So that song happened in 2018 then everything else slowly over the next couple of years until we started recording All In A Dream in spring of 2020.
How was holding onto the record for that long?
Yeah, it’s tough, you know? It’s really hard to sit on something for that long and then it makes it even more torturous to start putting it out into the world. The anticipation is really hard because you assign a lot of emotional value to it when you’ve been sitting on it for that long, but it’s cool. In some ways I think it took a while to finish up because of the pandemic. The studio we were in closed the day after we started recording vocals, and then we finished it up this time last year then it took another year for the pressing stuff to come together because of the delays. It’s been tough to just sit with it but, as you know from this conversation so far and for anyone who has been a fan of the band for a while, that we do things at our own pace anyways, so it came slowly but surely.
Those kinds of delays can definitely ramp up anxiety. It almost gets to a point where you’re like “Alright, I’m just ready for this to be out” past that point.
Yeah, we’re definitely ready for it to be out. It was supposed to come out sooner than this, you know? We recorded it in spring 2020 and I think we probably imagined that it would be out early 2021 at the time but no one really could’ve seen – well, I don’t know, maybe some scientists – but none of us could’ve seen what was coming that far back.
All your previous releases were with REACT! Records but for this one you went to Revelation Records, how has that been? Has it been much different?
Yeah, everything was on REACT! and it has been a little bit different, but both are very good, still have very positive feelings toward REACT! which is a label that is run by my best friend. He lives literally across the street from me, like, if I’m in my backyard I can wave to him if he’s on his deck.
So that never felt like we were working with a label, it always felt like we were working with a friend to deliver the music. It was important to us that we felt very comfortable with whatever label got this record and after talking to Sam and Revelation a few times it was the obvious choice after getting to know them. And, of course, the Revelation back catalog is stuff of legend to us. We love Revelation records, not even just stuff from the 80s but the 90s and beyond that, too. It was a big deal for all of us and we’re honored to be a part of that label and very glad that it feels comfortable and that they feel like friends, too. It’s all stuff I’ve been listening to since I was a teenager.
One of the things that Praise has always been good at is displaying the process of loss and being unafraid to explore those feelings of grief. In the past, it seemed like there was a bit more focus on feeling a bit scattered because of it, but it seems like the focus has shifted into a clarity for looking forward, holding onto hope, and pushing on in the world. What do you think led to this change in perspective?
We’re getting a little bit outside of my realm here because Andy [Norton] writes most of the lyrics for the band but I think that. I want to be really careful with my words here because I am speaking for somebody else, I just want to do it properly. I think that I’ve seen Andy grow as a person in the time I’ve known him and the period of time between Leave It All Behind and now, it has been amazing to watch him grow and watch his perspective change.
It’s been rewarding creatively and artistically to watch his approach to writing music and lyrics change along with that. I think and hope that he’s in a different place than what he was when he wrote [Leave It All Behin] because that’s how loss works, you know? You do need to grow and you do need to move past things in your life and you need to remember the people you lost and you carry them with you forever. I think that he’s bringing something else to the table creatively because he’s in a different place in his own life and moving past those things that have happened to him.
Instrumentally, everything that Praise has always been is there, but you have begun successfully balancing a lot more variety in your style and flavor. Were there any particular influences you pulled in on this release that helped you channel that sharper melody work?
Melody is really important for Praise in general and from the time I joined it’s something that we’ve always wanted: to dial up the melodicism of every song. If you had to describe Praise musically, it would be melodic hardcore. That’s what we love. I think since I joined and since we started writing music there is a set of influences that have always been there and will always be there, stuff like DC hardcore like Dag Nasty or Rites Of Spring then other stuff from the 80s that’s very inspirational to us as well like Verbal Assault and Gorilla Biscuits. I think every time we do a new record it is such a joy to be able to explore. Being a hardcore band can be limiting, but being in a melodic hardcore band, to me, is saying it offers a lot of opportunity to do things differently. On this record we got to bring in a lot more influence from Hüsker Dü, or U2, or Leatherface. Bands that we love that are maybe slightly outside the traditional melodic hardcore that we come from that we love and have always loved that we can explore more of our creativity by pulling those inspirations that are a little more outside of our box.
Absolutely. And just because you brought them up by name, what’s your favorite U2 record?
My favorite is War but everything up to and including Joshua Tree is pretty unstoppable. I do have a really soft spot for Joshua Tree because the TV show The Americans used the song “With Or Without You” in the series finale and now I can’t hear that song without having an emotional breakdown. It blows my mind every time I think about it. I loved that song in the record, too, before I saw that, but I appreciate it on a whole deeper level now.
Even in just the first taste of All In A Dream, listeners get a lot of growth from it immediately. We can sense a lot of change has come through. With that new message of holding on hope, for the time it’s coming out after all of this and being right on moving toward the tail end of the pandemic, do you feel it’s fitting?
Yeah I do, and that’s a really great question because when we wrote the title track and the album it was at a very different time. No one knew what the hell Covid-19 was, and it might have been written in a real earnest sense of hope that maybe we felt in our own lives and maybe we felt a rare sense of hope from certain political events or cultural events in the world, and then certainly that all changed in the middle of recording the record.
It does feel a little bit helpful right now, I don’t know if it will keep feeling like that, it feels like anything could happen at any moment now. Now when I think about that song [“All In A Dream”], what I think of is that hope which you can find in your own life amongst your friends and family. The way that I think about that song and the way that it interacts with the current moment, it changed a lot.
After the record comes out, you’ve got the release show, does Praise have any plans for the future?
We do have some stuff that’s coming up in the summertime that I don’t think I can speak on yet, but we’re gonna play some shows on the east coast and then maybe get in on some west coast action. We’ll play it by ear and see what comes along. We’re always excited to play music with our friends from other parts of the country and other parts of the world and make new friends so hopefully we’re able to do that.
Lastly, what do you hope people get most from All In A Dream?
I hope that people who love the same kind of melodic hardcore that we do find something to appreciate in it and find a little piece of that classic music they love from a contemporary band. Then, the people who aren’t exposed to the traditional music that we come from, I hope they hear it and want to dig deeper and listen to some of the stuff that inspired me.
Watch the video for “All In A Dream” here:
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Photo courtesy of Michael Thorn
