Perth metal act All This Filth usher in a new tomorrow with brutal second album

Perth metal band All This Filth are celebrating the release of their new album Tomorrow Will Be Better? at Rosemount Hotel on Friday, February 23. ALEIGHSHA GLEW caught up with vocalist Brendan Preston to find out the story behind the record, and what we can look forward to on the night.

What has it been like getting your music out into the world?

We released the single at the end of 2022 called Still Bleeds to My Heart, and we did a video clip for that. Towards the end of last year, just before we went on tour, we actually released one single called It’s Never Going To Be OK, which is the first song off the upcoming album.

We actually debuted that song in Victoria. We played Sunbury on the Friday, Kill Fest in Kilmore on the Saturday and on the Sunday, we actually played Fitzroy in Melbourne, and that went pretty well.

We released another single just before we got back from Victoria called Breathing Concrete, and we played our Filthy Christmas show at Badlands. We did a video clip as well, which is on YouTube.

We actually toured Queensland on the 4th–7th of January and did another festival called the Monk and Pedal Festival, which was at The Zoo in Fortitude Valley.

I saw that you had signed with a US label called Brutal Records. Did you put this album under that label?

Yes, the album is out through Brutal Records. They’ve done some deals where you can buy the album, though. I think in Europe it’s released through Seasons of Mist Records, which is a pretty decent record label. In America and the rest of the world, it’s through Brutal Records, and they’re getting it put in the stores. The target is all over the place, into physical stores, online and streaming retailers as well.

What inspiration did you draw from when writing the album?

This album was actually a direct follow-up to the last album, Misery Season. Thematically, it picks up exactly where the last album left off. The last song on Misery Season ends, and then the first track has like an intro where it sort of starts with the last song on Misery Season by use of sampling. Misery Season was sort of like, unintentionally, a concept album, telling the story from start to finish about the hard times that I was going through at the time. Dealing with life, just depression, anxiety, mental health and the toll that it can take on me. So Misery Season is about the misery coming upon you, and being a season, it sort of comes and goes, gets worse, gets better, but either way, it just keeps coming and going.

This new album, called Tomorrow Will Be Better?, asks questions after you’ve gone through a hard time in your life, like, ‘What do you do now? and ‘where to from here?’ You made it through that only to realise that on the other side, there’s still more challenges. You’re still having to deal with your demons and your depression. And you still have to battle, so you make it through. You make it through ‘misery season’. And now, what do you do? Where do you go from here?

Awesome. So you’ll be launching this album at The Rosemount on Friday, February 23?

The album was officially released digitally on February 9, so you can stream it now. The local album launch here in Perth is on February 23, and it’s at the Rosemount Hotel in North Perth. If anybody would like to come, we’re selling tickets through Oztix. We’ve got our friends from Buried Shallow, Allocer and Von Spriggan on it.

That’s awesome! How have you prepared for the launch?

Aside from booking the show ourselves and putting the bands on, we have been rehearsing and adding new songs to the set list. We’ve also been practicing songs on the album that we haven’t played live, as there will be a bunch of new songs debuting at the album launch.

We’ve been trying to do a bit of social media and keep people engaged. As part of all that promotional stuff, we did the touring at the end of last year, and from January this year, we’re trying to increase the fan base and the awareness and get people into it. We’re looking to do this local launch and then hopefully do some more interstate touring and possibly international touring when we can.

How did you choose the bands to support you at the launch?

We’re friends with the guys from Buried Shallow. Mark, from Buried Shallow, actually used to play guitar for us. He actually recorded on the last two albums as well and co-wrote on the last two albums, so it just seemed like a fitting way to sort of have him included in that as well.

We did have an idea we didn’t really want to have the same bands we had on our Filthy Christmas show last year, but just due to circumstances beyond our control, there are a lot of gigs on around the same time and a lot of bands were unavailable, but we’re pretty happy with the line-up.

Allocer actually just hit us up and were just tenacious and said, ‘hey, we see you guys have an album launch coming up. Would you be interested in having us on?’ And we were like, ‘yeah, because we played with them before, and they’re a solid band, and I like their moxies’, you know, and they’re being tenacious.

I actually heard Von Spriggan a couple years ago on andrewhaug.com, the 24/7 rock metal radio station. I really dug it, and I found out that they were from Perth, so I looked into it. Our manager actually came to me and asked if we had heard of Von Spriggan and if we wanted him on the line-up. We are going to have Von Spriggan open the album launch, and it’s his debut show. As far as I can understand, it’s mostly just a studio project.

You know, Perth has a lot of really great bands. Perth punches above its weight. We’ve played with some really good bands over east as well, but like per head per capita, as they say, Perth definitely punches above its weight; there’s a lot of really good bands here.