When The Dillinger Escape Plan announced that they would be retiring after their forthcoming album, Dissociation, and the touring cycle behind the album was done, people were pretty sad. Then again, what band that breaks up doesn’t come back again a few years later. In between nostalgia and the almighty dollar, bands like Faith No More and Refused have been lured back and wound up playing in front of much larger crowds than when they split. So sure, say you’re breaking up for a few years, then come back with a reunion tour to cash in after taking a several year hiatus. Right? Wrong. In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, signer Greg Puciato said this isn’t a hiatus.
“‘Extended hiatus’ would leave people to believe that we think that we’re coming back. We’re breaking up, we’re not going on an ‘extended hiatus.’ We just feel like… This is a really weird thing to say but we really do still love what we do. We don’t love it any less.
We don’t love making records any less. We don’t love being onstage any less. And that’s the hard part is that you’re making a choice to stop doing something you love which sounds insane to people. But really what it’s about is realizing that if you’re a painter you don’t just paint until you run out of paint. You don’t just paint until your arm falls off. You make a decision at some time that you made a final brushstroke.
Or when you make a movie you don’t just film until you run out of film or hard drive space, you make a decision artistically to say ‘even if I’m having the best time ever, this is the end.’ So in the last few years we started to reach what felt like a thematic conclusion to our band, you know particularly Ben and I where we realized that in our lives psychologically that we were reaching sort of a resolve.
And that we had used our relationship with one another and our artistic outlet together in Dillinger Escape Plan to kind of work through a lot of things as people and as a couple of people. We started to reach this resolve—a thematic resolve—and it started to show itself in our music and our lyrics.
And I think we both just started to realize like ‘hey, if we’re ever going to draw a line and say this is over, this seems like a good time.’ And we started talking about it and the fear aspect of it in a way, cause right away there was this gut feeling of ‘oh shit, my safety net is being taken away.’
Once you got over that fear I think we started to realize that this feels like a very empowering move to say hey, now you can look at the Dillinger Escape Plan as a body, an artistic body, not just on an album-to-album basis, but you can look at the whole band artistically and say this is what this was. And it had a beginning and it had an end and they did close the circle and it is this thing that you can look at as a whole.
You know I don’t like TV shows where they just go on and on and on until the ratings die. I like a movie where someone says hey this has an end and I made it and at the end I don’t want to do another one. I don’t want to see ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean 7‘ you know?
And I feel like once we started to wrap our brains around that we started to feel really comfortable about it. It feels correct, that’s all I can say about it.”
Dissociation will be released on October 14th on Party Smasher, Inc. and can be preordered here. You can see the band’s tour dates, which start just before the album is out, here.
[via Theprp]
