Northlane had a busy 2022 celebrating their sixth album Obsidian, and the good times carried over into 2023.
The Australian djent crew nabbed a special trophy in their home country, toured with everyone from Sleep Token to Parkway Drive, dropped their new single "Dante" and got even more new music prepped for 2024.
Before 2023 comes to a close, we chatted with Northlane frontman Marcus Bridge about the last 12 months of music, movies, live shows and more.
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER NORTHLANE'S BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT OF 2023?
For [our 2022 album] Obsidian, we got a couple of awards back home. We got an AIR Award, which is like the independent music [Grammys] in Australia.
We [also] started working on some new music this year, too. People always say it, but I feel like it's some of the best music we've ever written. So for me, I feel like the further we push forward in our career, the music is the achievement. That we're still able to make what we do.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE ALBUM OF 2023?
I feel like I'm always pretty late to music, I listen to it the following year. But I guess This Is Why by Paramore, that album has been a big one for me this year. Paramore's one of my favorite bands, anytime they release music it's usually my No. 1 of the year.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE CONCERT YOU'VE SEEN THIS YEAR?
We played the first show of the Motionless in White tour in Scranton, which is their hometown show. Their stage show is one of the most insane things I've ever seen. They threw, like, literally every kind of stage performance trick at this show.
So it was pretty surreal seeing all of that. They had the Cherry Bombs dancing and they did the thing where [they had] ankle grinders against metal, sparking out. Chris [Motionless] had a Captain America: Winter Soldier arm as part of his stage getup.
The stage setup itself is just really unique. It wasn't just guitar left, guitar right, drummer in the back, vocalist in the front. It was kind of set out this really cool way. And every song just had this spectacle to it. It either had a movie theme, like some of the Matrix theme production. It's literally too much to explain, it was so much.
WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE NEW BAND YOU DISCOVERED THIS YEAR?
There's a band called Post Profit that I thought was really cool. They kind of give me a lot of different, kind of Nineties/early 2000s nostalgia vibes. It reminds me of Deftones mixed with Incubus mixed with like Glassjaw sometimes as well.
I feel like they've only just started popping off this year and they're really sick.
WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE AND TV SHOW OF THE YEAR?
I really liked the Barbie movie. I really liked Oppenheimer as well, but I think I preferred the Barbie movie. It was just a lot of fun, a really enjoyable movie.
TV-wise, I really loved The Bear. I'm sure everybody loves The Bear, but that show for me was just such a game-changer. The emotional impact of some of the scenes in that show is so real and tense. I never really seen anything like that.
WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED FOR IN 2024?
We'll be starting to put out some new music pretty soon. So next year will be pretty packed with a lot of touring and a lot of new stuff, which is exciting.
I feel like with the pandemic we didn't get to take full advantage of touring our last album Obsidian, so I feel like this new release will be the first step in ... it's all straight-ahead. It's not, Oh, what's happening? Are we going to be able to play shows overseas?
It's all going to be straight-ahead, let's go. So I'm just excited to play these new songs with a new energy, I guess.
