Eric Vanlerberghe still remembers the moment Australia became real. It was I Prevail’s first time Down Under, and the band had just landed in Perth.
They were jet-lagged, slightly dazed, and doing what most exhausted touring bands do when they arrive on the other side of the world: trying to find something to eat and maybe a beer strong enough to convince the body clock to play along.
Then Vanlerberghe looked across the room.
“I remember looking over and seeing our tour poster in this random bar,” he recalls. “And it had all these sold out dates and it just hit me like, holy shit. I’m on the other side of the world about to play for people I’ve never met.”
At the time, everything about it felt foreign. Exciting, too, but completely unknown.
“I’ve never been in Australia. I don’t even know what people are like down here,” he laughs. “I just found out what the accent really sounds like.”
This weekend, I Prevail return for their biggest Australian headline tour to date, bringing their ‘Violent Nature’ tour to Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney with Imminence and Invent Animate. For a band that has now crossed the world to play Australia multiple times, the long-haul flight no longer leads into uncertainty; it leads into familiarity.
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“I think this is our seventh time,” Vanlerberghe says. “It’s more of a, ‘I can’t wait to see some familiar faces.’”
He means that literally. The fans who have come out every time. The friends he has made outside of music. The Australian artists he hopes to reconnect with. The people he knows he will see pressed up against the barrier again.
“I know I’ll see them up in the front and I’ll recognise them,” he says.
That recognition means something. When a band comes from Michigan and ends up on the other side of the planet, playing rooms filled with people who know every word, the surrealism never fully disappears. But for Vanlerberghe, Australia has become one of those rare places on the touring map where routine and magic overlap.
“It almost feels like a second home,” he says. “It’s such a cool feeling to be on the complete opposite side of the world from where I’m from and have some familiarity and some familiar faces and even some friends that I’m looking forward to seeing again.”
That pull between distance, recognition, pressure, and release sits somewhere beneath Violent Nature, the band’s latest record and a pivotal one in their story. It is the first I Prevail album with Vanlerberghe taking on both clean and unclean vocals, a shift that could have easily turned into a pressure cooker.
Instead, it became a test of nerve.
Before it was an album title, Violent Nature was a phrase. The band had a few demos and ideas in motion when guitarist Steve Menoian brought it into the room. He and Vanlerberghe both keep notepads of lyrics, words, and stray phrases that might eventually find a home.
“He goes, ‘I got this thing that just feels cool. How do you think it would it work over this instrumental?’” Vanlerberghe says. “And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I could see that.’ I tracked it and was like, okay, that’s sick.”
The title might sound brutal on first impact, but for Vanlerberghe it was never about violence in a literal sense. It was about force. Instinct. The kind of emotion that sits in the chest before it becomes language.
“It was just what I was feeling right then and there,” he says. “Raw, rage, emotion.”
The rest of the record seemed to orbit that same energy. Not every song is angry, but every song comes from somewhere charged.
“The rest of the record was written through a lot of the themes were just visceral emotions, whether it was pain or anger or resentment or acceptance of letting something go or letting a loved one go or whatever it may be,” he says.
That is where the title found its weight.
“It’s not necessarily the violent, it’s not violent, but it’s just this visceral feeling,” he explains. “Every song has this very strong emotion for us behind it. And it kind of just resonated with us.”
Eventually, there was no other name that made sense.
“It got to a point where we were like, we couldn’t think of the record being called anything else,” he says.
If the emotional world of Violent Nature felt instinctive, the vocal reality of making it was anything but. Vanlerberghe had fronted I Prevail for years, but stepping into every vocal lane on the album forced him to confront questions he had not previously had to answer so completely.
The first major test was “Rain”, the first song they wrote with what he calls “just a big chorus.”
“We just had a microphone and acoustics set up in the middle of the room and we’re humming melodies and then the lyrics started flowing,” he says. “It was like, okay, yeah, I think that sounds good, but we’re not going to be able to tell if that’s it until you go and sing it.”
That was where the uncertainty came in.
