Alexisonfire's Dallas Green: ‘It Feels Like We're Starting Over, In A Good Way'

The Canadian post-hardcore band’s singer and guitarist talks about the way forward after releasing their first new material in nearly a decade and prepping for a new City and Colour album.

- Anurag Tagat

When post-hardcore was (somehow) part of the mainstream music pie in the early 2000s, among the names being featured on the radio as well as receiving slots on MTV2 were Canadian band Alexisonfire. They became one of the big draws for fans of emo, melodic hardcore and metal when they featured multiple times on American tour series Warped Tour and arguably put Canadian post-hardcore on the map.

But after critically acclaimed albums like Crisis and Old Crows/ Young Cardinals, and their EP Dog’s Blood in 2010, there was an unease that set in and by 2012, a final departing EP called Death Letter was gifted by Alexisonfire to fans, featuring re-made, quietened versions of some of their best-known material. “The band and the fans, I think everybody needed to have a bit of closure on that period,” says vocalist and guitarist Dallas Green, who was also steadily building his solo identity with folk/acoustic and bluesy rock tunes as City and Colour. Guitarist and vocalist Wade MacNeil too had been taking on other projects, including fronting U.K. hardcore punk band Gallows.

Within three years of the end, however, Green was putting out feelers and Alexisonfire was back in the game, reuniting at bigger summer festivals in 2015. He says over the phone from Toronto, “We’d all been talking. We didn’t break up because we didn’t like each other, it’s just some other stuff that happened.” Slowly and steadily, they went beyond the nostalgia value and grew into the dependables. That idea is best seen (and heard) with

“Familiar Drugs,” their first new material since 2010 that came out in February. A video showing all the members raging at their best, was out last week.