The majority of career musicians will at some point face the conundrum of how to keep changing and growing without alienating their long-time fans. For Floridian metalcore quintet Wage War, the process of self-conscious stylistic growth began in earnest with their third LP, 2019’s Pressure.
After the breakthrough success of the band’s second album, 2017’s Deadweight—which made an impact on the charts in the US and Australia—Pressure showed that Wage War, led by guitarist and clean vocalist Cody Quistad and lead vocalist Briton Bond, weren’t afraid to take risks with their sound.
The band’s first two records were produced by A Day to Remember lead vocalist Jeremy McKinnon and Andrew Wade (ADTR, The Dead Rabbitts). But for Pressure, they brought in Drew Fulk aka WZRD BLD, who’s worked with artists as varied as Lil Wayne, Bullet For My Valentine and Lil Peep.
With Fulk’s assistance, the band began to inject electronic programming into their hard hitting metalcore sound. The record also emphasised the anthemic qualities of Quistad’s chorus vocals and sharpened the corners of the band’s songwriting.
The response to Pressure was predictably mixed, but Quistad and co. didn’t come out the other side feeling discouraged. To the contrary, Wage War’s new album, Manic, is their most adventurous to date. The title tracks draws influence from underground rap crew $uicideboys$; lead single ‘High Horse’ is as unrelenting as anything in their back catalogue; and the album reaches its emotional zenith with the late-album hard rock and country ballad, ‘Never Said Goodbye’.
Watch the official music video for ‘Manic’
Tone Deaf spoke to Quistad about the stylistic variety of the new album, the declining importance of the album format, and what inspired him to write ‘Manic’.
Tone Deaf: Despite the pandemic, you were able to maintain the pattern of releasing a new Wage War album every two years. Is it important for you to get a new record out every couple of years?
Love Metal?
Get the latest Metal news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
Cody Quistad: Yeah, I mean, if the band was solely run by me we would have new songs out every couple of months. I think with the way that music has shifted and how music is consumed, I think that having new music frequently is a big plus.
With playlisting and music shifting to the singles game, albums just aren’t consumed the way that they used to be. It kind of feels like it’s all about your three or four big singles and then everything else is just for actual fans who will go listen to the deep cuts.
TD: There is a lot of dynamic and stylistic variance on this record. Do you think about being flexible enough to fit onto different playlists when you’re writing?
CQ: I don’t think that’s anything that we’ve ever done for specifically playlisting. The record and how far it stretches and reaches is very much a by-product of how much different music we all like and we all listen to.
We’ve been a band for almost 12 years and we’ve been professionally touring for about six. We’ve played a lot, a lot of shows, and when you’re playing what feels like the same song ten times for crowds every night, it can get a little old. And with the amount of stuff that we like, we just really wanted to differentiate on this album.
TD: Did you go into this record with a checklist—literal or figurative—of the variety of sounds and moods you wanted to cover?
CQ: We just have a lot of different things that we’ve found that we can do successfully. Obviously the heavy side, the melodic side, and then we’ve even been able to bridge into the acoustics a little bit and see some love there.
My favourite part about the album is that I don’t think any two songs sound even close to the same. So if you don’t care for one side of our band, odds are you skip to the next song and it’ll be something that you’re more into.
TD: The song ‘Manic’ is the most deviant thing you’ve done. Could you imagine doing a whole record that goes off on a tangent in this way?
CQ: I would say yes. The response so far to ‘Manic’ has been probably the most overwhelmingly positive thing that we’ve ever had, which is so weird to me. I’ve always been so confident in this song and I know it’s a good song, but I always thought it was going to be kind of an uphill battle just because it’s so different for us. But it seems to be something that everyone is connecting with.
I’ve seen some kids call it trap metal and stuff, and I don’t know if I back that all the way as far as a genre that I want to be called, but we certainly have incorporated a lot of this new emo, trap, the darker side stuff, and I just feel like it’s a cool flavour.
TD: How premeditated was the writing of ‘Manic’? Did you have a strong idea of the influences you wanted to include?
CQ: That entire song was written in one day and I knew two things: I knew that I wanted it to start with some kind of synthy pluck thing and I knew that I wanted the main guitar riff to mimic that. And then I just started going from there.
I listen to a lot of pop music and some trap. Me and my friends, we all love really hard beats in rap, like real simple, ethereal, scary, $uicideboy$ and Shakewell, artists like that. But I was kind of wanting to emulate that in a version that would make sense for us.
And then the other thing that I knew I wanted to do was, I call it the rock drop—you know, Skrillex used to do it but it was with dubstep, where they would have the build-up riser thing. And so I knew I wanted to have that.
From there, the song kind of wrote itself. The vocals came very, very fast, and I remember that I sent it to our team and everyone was like, “This is sick—what is this?” And I was like, “It’s a Wage War song.” And they were like, “What?”
Listen to Wage War’s latest album Manic here
