UNEARTH Vocalist Talks About Touring With SLAYER, DIMMU BORGIR And 'Aqua Teen' Movie

Dan Barkasi of HMAS.org recently conducted an interview with UNEARTH frontman Trevor Phipps. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

HMAS.org: How did the tour with SLAYER go?

Trevor Phipps: The SLAYER tour was amazing. It was an honor to be on it, for one. We had heard horror stories from bands that had opened for them. Where you would just hear the "Slayer" chants the whole time. Some "Get off the f*cking stage" chants. We didn't hear that at all! It was just an amazing tour for us, from start to finish. They're all real nice guys. It was cool just to drink Jager with Kerry (King). That was fun as hell. It was just a great experience for us, and we'd love to do it again one day.

HMAS.org: This tour with DIMMU BORGIR, KATAKLYSM, and DEVILDRIVER is a diverse lineup. How did this tour come along?

Trevor Phipps: DIMMU's booking agent approached us. They wanted to put together kind of an eclectic bill, and it was something that sparked our interest. These are the types of bands that we probably wouldn't normally be on tour with. We've done two festival tours with DEVILDRIVER before. So, that's a band that we'd probably tour with. To have DIMMU and KATAKLYSM — a black metal band and a death metal band — is totally different for us. It's time for us to get out there and try to branch out to different types of audiences. We're all real heavy bands. We're not played on mainstream radio. So the best way to get yourself heard is to play on different styles of tours. That's why this tour is such a good thing for all four bands.

HMAS.org: How big do you think it was for you guys to complete your first headlining tour of the U.K. and Europe?

Trevor Phipps: I think it was a huge thing for us. Before we've done all support tours there. We had great shows, but we didn't really know the fan's true worth. We went over there this time, and every show was consistently between 300 and 800 people every day. So it felt good to know that we could go over there and draw that many people in a different part of the world. So it was actually a really big thing for us, and we were very pleased with the turnouts.

HMAS.org: The song that you did for the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" movie, "The Chosen", was very cool. How did that come about, and did you guys write that exclusively for the movie?

Trevor Phipps: We did, in a way. They approached us, because the dudes who write for that show love metal. That's why both us and MASTODON are on it. The one dude actually plays guitar. He's a pretty good player. So they approached us, and we had had some riffs and ideas left over from the last record that we didn't put on the album because it is a different style of song. The whole last record is just a really dark, fast, heavy record. And this song is a bit more of a brighter tune — it's more of a hard rocking metal song. It really didn't fit the vibe of our record. So then when we got asked to do this soundtrack, we we're like, "Alright, lets re-visit that!" See if we can piece it together. Because the whole cartoon's fun, so we kind of pieced together this song. It just kind of happened all in one day. Everything just seemed to fit together, and it came out great I think. It's a different approach for us. It's a different thing for us, and we're not saying that's a direction we would take for every song, but it's cool just to get something like that off our chest and write something new. It's a different style.

Read the entire interview at www.hmas.org.