Naming your latest trek the “Bad Luck” tour, as Michigan metalcore veterans We Came as Romans have done this year, is a bold gamble — and one that invites a head-shaking, told-you-so kind of self-flagellation each time something goes sideways on the road.
The way founding vocalist Dave Stephens frames it during his Zoom call with Revolver, though, the initial leg of U.S. summer dates has been full of good fortune thus far — or at least mostly.
The quintet have been on point whilst playing a mix of classic tracks and heavy new tunes from their just-released All Is Beautiful…Because We’re Doomed. The crowds have been popping off, too — this including a night in Atlanta, Georgia, where Stephens’ adolescent nieces and nephews started rocking out onstage with the band. In other words, the shows have been super sick.
But funnily enough, when Stephens catches up with Revolver ahead of a concert at Portland, Oregon’s Roseland Theater, the frontman has been pounding green juice and coffee all morning to cope with the head cold that’s ripped through the ranks of the WCAR camp the past few days. “It’s not ideal, but we’re fighting through it,” he says with a genial laugh.
While Stephens isn’t too pressed over the temporary illness, he does confess that it was a struggle to put together All Is Beautiful…Because We’re Doomed. The band’s seventh album follows 2022’s Darkbloom, a project that reckoned with the tragic accidental overdose death of vocalist-keyboardist Kyle Pavone in 2018. The emotional fallout that surrounded the Darkbloom sessions inspired the band to quickly write a deep, personal and both sonically and thematically heavy release. It was as cathartic as it was speaker-crushing.
When it came time to start working on a follow-up, the band felt a little lost on a narrative level. Stephens admits that the group — which also features guitarists Joshua Moore and Lou Cotton, bassist Andy Glass and drummer David Puckett — were all in a very good personal headspace at the time. That might’ve been the problem.
“Darkbloom was easy to write, because we were coming off this crazy traumatic event with Kyle passing. From a creative standpoint, the ideas were just flowing. It was emotionally difficult, but creatively it was really easy,” he says. “It was really hard for us to figure out what we were going to write about [for All Is Beautiful] — We were writing for almost two years.”
Jake Mulka
With their 20th anniversary as a band looming in the future, We Came as Romans ended up crafting a song cycle partially based on their journey together — and exploring the drama, grief and gratitude they’ve experienced along the way.
The melancholic, yet anthemic heft of “Bad Luck” reflects the many challenges they’ve faced over the years, but also their ability to find moments of peace amid all the chaos. The body-slamming “Red Smoke” is about a power struggle that plagued the band behind the scenes, but was also inspired by the sight of festival crowds they’ve played to across Europe. The bittersweet bounce of “Circling a Dying Sun” finds the act shining bright in the studio, while simultaneously contemplating the eventual death of the project that’s kept them in orbit since they were teenagers.
With the band now inviting fans to embrace their Doom, Stephens weighs in on backstage rituals, bad luck and accepting the end of his long-running band — thankfully for fans, without pinpointing an exact expiration date.
You’re on your “Bad Luck” tour, which is obviously named after the recent single, but it’s also a curiously, perhaps even ominously titled trip. What led you all towards this idea of embracing bad luck, and had any of you been superstitious about that angle?
DAVE STEPHENS I’m not going to lie, Louis, our guitarist, was a little superstitious about it. But in my mind, every tour there’s something crazy, or there are several battles that make us feel like we’re cursed. Regardless of the name of the tour, I think it would have happened anyways. But every hiccup we’ve had this tour, we figured it out and kept going.
And that’s what that song is about: Staying resilient through those times. I think that’s what’s made us so strong as a band.
Lou posted that he’s had to take some time off from the band this tour…
He’s coming back in just a few days. But his wife’s at the part of her pregnancy where it’s really difficult on her, and he wants to be there to support her. Also, if his baby comes early, he doesn’t want to be all the way out on the West Coast.
He and his wife are about to welcome the arrival of their child, to their great fortune. So, what are some of the struggles that you folks have faced on the road this time?
There was an issue with our lighting design. We had a show where the elevator specs didn’t work with our lighting setup, so our lights wouldn’t fit in the elevator — we couldn’t use our lights in New York. We had to strip down to about 15 percent of the [usual] package.
But then our techs were like, “Screw the design, we’re gonna modify this.” So, they brought out metal saws and cut and custom-modded [the rigs] so they’ll fit in every elevator now. Now we’re cooking, but that was a big issue.
That’s kind of like your “Stonehenge” moment.
Yeah, honestly. I was super bummed out in New York. One of the guys from Fit for a King came out, and as I was talking to him, I was like, “This just sucks, man.” I was in a pretty bad headspace for a minute, but he was like, “Dude, it doesn’t matter. It’s a bummer for you, because you know what it could have been, but everyone that’s gonna be here tonight doesn’t [know that]. They just came to see a show, so give them a show!”
That was great advice, and that was my mindset through the rest of the day. We all just pushed ourselves a little harder onstage, and tried to have fun with it.
Somewhat on that point, a recent post of yours shouted out the way that Andy’s pre-show shenanigans really gas you up before you get onstage. What does that entail exactly? Is he a prankster? A goofball?
All of the above. We have this whole ritual we do — it starts an hour before the set. Everyone in our camp gets together and we stand around a bottle of whiskey. We clank on it with our rings and we start yelling “whiskey time” — then there’s some barking, there’s a song that follows.
