Into The Light

            Alkaline Trio makes no apologies for who they are. For a band who has been churning out records since 1996, there’s not much that can faze them—even a little backlash for being on MTV’s most loved and hated show, The Hills. But Matt Skiba (vocals, guitar), Dan Andriano (vocals, bass) and Derek Grant (drums, vocals) pay that little mind. The Chicago natives just released their sixth studio album, Agony & Irony, and there’s business to attend to.
            On their latest full-length, the threesome investigates the dichotomy of light and dark, something that turned out to be more of a subconscious intention rather than a deliberate one. “Once we decided what songs were going to be on the record, we kind of realized that the album had a little more hope than our past couple of albums,” Andriano reveals. “I think in certain songs it’s darker than ever, honestly, but there’s also a nice lift to the album that we’ve been missing in the past and it kind of balanced itself out. That’s when we realized our songs were coming from that angle, but it was more after-the-fact as we analyzed ourselves.”
            Known as a decidedly punk band for their bombast attitude, hard-charging riffs and counterculture influences, the 31-year-old bassist says he’s not concerned with what genre Alkaline Trio is associated with and, in fact, the band doesn’t consider themselves punk rock at all.
            “The goals that we originally set for ourselves were to get out and try to play for as many people as possible, and at the time we thought ‘as many people as possible’ was playing for four or five hundred people a night,” he says. “Fortunately for us we’ve just been able to do what we do and maintain a pretty steady progression and growth. We just like to write songs that we enjoy, and if people want to get into them, I don’t really care if they live on the street or work ‘9 to 5’ in an office every day for Charles Schwab. We don’t discriminate as far as what your background is as a listener, so I would hate for people to discriminate against us as far as what we consider ourselves.”
            As a three-piece, Alkaline Trio has two singers in Skiba and Andriano. The writing process is a fully collaborative effort beginning with lyrical ideas from the vocalists. However, Andriano admits that it is only when drummer Derek Grant gets involved that the shells become Alkaline Trio songs. The fruits of their labor are triumphantly displayed throughout Agony & Irony, which starts off with a strong set of catchy, fist-pumping jams including the album opener, “Calling All Skeletons”—a favorite of Andriano’s to play live. “Skeletons” is followed by the Ian Curtis-inspired track, “Help Me,” which lyrically explores a sense of displacement, but musically suggests a light at the end of the tunnel. Andriano’s most personal song on the record is “Ruin It,” which he says was difficult for him to write. “It’s got a lot to do with me getting over myself in a way, so in that sense I’m very attached to that song because it means the most to me.”
            As for their buzzworthy cameo on The Hills, Andriano brushes off accusations of “selling out” with a cool perspective. “A lot of people have negative things to say and I personally don’t understand it,” he laments. “I don’t watch the show, and I understand if you’re a punker and you think The Hills is stupid or whatever, but I don’t know why we wouldn’t have done it. [Audrina Patridge] works for our label, and we also want to get our music out there to as many people as possible. I think a lot of people watch that show, so we were excited that we might have turned a few people onto our band by doing it, so that doesn’t hurt either.”
            After more than a decade of playing sold-out shows and selling more than 1 million albums to date, Alkaline Trio is on a quickly ascending track armed with experience and a tough skin that comes with traveling through, well, the darkest and brightest of days. Does anything surprise this triple threat?                  “Not really,” Andriano says assuredly. “I’m not trying to sit here and be like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen it all,’ but we’ve definitely been through a lot as a band—in business, songwriting and life experience—so I feel like we’re ready for anything at this point.”