Back in September, The Sword abruptly announced they were going on hiatus and cancelled their Australian tour. The band offered no real explanation as to why the hiatus was happening at the time. Guitarist Kyle Shutt immediately announced a Doom Side Of The Moon tour and a crowdfunding effort for his solo album and that was basically that.
Now in an interview with The Austin Chronicle, Shutt opens up about the hiatus. He says The Sword started branching out from their original doom sound because "all these Johnny-come-lately motherfuckers started doing half-assed versions of what we were doing 12 years ago and it became so watered down that we wanted to grow out of that and push the genre into different directions." He adds that smaller crowds and a bad music industry also had something to do with the hiatus.
“Personally, I’m really bummed about it. I’ve been in the band since I was 20 and I’m 35 now. It’s not the end… I don’t think. I hate to get into it, because it wasn’t 100 percent my choice, but it did seem like the best option if we were able to continue at some point in the future.
It’s no secret that the vocal minority on Facebook says, “I just want the first three albums!” For us, it’s just like, “Yall, if you expect the same thing over and over again, we are not your band! I don’t know if you’ve been listening the last 15 fuckin’ years!”
We started The Sword because there was no band like that. Then all these Johnny-come-lately motherfuckers started doing half-assed versions of what we were doing 12 years ago and it became so watered down that we wanted to grow out of that and push the genre into different directions. Especially with High Country, I wanted to do a dance pop song and I wanted to do some really mellow shit.
On that last tour, we were better than we’d ever been, but there were half as many people at the clubs. Most bands would kill to play to 200 people, but when you used to play to 500, it creates a weird energy.
With that and the music industry being even further down shit creek than when we started, it was the perfect storm for us to be like, “Fuck this shit, let’s just put it away for a while and come back to it when people wake the fuck up.”
His first sentence is pretty interesting too. Were there other band members that either wanted to soldier on or definitively call it quits?
