Interview: AVOID on 'Cult Mentality', Metalcore Tropes, and the Perfect Live Show
At the beginning of the month, I went to see an up-and-coming new metalcore act called AVOID at Café Colonial, an intimate venue tucked away in the heart of Sacramento. Prior to the show, I gave a listen to their 2018 album Alone, and I liked what I heard. By the end of that show, I was drenched in sweat, but I felt like I had witnessed not just something special, but something that everyone who loves this genre of music needed to see. AVOID put on one of the craziest shows I’ve seen in years, from any band, and I can only imagine what will happen as they begin to ascend in popularity.
With a new full length album on the way this November, titled Cult Mentality, AVOID are poised to become a dominant force in the heavy music community. I caught up with their vocalist Benny Scholl when the band had a day off in Las Vegas. Throughout our entire conversation, it’s so clear that Scholl is full of energy, bursting at the seams to talk about this genre, their music, and what’s to come, but he’s completely content with living in the moment and embracing these moments as they arrive. We discussed the making of Cult Mentality, metalcore tropes, and what goes into putting on such an intense live performance.
Note: Note: Portions of this interview have been edited and condensed, solely for the purposes of clarity and length.
To date, you’ve released one album, Alone, and one EP, The Burner, with your most recent being the upcoming “Whatever” single that’s set to be released on the 19th. Given that The Burner was released in the middle of the pandemic, is the plan currently to work solely on singles only, or do you have another album plan in the works?
Yeah! The record [Cult Mentality] will be out on November 4th. It’ll be a full length, and it’ll be right about when we’re doing another tour. It’s gonna be crazy. All of the singles that we’ve put out this year are part of this full-length record. Honestly, it was a really crazy process. After we finished up The Burner, we just started writing again, and we wrote so many fucking songs. I think we ended up cutting like 30 from the mix for this record. We wrote a lot of fucking songs, and we had to whittle it down to what the best ones were. So with “Whatever”, it came along with our buddy, Ethan. He had this riff, and we were like, “yo…that’s fucking sick.” Nick [Olson, guitarist], Chris [Echols, guitarist], and Paul [Jaton, drums] sat down and got that initial intro riff figured out, along with a very broad version of that song.
When we went down into the studio with our producer Hiram Hernandez, we took the bones of that song and shifted it around a little bit, and then we made it into what it is now. Then, I sat down and wrote the vocals to it and all that. It’s one of those songs that we felt punched you in the face and had a lot of energy. We wanted to make sure that it would come across in the best way that it could. Lyrically, it ended up being a song that took on all of the metalcore tropes. If you hear that intro at the beginning of the song, we have a robot voice sample that a lot of these bands have been doing lately, but we literally just had it say “robot voice”. So it was like an ”anti-metalcore” song, while also pulling out literally every metalcore trope in the book. It was poking fun. It’s supposed to be super lighthearted; obviously, you’ve heard our band, and we very much exist in that world. We’re not actually trying to hate on it. We just thought it was a fun way to poke fun at the stupid parts of trying to make it in this industry. If you see the video, we dressed up in early-2000s make-up for part of it. It’s super fun and dumb, and poking fun at hopefully everything that everyone loves about this scene.
The “robot voice” trope that everyone’s been doing reminds of the thing that all of these bands used to do where they made sure they had curse words all over their merch, as big as you could possibly have it. And then The Devil Wears Prada put out a shirt that just said “Curse Words”.
Yup! I remember that!
So you’re fully existing in that scene, but teasing and poking fun at it.
Exactly! I mean, if you can’t make fun of yourself, then what are you doing? I feel like…and I’m not even trying to rip on anyone specifically because I love so many bands in the scene, but I’ll admit that it’s been a tad stale over the last couple of years. I completely understand if we’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but we’re really proud of the sound that we’ve come up with for this record. We hope that it brings a refreshing take to what we’ve been hearing from the scene, you know?
That’s something that I noticed about both you and Dead Lakes (who were also on the tour you just wrapped up). You’re both on different ends of the spectrum as far as metalcore goes, but you both do things to blend the genre with other genres.
Yeah! If you wanna be a “genre-head”, you can get as specific as you want. But we call it “heavy”, we call it “rock”, we don’t really care what it is. I’d agree, especially being on the tour with Dead Lakes; we feel that there couldn’t have been a better band to come and do [that tour] with us. We grew up with Dead Lakes; those guys have been our friends for [over] seven years. But I think we definitely both exist in that world. Dead Lakes is a lighter band that can get heavy, while we’re like a heavier band that can get lighter. I think that’s cool because it’s not just two bands who sound exactly the same that are on tour with each other. You actually get a show out of the deal and get to see some different music, and hopefully it’s not just three hours of shitty breakdowns, you know? [laughs]
Let’s talk about your show. That Sacramento show, in particular, was really hot and humid. Where do you get the energy, and how have you guys built your stage show? Any band can go out there and put out big stage props and put on a big show. But when you can do that with a few lights on the stage and a couple of instruments and really make it shine, that’s when I think a band is really fucking special. How do you guys go about building your show, and how have you honed that skill over time?
