Protest The Hero
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Protest The Hero

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“I mean, life is change, isn’t it?” ponders Rody Walker, the band’s lead vocalist. “If you can’t adapt, it gets into all that Darwinian bullshit. We could have just packed it in – when Arif was leaving the band, it felt like the whole thing was falling apart. It felt like we were in That Thing You Do! or something. I dunno, I’m not good at anything else. I’m not that great at this, but at least I got a start at it. I didn’t really have any plans of packing up, and thankfully Luke [Hoskin] and Tim [Millar] feel the same way. I mean, we persevere. We have to. What else would we do – go back to school? No fucking thank you!”

Volition, released last October, has done incredibly well for a band of self-confessed outsiders. It marked Protest The Hero’s third top ten appearance in the Canadian album charts, while also landing their highest position to date on the Billboard 200 (at number 20). The band also did an entertaining music video for Underbite, in which a gang of finger puppets attends a rock show and one jilted fan discovers the truth about his favourite group. So, was it fun to make?

“Oh, it wasn’t,” says Walker with a heavy sigh. “Usually, when we do videos, the Canadian government is really good at wasting taxpayers’ money. They hand us a lot of money so we can hire all sorts of people to do all sorts of work. With this video, they didn’t give us a whole lot of money, so we had to do all the shit ourselves. We did all the puppeteering that you see in the video. I remember being crouched into this super-weird yoga position with four puppets on each hand, moving them about for the entire duration of the song. My back will never be the same! I hated it. I’m really happy with how the video turned out, but I just really hated making it!”

Protest The Hero, despite the intrinsic and often intense nature of their music, are the kind of band that enjoys frequent goofing off and having as much fun as possible. It’s a balance that Walker himself feels is important to strike – especially in the world of rock stardom and bands desperately attempting credibility.

“The music sounds so fucking serious – and, I guess it is, to some degree,” he says. “As people, though, we’re not serious at all. We act the fool quite a bit. I think it’s important to have that represented in our videos or our live shows. Just whenever we get a chance to flap our dicks around, really. So many bands think they’re so fucking cool, and they’ll get up and be like…” At this point, he puts on a big, gruff rockstar voice. “‘This is a rock show, everybody get up for the rock show!’ I mean, no-one is that cool! I hate to crack everyone’s crystal ball, but no-one in metal or punk or rock music is cool. We’re all fucking losers, just like everybody else!”

BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG