The Fall Of Troy: Fighting The Fight

Like so many other great bands, they threatened to derail before they could make their mark. Armed with a bold new album and a healthier outlook, THE FALL OF TROY have returned to thrill their fans and own their haters.

Story: Emily Zemler

Five minutes into the interview with Thomas Erak, and he’s already sick of answering questions. The guitar-toting frontman for the Fall Of Troy sighs audibly through his cell phone before vigorously responding to a query on the infamous incident that befell his band last April during their tour with the Number 12 Looks Like You, Blackout Pact and Heavy Heavy Low Low. It was nothing major: During the band’s set in Columbus, Ohio, last year, Erak walked offstage after proclaiming it was the last show they’d ever play together as a band.

“It was a lot of things that came to a head,” says Erak, driving from the band’s hometown of Mukilteo, Washington, to see hip-hop hellions Clipse play in Seattle. “We were on tour with a couple bands that were getting into a lot of trouble and getting us into a lot of trouble that we weren’t even involved with. We had been on tour for two years straight, with no more than 10 or 12 days home at a time. I was extremely unhappy with the situation, my band and being on tour. So I walked offstage and was like, ‘This is it.’ At the time, that was how I felt. I think it was more of a wake-up call than anything else.”

The night resulted in the band calling for an indefinite hiatus, with a post on their website stating, “We don’t want this band to end, but we don’t want it to continue on in the fashion it has been lately.” They canceled an arranged tour with He Is Legend, which sent fans scrambling to message boards in fear that TFOT-Erak, drummer Andrew Forsman and bassist Tim Ward-were breaking up for good. But less than a month later, the band were back on track, rejoining He Is Legend (a move which Erak now calls a “really awful idea”) and subsequently returning home to write and record the band’s raging new album, Manipulator, with far less drama than everyone seems to assume.

“I don’t think we have fights and blowouts all the time,” Erak adamantly says, dismissing stories that his band is fraught with tension and conflict. “I think that’s a misconception. You try to stay in a van with the same two guys for months on end and tell me that you’re always gonna have a jolly old time. That’s not how it goes. I’m a little unhappy with the fact that people are still fucking asking us about it. It’s like ‘Are you still a band? Are you still playing shows? Did you just record a record?’ There you fucking have it. It was an immature move on my part, I was pissed off and I said something I didn’t mean and it got taken so far that here we are, doing an AP interview talking about it when we should be talking about this band.”

The Fall Of Troy have come a long way over the past year, a fact that is not only reflected in Erak’s newfound maturity in handling difficult situations, but also on Manipulator, an album which levitates the group several levels above 2005’s Equal Vision debut, Doppelgänger. Written during what Erak cryptically calls a “dark time” for the band members, the album bounds with a new kind of musical confidence, achieving some kind of aural catharsis for whatever was going wrong in the band members’ lives. And it certainly didn’t hurt that Matt Bayles, the Seattle-based producer who has helmed the course for bands like Botch, Isis and Minus The Bear, was behind the board during the month-long recording process last December.

“This is probably the easiest and the most fun record to make,” says Forsman on his way to a hardware store to buy a trailer hitch for the band’s van. “We had a month, which is not too short and not too long. It’s just enough time to keep you from second-guessing yourself. Matt Bayles is one of my favorite producers and working with him, he’s even more amazing than you could possibly imagine. I thought the record went splendidly. There’s some obvious things on there that I’m sure people will say, ‘Oh, they’re trying to sell out and get the big hit.’ But actually, we like that music. I think there will be fans that will be surprised, but I don’t think they’re going to disown us because of it.”

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Click HERE for the official AP review of Manipulator.