Interview: Joshua O’Donnell of Banks Arcade

The darkest chapter to date for Melbourne metal boy band Banks Arcade arrives in full today, with multifaceted chaos lying in wait on the brand new EP DEATH 2, officially out now via UNFD.

To find out more about the EP we had the chance to chat with the band’s frontman Joshua O’Donnell.

Spotlight Report: Death 2 comes out this Friday, and it’s been getting some good reviews so far. What do you think is the most important thing for your fans, old and new to know about Death 2?

JO: The most important thing about Death 2 is I guess just that we’re really leaning into the heavy side of the band on the EP and the whole point behind it was to not be as eclectic as some of our other stuff. And also just focusing on the heavier side of things. Obviously there’s still a bit of variance in the songs, but yeah, I think that fans should expect something that’s heavy, and if they’re the type of people that like those songs from our releases in the past, they’re going to really like this. I’d say it doesn’t have as much of the slower moments as we might usually have on our full length projects.

SR: I heard you had a listening party a couple of weeks ago. It sounded pretty great. How did that all go?

JO: It was awesome actually. It was kind of – for me at least – I was a bit stressed out by it because, you know, I wanted to do something special for the people that were kind of hard out fans of the band here in Melbourne, where we’ve seen a lot of growth. And I wanted to, you know, obviously promote it and have people come, but we didn’t want to make it this big thing. We wanted it to be somewhere in the middle and we had a few different things we were trying to execute, one of which was like a deconstructed listening session where we were playing individual stems from the songs and allowing people to hear things in a bit of a different way. And we had some exclusive merch there, which it was really well received. We sold out of all the merch that we had; people love the deconstructed things so much that I think that we will end up posting it at some point during the release campaigns so that people can kind see that and access it on online. But yeah, it was a great success and we had a very good time.

SR: Yeah, love that. You guys call yourself a ‘heavy metal boy band’ and I think that is probably one of the most accurate description of what you are doing. You have a pretty unique sound. Has that come out of a wide range of musical influences? (I’ve heard that Northlane and The Prodigy are two musical inspirations for the band).

JO: Yeah, I I think we all come from very different backgrounds. James, the drummer, studied jazz and listens to a lot of R&B and jazz and now heaps of electronic music. And we all obviously bonded over the bands like Northlane early on when we were growing up. That was something that we really enjoyed listening to, and I think that none of us really just listen to one style of music, and that comes out in the writing, like when I’m making music.

I might be listening to lots of hip hop or I even listen to country music and pop music and all sorts of stuff. And so what I’m listening to at the time will come out in my writing and I never wanted to be in a group in which I was limited by, you know, hearing something that I liked and wanting to draw inspiration from it. But then being like I’m just in a death core band or something like that, I can’t go outside of this box. And I think that this is like, you know, it’s not necessarily anything unique at the moment, a lot of people are doing this, a lot of bands have very eclectic sounds and I think it’s a good thing and it it’s a good place for artists to be able to explore and hopefully find some new sounds that people haven’t heard before.

SR: Yeah. Well, and that segues beautifully into [the] next question: Speaking of your unique sound, I think it is very much what the last few years seem to be all about. The 2020s seems to be less about putting labels on music and just enjoying it, rather than fitting things into very specific boxes. You kind of did touch on that, but is that something you agree with?

JO: Yeah, 100%. I mean, even you know, if you look at popular music, it’s taking that turn as well, where you hear a lot of things on massive pop artists’ albums where they are you, they’re like sampling sections of heavy songs, or even if it’s just visual art like we’ve all seen the massive trends of, you know, the blends of visual art that’s drawing inspiration from the heavy metal scene and text and things like that. I think that that the more that we can be in a place where artists aren’t in one specific box, the more they’re going to create new and interesting things.

SR: The next question again is kind of on that plane, but maybe we could take it back to the early days as well as looking now like is that kind of thing, like not looking at the labels and not kind of adhering to expectations, is that something that you set out to do like from the get-go or is it just something organically ingrained in Banks Arcade?

JO: I, well, if I think right back to the beginning, I don’t necessarily think I could say yes to that question because when I first started, I was very much just like oh, we’re gonna be a metal core band and you know that band was a completely different lineup.

It was me and four other guys really. And the goal was the same in a lot of ways in, in the sense of the journey that we’re on and how far we want to take the band, but I think creatively I at that time was just seen this as a as a metal core kind of project. But what I will say is during that period, I was like making a lot of hip hop and I had my own outlet where I was literally touring as a rapper and had a whole catalogue of music that was like out there and I was hanging out with a lot of people in the hip hop space.

So there was a point at which I stopped doing that and then when I stopped that, it blended with the Banks Arcade. So at that point I was kind of like now I can do everything. I don’t need to have a different project. So I can just funnel it all through this one thing.

“…The most important thing about Death 2 is I guess just that we’re really leaning into the heavy side of the band on the EP…”

SR: On that topic, you are still technically fairly young as a band. What has been your highlight so far?

JO: Highlights … it’s hard to answer this one, I think because you like a lot of different moments for different reasons.

Obviously playing big festivals and things like that is always fun, but I think I look back fondly on mainly the times that we’ve got to share as a group like myself and Harlan and James have grown so close through all of this and we have had to have a lot of tenacity in certain moments. So, you know, even though I could say playing Download festival or touring America, all of these things are like big highlights are very amazing, but I think that so that the things that really stand out to me are moments that we have been able to overcome, things that were really tough and we stuck it out. And that’s the stuff that is a highlight to me in this sense is that it gives me confidence in the future and it gives me confidence in this group to be able to have longevity and I think that that’s the most important thing that people can do, not even in music and … anything, ensuring that you’re working with the right people and that you have open communication and a positive way to interact in those relationships.

I think that that that’s one of the most important things. So I think some of those moments are the highlights for me.

SR: Yeah, well, it’s a future proofing alongside being able to do your creativity, which is amazing. And that brings us into [the] last question. What are you hoping to achieve in the next few years with the band and/or what’s next for Banks Arcade?

JO: I think at the moment we’ve really just started to focus a lot more on the music. Obviously, once you start touring, there’s a huge business side to all of this and trying to get money and grants and work out all the finances and logistics of everything. And we’ve been very caught up in doing that, staying on the road for this past period. And I think that going into this next stretch of touring we have really decided that, you know, we have to keep trying to innovate and create music that we love and that really is the goal, and I think whatever comes from that is not up to us. So I don’t try to put tangible goals in terms of like, “oh, I want to play this show” or “I want to do this thing”. I think it’s just a matter of us continuing to write music and continuing to follow the processes that we’ve followed up for now and enjoy playing it to people and hopefully that can, you know, make us a little bit of money at some point.

BANKS ARCADE