The people that drink take a shot, and the people that don’t drink take a shot of soda or juice. From that moment on, it’s loud music in the dressing room. The energy’s up — Andy usually plays some stupid song, and he does some stupid dance, and then we all try to learn the dance, too.
That sounds like a nice kind of band-bonding backstage ritual. You also had a family-bonding moment onstage in Atlanta — you were singing with your young nephew, who’d crowdsurfed to the front of the stage.
You’re right, “whiskey time” is definitely a bonding moment for the band and crew, and it’s become a ritual. And we’ve noticed when we didn’t do it, something terrible would happen during the show. Like, one show our PA didn’t work. Another show, the soundboard blew up. Another show, we had a technician quit before the show. Insane things happen when we don’t do it, speaking of “Bad Luck.”
But Atlanta was probably one of my favorite shows, because all my in-laws were there, and they brought out their kids. My parents actually traveled down from Detroit to be there, as well.
I was kind of gassing them up before the set. I was like, “You guys gotta crowd surf,” [but] they were nervous about it. Then I talked to my buddy DJ, who lives down there — huge dude, like 6’3” — and he’s like, “I got you, Dave.” A few songs in, he just put each [kid] on his shoulders, plowed through the crowd, and basically passed them off to me. I brought them up on stage and got them to dance with them, and they were jumping around and having a good time. Core memories for those kids, you know? They came up for “Cold Like War.”
My nephew’s such an outgoing kid. Super talkative. Not shy at all. But the second he turned around and saw the crowd — and you can see this in the video — he kind of froze. But then I got him dancing a bit, and it got him comfortable. It was funny.
Do you remember your first crowd-surfing experience or stage dive?
I was in high school. I went to Warped Tour and watched Story of the Year. I got beat up pretty good [in the pit], and I realized the only way out was through, so I had to jump up and crowd surf out of there.
Since you mentioned “whiskey time” earlier, the band had a “Bad Luck” listening party at the Bad Luck Bar in Detroit a while back, which had We Came as Romans-themed cocktails on the menu. What were you serving?
David, Andy and I are really into bourbon, and we’re really nerdy about it. And we’re pretty into mixology, as well. We got to meet up with Yani, the owner of Bad Luck Bar, and spend an afternoon helping him curate these drinks, and just tell him our vision for each cocktail — they were named after different songs on the record — and what colors we were seeing, what the songs made us feel.
Was the “Red Smoke” cocktail made with a Campari-type bitter and some liquid smoke?
That’s where I thought he was gonna go, but “Red Smoke” was a mezcal-based Old Fashioned, basically. And then they smoked it before serving it. “Lake of Fire” was more like you’re talking about — it was like an elevated Negroni.
“Red Smoke” is a song you’ve said was partially inspired by looking out at massive festival crowds, but there’s a medieval battle component to it. How do those two elements connect for you?
We wrote that song because there was a time in the band about 10 years ago where we just weren’t getting along very well. Usually it’s a close-knit, family-type vibe backstage, but there was a lot of underlying issues going on there. We were at each other’s throats for an entire [album] cycle.
I think some of that stemmed off of us being dissatisfied with [2015’s] self-titled release. Then we went out on the road and just started taking it out on each other. We referred to [it as] red smoke, because it was almost like there was so much smoke in [our] way — and so much noise and clutter — [that] we couldn’t figure out what the actual problem was. And instead of coming together and fighting our enemy, we were just fighting each other. That’s where the inspiration came from for that one.
Can we get into the meaning of All Is Beautiful…Because We’re Doomed. There are these conflicting ideas in there — feelings of gratitude despite being faced with great struggle…
The inspiration for that title came from Homer, who wrote the Odyssey and the Iliad. There’s a quote where he says the gods are jealous of mortals, because we realize that our lives are finite and that there’s eventually going to be an endpoint for all of us. Because of that, we appreciate things like a sunset, or the ocean, or going for a nice walk through the woods. Simple things that the gods can’t even appreciate. So, there is this beauty in realizing and accepting your own fate.
The whole record’s about the life of the band, all these experiences we’ve been through together, and eventually, the death of the band. “circling a dying sun” is about us watching the band die one day, and how that’ll make us all feel.
Steve Thrasher
Was thinking about the end of We Came As Romans — whenever that may be — a Zen experience, or did writing about it stress you out?
It was stressful writing that song, and emotionally draining. I mean, I started this band 20 years ago. I’ve been in the band longer than I haven’t been. It’s been my entire life. So, the thought of it one day not existing…it’s scary.
I know we’ll all be OK, but it’s just weird to think about what life will look like without [We Came as Romans]. But I think in accepting that there’s an expiration date — two, five, 10, 20 years from now, I’m not sure — [it makes us] appreciate life, because we realize our mortality. It makes it more beautiful, you know?
All of us have grasped that concept and applied it to anything the band’s doing — that any tour could be your last, or any songwriting session could be your last. We’ve grown to appreciate the small things, and laugh off the things that happen in a negative way.
What kinds of things are you appreciating more these days?
We’re hanging out together more often, and on days off we’re trying to find fun stuff to do. I’ve been under the weather, but a lot of the guys took a boat to this cool island in Oregon. Or it’s [about] spending time with the opening bands, because you never know when their time could expire, too.
I feel an elevated sense of camaraderie.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.