Just to quickly catch you up, if you aren't abreast to the drama between Arch Enemy vocalist Alissa White-Gluz and her former band The Agonist, here's what happened.
Before Gluz joined Arch Enemy, she made her name in The Agonist, which she helped co-found in 2004 (then known as Tempest). Gluz announced in March of 2014 that she was the new vocalist of Arch Enemy. That same day, The Agonist announced that they recruited Vicky Psarakis and that Alissa was no longer in the band, but wished Alissa the best in her future endeavors.
This caught Alissa off-guard, as she claimed she had begun writing lyrics to new music for The Agonist and was ready to record but then her "former bandmates decided to choose a different path." She eventually went on Jamey Jasta's podcast and went into depth about her side of the situation. The Agonist saw this statement and decided to release a novel of their own going through each of the steps in which they parted with Alissa.
The short version of it is that she was keeping the rest of the band in the dark, going as far as to not even tell them the name of the band she was auditioning for, and when they had to cancel a big tour, the band called their label (also Arch Enemy's label) and their A&R guy was in on it all along and told them that Alissa would be really busy and they may want to consider finding a new frontwoman.
Now that we're all caught up, The Agonist is gearing up to release its sixth studio album, Orphans, on September 20th via Rodeostar Records and Vicky Psarakis was interviewed by Rock Confidential to promote the album. When being asked what took so long for the album to be released, she revealed the band had a hard time finding a label:
"Basically, the main thing is that we didn't have a label at the time. And that is for reasons aside from the music. A lot of things happen that I personally don't deal with at all. I don't even wanna deal with it. I'm just here to write music and sing. Some people out there didn't want us to release this album and we just kept really, really pushing and pushing and we almost considered just releasing it on our own — which isn't a smart business decision. But we were, I think after six months, we were frustrated and sitting on this album that's so good and we couldn't do anything about it. And then finally, Napalm reached out to us and proposed to release it under a sub-label of theirs called Rodeostar. And as far as we're concerned, we're using all the same resources from Napalm — the same team of people, same social media outlets. So we were, like, 'Okay, let's do it.'"
When pressed on who the person she was referring to was, she revealed it was former vocalist Alissa White-Gluz:
I think it's okay if I were to speak openly about it. I'm not one to cause drama but I think for anyone that's out there and watching and kind of seeing what's going on, I think it's fairly obvious that the person that's been trying to hold us back is Alissa [White-Gluz, former vocalist]. In the beginning, she was doing it a lot through interviews and just talking very badly about the band members. That is super awkward for me, because this is a person I've never met in my life, so it's weird for me to be talking about it. There's no knowing how far and to what extent her reach could be to hold this band back. I definitely know some stuff that she's done and other things are just speculation. So, I don't wanna throw that out there, but I will say that she has been trying to kill this band ever since she was fired."
If working in metal media has taught me anything, it's that Alissa will be doing an interview sooner or later and this topic will be broached, and when it happens, we will report on it.
[via Blabbermouth]