“It’s like, all right, I don’t know where my range is,” he says. “I know I can sing. I just don’t know where my range tops out, where I feel comfortable and all that.”
For a few days, possibly a week, the questions kept circling.
“I don’t know, is this good?” he remembers thinking. “Is this something I can do and sing this song five nights a week for three months at a time?”
There is something disarming about how plainly Vanlerberghe talks about self-doubt. This is not the polished, post-victory version of vulnerability, where the hard part is safely behind him and the lesson has already been turned into a neat soundbite. The doubt is still there. It has been there for most of I Prevail’s existence.
“I’ve had no musical training,” he says. “I’m just a fan of music that wants to do it for fun. And then we start touring and we get signed and we get nominated for awards and I’m always like, all right, the bottom’s going to fall out any moment. The imposter syndrome’s always there.”
It is a hell of a thing to say when the band in question has already ticked off the kind of achievements most heavy acts would kill for – a viral breakthrough, gold records, Grammy nominations, and major international tours. But that is also the point. Success, from the outside, can look like proof. From the inside, it can sometimes feel like borrowed time.
With Violent Nature, the stakes felt especially personal. Fans were always going to listen closely. Some were going to compare. Some were going to be ready to decide what I Prevail could or could not be in this formation. Vanlerberghe knew that.
But something shifted as the record came together.
“After tracking the record, continue working on these songs, I was more excited to just put this out and be like, ‘You know what? I gave it my all at this time. The boys gave it their all at this time and we wrote the best songs we could and I’m very fucking proud of what we’ve done,’” he says.
That pride does not come with delusion. He knows not everyone is going to be on board.
“There’s going to be people out there that are not going to like it and there’s going to be people out there that are going to like it and it doesn’t matter for us,” he says. “We’re going to write the music that we love and just keep pushing on and find the people that relate and connect with the music.”
The more he sang the songs live, the more the confidence arrived.
“After touring these songs and singing them more and more each night, the confidence has just grown,” he says. “The love and support I’ve received from my band mates to fans has really helped me just get through the imposter syndrome that I feel I’ve felt since we started this band 12 years ago.”
That connection with fans is not some vague talking point for Vanlerberghe. When asked what success feels like now, after the records, nominations, and big tours, he does not reach for numbers. He reaches for people.
“I think when I feel any bit of success, it’s when I talk to a fan or I see people at the show holding up signs that say X, Y, Z song changed my life,” he says. “Or I meet someone at the bar that didn’t recognise me. And after we talk for a little bit, they realise that I’m in I Prevail and they tell me, ‘Oh my God, this song, it got me through this or it got me through that.’”
He understands that kind of attachment because he had it first.
“I was that kid,” he says. “I have Senses Fail lyrics tattooed on my chest because that record really changed my life and the direction I was heading and really helped me at one of my lowest times when I was a teenager.”
Before I Prevail became the band whose songs helped other people, Vanlerberghe was the kid pulling something out of someone else’s music. That memory has never left him.
“I was able to pull something out of music,” he says. “When I started local bands before I Prevail, I just wanted to write something that resonated with someone else.”
Now that it happens regularly, it still does not feel normal.
“I hear stories more and more frequent of this song or that song did something positive in their life,” he says. “That never gets old. It never gets old.”
Those conversations give him something industry validation cannot.
“I love chatting with those fans because that’s when I feel like the imposter syndrome’s gone,” he says. “And I feel some bit of success that I was able to take something out of music and now am blessed to be in the position that I can put something back out.”
That exchange between artist and audience has also shaped the way I Prevail write. Vanlerberghe is careful not to frame Violent Nature as the first honest I Prevail record. To him, they have all been honest. Every lyric he has written has come from something real: something he related to, something he lived through, something he witnessed, or something he had to process.
Still, he admits this album demanded a deeper kind of excavation.
“I hate when bands use mature. It feels more mature because I don’t even know what that means,” he says. “But I did feel the ability after you have a bit of a catalogue and songs that you’ve already written, you can’t write the same song twice.”
