KING PARROT
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KING PARROT

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“There’s a massive tree in my yard,” says Young. “I heard this huge crash this morning – the tree has just fallen apart and crashed right through my shed that’s right next to it. So I’m dealing with that and with jetlag and all the bullshit that comes along with flying back from Europe. Still, I’d rather be doing these interviews than worrying about all of that!”

 

The extreme metal purveyors have toured relentlessly in support of their second album, 2015’s Dead Set, doing several rounds of the country and runs through North America and Europe. It’s the latter from which Young and co. have just returned home from, where they played a mix of festivals and club dates alongside veteran bands Obituary, Exodus and Prong.

 

“We had a blast,” says Young. “All of those bands have 30-plus years of experience, each with their own legacy. How lucky are we that we get to go around this beautiful continent and play with these legendary bands, getting opened up to a much wider audience? It’s been an incredible experience. Everyone treated us really well, and we got to visit some incredible places. We’d never played Romania, Croatia and Hungary before, so that was amazing for us.”

 

When queried on places still left to take on, Young has the land of the rising sun in mind. “We’ve still never done Japan,” he says. “We’ve done some great shows in South-East Asia, but it’s been a dream of ours to get over and play in Japan. South America would be really great, too. We’ve even seen a few heavy bands make it over to Russia, which is definitely something we’d be up for.”

 

Although the success of Dead Set has gone well beyond any of the band’s expectations – it scored an ARIA nomination and a run of sold-out shows in support of its release – it’s also now coming to the end of its cycle. A third album is almost a certainty for King Parrot in 2017, with material already well into development. “It’s coming along nicely,” says Young. “We’ve been demoing a bunch of the songs and working through a lot of ideas. We feel like we’re really getting somewhere with it. At the moment, we’re just fine-tuning it – over the summer months, we’re going to be rehearsing a bit more and hopefully have recording ready to go by about March. It’s exciting for me – as much as I love touring and playing live, I really love getting creative and working on new material to show everyone. Hopefully, it’ll translate live as well as the last two records have.”

 

The band will take a brief moment to rest up and spend time with their respective families over Christmas, and then it’s straight back onto the road for some of their biggest Australian shows to date. King Parrot will be headlining the aforementioned Thrash, Blast and Grind festival; which begins in Brisbane before making its way through to Sydney all the way down to Adelaide. Joining them will be American thrashers Revocation, fellow Melbournites Whoretopsy and Sydney shredders Black Rheno. That’s on top of Tasmania’s finest metal export, Psycroptic, who were partially responsible for the whole shebang coming together in the first place.

 

“Myself and Dave from Psycroptic are good buddies,” explains Young. “We recently played some shows with them over in North America, and we had such a good time. We did a tour with them back in 2013, so we felt it was the right time to get something going again. It was partly inspired by the downturn of festivals like Soundwave and the false start of Legion, but we also wanted to create something that would be fun for all of us and would be manageable on our end. With this line-up, we wanted to drag in all the elements of extreme music at the moment – grindcore, technical death, sludge, all that sort of thing. We’ll also have a local band opening in every city, too, which we think will be really cool. I think we’re doing this for the right reasons – if this goes well, we might even see to doing it in a regular basis.”

 

Young is feeling very positive about the potential impact something like Thrash, Blast and Grind could have on the metal community. He hopes that it provides a positive step forward, and that other similar events will follow suit. “We know that it’s not going to fill the void left by something like Soundwave,” he says. “As a collection of pretty extreme bands, it might not even appeal to to a lot of the kind of people that went to festivals like that. Hopefully, though, it caters to those that are interested in that sort of style of music. We’re trying to get something cool off the ground, so at this stage we’re just going to see how this first one goes. It’s anyone’s guess where it will go after that, but we think we’ve gotten something pretty unique on our hands.”

 

King Parrot are touring nationally in February as part of Thrash, Blast and Grind. Their latest album Dead Set is out now via Agonia Records.

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