Well we seriously appreciate that, man. Thank you so much. I’ll speak for myself personally. I just don’t think about the show until it’s happening. I’ll usually have a “worse” show if I spend all day thinking about it. When we’re not on tour, we’re thinking about the show literally 24/7, trying to perfect it and do whatever we can so that when we’re on tour it can be more mindless in that way. We all warm-up and have our own little pre-show things, but I’m trying to spend the least amount of time thinking about the fact that I’m going to be on a stage in front of people where there’s going to be a bunch of fuckin’ beady eyes looking at me. [laughs].
AVOID performing at Cafe Colonial in Sacramento, CA. Photo Credit: Jared Stossel/Shameless SF
Even when we’re in practice, I’ll slip up on things and think, “Oh I don’t know how this show’s gonna go.” And when we’re in the show environment, the second the fuckin’ set starts, it’s like a switch that flips. Everything turns off and you’re just going, and it’s crazy. And then as soon as the show ends, you’re suddenly back in reality. It’s almost like a trance, if you will. The second we’re going, there’s people in there, and you can’t fuck up at that point; you’re doing the show. Even if there are little mess ups and stuff like that, you can’t really think about it. You can’t be mad and think about things like, “Oh, he missed that guitar chord” or “Oh, I missed that lyric” or this or that. The crowd will pick up on that. I mean, we don’t play the perfect set by any means, but we have the energy to go crazy. I miss notes, I forget words…but none of that fuckin’ matters. We’re not trying to belittle each other for every mistake, it’s more like, “yo, we’re in the moment, whatever happens happens, and let’s make whatever happens crazy and memorable”.
Well that’s what makes a good show. I’ve seen bands play shows where every single note is absolutely perfect, but then the stage energy doesn’t make up for it.
Right! Look at a band like The Chariot, for example. The Chariot is one of my favorite bands that’s ever existed. And they’re all phenomenal musicians on their own, but you saw The Chariot live, it wasn’t about them playing every note perfectly, it was about them throwing their guitars at people and doing the craziest stage dives. It’s all about the energy.
Right. That’s very similar to watching letlive. and ’68. The record is the record; you can tweak that and re-record as much as you want, but when you’re live, there’s so much more to it.
For me, I never want to play the song the same way twice. If you wanna hear the record, you can go listen to the fuckin’ record. It exists, and you can hear the song actually how it is. But if you wanna come to the AVOID show, it’s gonna be a show! It’s gonna be a little different every night. We’ll have our “guide”, and we’ll write our setlist before we go onstage every night. It’s all about fun and fuckin’ chaos and energy.
That [setlist idea] is something that I actually took from Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews Band. I’ve gone to a Dave Matthews Band museum. You can see that in the 90s he would write the whole set for the whole band on a fucking napkin before the set, and then they go off of that. I’ve always thought that kind of energy is so much [cooler] than being completely attached to a grid and having to make sure it has to go the exact same way every single night. Because then you’re always bummed the second that it doesn’t go right. When you can weave that human element into the show, I think it creates such a better experience, not only for the band, but for the fans.
When I was a little kid, I was actually at a musician camp and the drummer from Heart was there. Super crazy, but something that always resonated with me was when he said, “I hate playing “Barracuda”. And I was like…”what?!”. And he was like, “yeah.” I could never imagine getting to that point, you know? But then you’ll hear Jacoby [Shaddix, lead vocalist of] Papa Roach saying that he’ll “never, ever, ever get tired of playing ‘Last Resort’. So it’s a give and take! But I think that if you leave that human element in, it not only makes the crowd more excited but it makes the band and us as musicians interested just as much. The crowd obviously doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but if you [as the band] also kinda don’t know what’s going to happen, that makes it so much more exciting.
I once heard the term “controlled chaos” and what you just said reminded me of that.
Yes! Controlled chaos. That’s my favorite term, baby. All the time.
Where are you heading on tour next? Where will people be able to witness what I just saw in Sacramento, but maybe in not as hot of a room? (laughs)
We picked the hottest week to tour there! We pulled this west coast tour out and saw all of our west coast friends. Coming up after this, we have shows that start at the end of the month on August 29th. We’re doing five shows with Bad Omens, two shows with Dayseeker, and a show with Silent Planet all out on the Midwest. We may have a couple of pop-up headliners, but I don’t know for sure yet; we’re still working all that out. Then I believe we have a festival in Colorado Springs, and we play on September 9th. That festival’s got crazy rappers like City Morgue and Trippie Red; that’s gonna be nuts. Then we get home from that and we hit hard in November and do the entire U.S.
AVOID’s new album, ‘Cult Mentality’, will be out on November 4th via Thriller Records. The band’s upcoming tour with The Plot In You, Silent Planet, and Cane Hill kicks off on November 2nd in Denver, CO, and will head to Northern California on November 5th with a date at Goldfield Roseville. You can click here to get tickets, and you can pre-order the album here.
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