“We’ve been working on it for that long. We’d been writing it for quite a while before we’d even gone into the studio, and before the studio there was a lot of rehearsals to just get it as tight as possible. It came down to working out each second of the album, and it just became a very big, exhausting process.”
The band adopted an ambitious approach to writing and recording Hatred and Tolerance, which is evident in the way the record turned out. “Right from the start, a few years back, we just decided that we’d go big,” Shafro says. “The whole point was ambition, aim real high and just try to achieve it.”
The band’s ambitious practice is even more impressive when you consider Tragic Earthis an entirely DIY concern. “We’ve done everything ourselves,” Shafro says. “Self-managed, self-promoted, self-booked. Everyone’s got a role in the band. We approach it almost like a business.”
Tragic Earth prefer to go a little deeper with their subject matter than many traditional hard rock bands. In keeping with the tone of and meaning behind the album title, Shafro says there’s thematic continuity running through the lyrics and imagery.
“I find it hard to define what concepts are, but we tried to just work in that theme of ‘hatred and tolerance.’ It’s sort of been the theme of what we do as a band, trying to talk about topics that aren’t, ‘Are you ready to rock?’ and ‘let’s get drunk’ and all that sort of stuff. [We’re] more about, ‘Let’s try to talk about what’s really happening in all of society.’
“The album just sort of goes through that in a pretty honest kind of way. It’s got ups and downs, it’s got a bit of mood to it. It’s a nice little journey. Just listen to it a few times, over and over, and it’ll start making more and more sense. Dig deep into it.”
The band are heading off on a national tour to promote the album, taking in South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and some regional Victorian dates, before returning to Melbourne for a full blown album launch at The Brunswick Hotel. That show – on Friday July 1 – boasts a ripping lineup of local rock bands. “We’ve got Arcane Saints, Pegbucket and Warbirds, so that’s going to be a lot of fun.”
And then, in even more exciting news, Tragic Earth will head off to Southeast Asia for their very first international shows. Shafro says this marks the realisation of one of the band’s long-term goals.
“When you’re starting a band and you say, ‘We want to be serious about this’, we all just asked ourselves these questions back at the start: ‘How far are we willing to go?’ And of course being very aware of the financial and time costs. Part of that was that we have to get overseas, we just have to keep finding a way. So in January-February, Malaysia came up. It was a tough decision, but it was just like that whole idea of ‘We’ve got to keep moving forward’. So we just committed to it.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
