Alexisonfire release “Bleed It” on 19 March, an album they started with no songs written

Punk & Hardcore

Cover of “Bleed It” by Alexisonfire: a red and orange burst of light, like a jellyfish trailing filaments, against a black starry sky inside a red frame

Alexisonfire will release “Bleed It”, their sixth studio album and the second since they got back together in 2015, on 19 March 2027. It’s out on Dine Alone Records, with fourteen tracks, and the lead single is “Push The River”, with a video directed by Vanessa Heins.

The Ontario five-piece (George Pettit, Dallas Green, Wade MacNeil, Chris Steele and Jordan Hastings) went into Revolution Recording in Toronto without a single song written. They spent sixteen months in open-ended sessions there. Instead of bringing in riffs, Green brought what the press release calls “simple instrumental moods”, a drum loop or a melody-less electronic piece, and the band played along. They then carried on with producer Kevin Ratterman, who also drums in the Louisville post-rock band Elliott, at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas.

“We really liked the demos. But Kevin allowed the songs to bloom and become this new thing,” says Pettit. MacNeil sums it up: “We made the record we didn’t set out to make, which ended up being the best conceivable thing we could have done.”

Their previous album was “Otherness”, from 2022. To promote the new one, the band will tour the US as co-headliners with Poison the Well, with Touché Amoré supporting, from 25 March in Dallas to 27 April in Boston. The announcement includes no European dates.

Text by Marçal Bonastre