That means if he is returning to familiar emotional territory, he has to find a new door into it.
“If I’m writing about something similar that I’ve went through in the past and there’s already a song in that vein, you got to find something a little more unique or dig a little deeper into that story,” he says.
On Violent Nature, that meant looking harder at wounds he might have already written around before.
“In the past writing a breakup song and then now coming back and this record, the song that we wrote that’s a breakup song, I had to do a little more soul searching or I had to dig deeper into that wound and flush it out and be a little more honest,” he says.
Then he catches himself. “All right, you got me,” he says. “I guess it is a little more honest.”
For I Prevail, that insistence on authenticity sharpened after Trauma. On that album, Vanlerberghe wrote bluntly about mental health, depression, and the loss of his best friend. The response taught the band something about what listeners were actually connecting to.
“Seeing how that album resonated with people, that kind of was like, okay, that’s how we have to be,” he says. “We have to be authentic. We can’t just write a love song that’s not about anyone. We can’t just write a song that’s like, ‘Hey, keep your head up. It’s going to be okay.’”
For a song to work, it has to come from somewhere lived-in.
“I think it’s got to come from somewhere that one of us in the band has lived through or has gone through or has experienced,” he says.
When asked which song from Violent Nature feels like the mission statement for this era of I Prevail, Vanlerberghe lands on “Annihilate Me”. Partly because it carries some of the same teeth as “Bow Down”, but also because it captures the stubbornness of a band that knows what it feels like to be counted out.
“I feel like I’ve been counted out. I feel like we as a band have been counted out,” he says.
That feeling is not framed as bitterness so much as fuel.
“You have people that talk shit about you online, you have people that adore you, you have people that wish for your downfall,” he says. “I didn’t want that. But if we are going to be placed in this position, we are going to do the best we can to write the best songs we can, to write music that relates and connects with people and I’m not going anywhere.”
That might be the real centre of I Prevail in 2026: not invincibility, but refusal. Refusal to sand down the edges. Refusal to write songs that are not rooted in lived experience. Refusal to let self-doubt have the final word.
And when the band hit Australian stages this weekend, Vanlerberghe knows exactly what he wants those rooms to feel like.
“We wanted to make an environment where you come into the show and it doesn’t matter who you are, what walk of life you come from,” he says. “We know that you worked hard for your money and that you are paying for an experience to escape what’s going on in the world outside, to come to a show and shut your brain off for three hours and just enjoy yourself.”
That is the job, as he sees it. Not just to hit the notes. Not just to play louder, tighter, or bigger than last time. The job is to make the outside world disappear for a while.
“We want to have a show where people come and just sing the words full chest, lose their voice, have the best night of their life and can forget about all the bullshit that’s going on in the outside world.”
Fans who saw I Prevail on their last headline run, or at Good Things in 2023, should expect a band still trying to outdo itself. Vanlerberghe says every tour has felt different because the band has kept changing: older, bigger stages, different setlists, new songs, old songs, and a clearer sense of the band they want to be.
“With these shows, we’re trying to put on a bigger show,” he says. “We’re trying to have a more exciting experience, play some new songs, play some old songs that you haven’t heard in a long time.”
As a fan himself, he loves when a band pulls out something older and plays it with the weight of everything they have learned since.
“That’s fun when I get to see a band I used to listen to 15 years ago and they dust an old one off and I hear it in a new way,” he says.
That is what he wants for I Prevail, too.
“I just want people to come and know that they’re about to see I Prevail and we can hopefully blow their expectations out by giving them a better show than the one they saw last or the one they saw before that or the one prior to that.”
By the end of the conversation, Vanlerberghe sounds less like someone trying to prove I Prevail belong in these rooms and more like someone slowly allowing himself to enjoy the fact that they do.
“It would take some crazy event for it to be not great,” he says. “We’re going to have fun and I’m so excited to see, like I said, some familiar faces, some new faces and just have a show where everyone can just forget what’s going on in the world and just have fun with us for three hours with some other incredible bands.”
Ticket information for I Prevail’s tour can be found here.
