James caught up with Dale Butler from Malefice before their home town headline show in Reading to talk about thier current tour and plans for the future.

We last caught up with you on the Sylosis UK tour in September, what have you been up to since then?
Writing for a long time, the Sylosis tour was when we got our new guitarist Andy that was his first tour. Spent a long time writing with the new line up which is really refreshing with a new song writer, planning for the future really.

You’ve been touring with Rise to Remain, Heaven Shall Burn, Adept and Cytota, how have the shows been?
Surprisingly fucking awesome, it was a weird bill for us to go out on for us and Heaven Shall Burn, because we share the same demographic of fans, the older fans. Been really good to come out in front of a younger fan base that may not have seen us on other tours, we’ve been destroying crowds for ages with the older metalheads so we didn’t know how we were gunna do but we’ve done really well. Had the biggest pits full of kids killing themselves every night so we’re so pleased.

Have you made any plans then to follow up your latest album “Awaken the Tides”?
This year we’ll hit the studio at some point, not concrete as to when yet but it will be a full albums worth of material but we’ll do something different you may not get it all at once.

Hometown show tonight then what should we expect?
Past year or 2 we’re really struggled in reading. Who know it’s always been a tough crowd to get out of their fucking houses, when they show up its crazy but because we’re close to London and we do London shows a lot they all go to that as its more of an event for them. Tonight may surprise us but we’ve had some of our worst shows here alongside some of our best so it’s 50/50. It’s great to be here we’ve all seen our girlfriends for the first time in 2 weeks so it’s really nice, we’re just going to party tonight it’s the last night we’ve got 2 weeks off after this so we’ll go crazy.

You get a longer set tonight then due to Rise to Remain and Adept pulling out?
Yeah we’ve thrown a couple of other songs tonight, it’s been hard for us because some nights we’ve only had 20-25 minutes which is hard for us we’ve got 3 albums so people come up to us after every show saying why don’t you play this. We’re going out in September on a headline tour effectively mirroring this tour, that’s when we get out big set and we get to focus more on “Entities” because we never got chance to tour that because we weren’t very big but now the fans are back tracking to it and want to hear it, since we’ve been promoting “Awaken the Tides” we haven’t had chance.

What can you say is your best moment within this band?
There’s fucking many, it’s hard to pick one in particular. The standout for me was playing india, it was such an eye opening experience. I’d have never got to go there if I wasn’t in this band, I’ve given up so much for this band and its experiences like that, I’d never get anywhere else and am being rewarded with. Anterior are the prime example, we never knew them before the Sylosis tour but now their basist frank is one of my best friends and we stay over each other’s houses all the time

Alright then how about the worst?
Every day on tour being away from my family and loved ones. Our drummer has 2 kids, that’s really hard for him and hard for us to see, we don’t like taking their dad away for weeks on end but it’s what he wants to do and what we also want to do. The real sacrifice is not being there and that’s the worst part, nothing worse from being stuck in the middle of like Poland half way through a 4 week tour feeling homesick. You feel very small and realise how big the world is, if anything happened it’d take a good 15-16 hours to get home, it’s never always going to be great we won’t be doing it forever we’ll just enjoy it while we can.

If you could pick a dream line up to be a part of, what bands would be on it?
3 favourite bands man; Mastodon, Deftones and Meshuggah, I’d be so happy being able to watch that every night I don’t think I could possibly ever get bored of watching that every night.

Are you playing any of the festivals this summer?
We’ve been spoken to a lot but we haven’t confirmed anything yet. We may do we may not, we’re doing a lot more European festivals this year because there are that many festivals in Germany that you guys over here would never even know about and they are some of the best in the world, we’ll be doing that kind of run around Europe. We’ve done a major UK festival every year for the past 5 years so if we don’t get one for one year it’s no skin off our nose.

What are your plans for the rest of 2012?
We’ve started to demo for the new album now, in June we go out for a few days that will be announced next week it’s only 4 shows it’s gunna be sick, September we’ll be doing our headline run, European festivals and that’s pretty much our year summed up.

One last random question that we ask every band, if you could be an animal out of a zebra or Giraffe which one would you be and why?
Can you remember what I said last time?
Giraffe
Can you remember why?
You liked the way they fought with their necks whipping around.

Can’t really pick the same again. I’ll say zebra this time because I said giraffe last time and I like to give everything a fair chance.

Thanks for your time, is there a message for your fans reading the interview?
Just keep coming and hanging out it means the world to us.

Interview by James Webb