Aussie metalcore behemoths Alpha Wolf dropped their hotly anticipated third studio album Half Living Things today via Greyscale Records and SharpTone Records.
A cornucopia of heaving brutality brewed into sharply-honed moments of melodic brilliance, Half Living Things is a snapshot of everything fans know and love about Alpha Wolf on steroids. Whether unleashing gargantuan party-starters (Bring Back The Noise), neck-snapping breakdowns (Double-Edge Demise), raw, stomping hooks (Whenever You're Ready) or an internet-breaking feature (Sucks 2 Suck Feat. Ice-T), Alpha Wolf harness and heighten their trademark intensity on album three, crafting the self-produced Half Living Things entirely on their terms.
Also levelling up today's Alpha Wolf presence, the group unveiled a new video for Haunter; a straight-up heavy masterpiece that balances its hooky chorus with full-blown menace, lyrically and instrumentally.
In this exclusive feature, Alpha Wolf’s Scottie Simpson and Sabian Lynch take us on an informative and entertaining ‘track by track’ journey through Half Living Things, shedding light on its creation and artistic intentions.
Alpha Wolf - Half Living Things - Track By Track with Scottie Simpson and Sabian Lynch
- Bring Back The Noise
Scottie: This was a song Mitch [Fogarty] came to the table with. I think we’d just had a big meeting about the album and how we felt like we didn’t have an album intro yet. We were talking in our group chat, then Mitch came back four hours later and he had the album intro. I don't think it was the whole song, it was maybe half of it, and we were just like, “Yep, that's the total vibe. That's the intro!”. The lyrical content and the vibe of the song is a lot of fun. It's not anything overly serious at all, but I think a lot of people maybe got a bit angry about that since it was our lead single, seeing how corny the lyrics were. But I think it totally encapsulates us live, and the fun we want to have. And sometimes you don't have to take yourself too seriously!
- Double-Edge Demise
Sabian: Double-Edge Demise is the fastest song we have to date, and we are really feeling the crunch with that one as guitarists. It is almost excruciating, and I've let myself down as a guitarist trying to learn that song (laughs). But it's going to make me a better guitarist in the future. I absolutely love this song and I keep saying it's my favourite song on the album. I really wanted it as a single with motorbikes doing backflips everywhere in the video clip, but it didn’t hit the mark for everyone else. I think it's a mega hard-hitting song. It's catchy, it’s got a mad breakdown, mad riffs, and I think it's going to be a favourite for everyone.
Scottie: Maybe we could do backflips onstage with fire?
Sabian: Lochie [Keogh] is a hard “no” (laughs).
- Haunter
Scottie: I think this might be one of the most “Alpha Wolf” songs on the record. I also think this was the first song we started showing people once we had the whole record. We're like, “Yeah, listen, this is the song you want to hear”. It's hard-hitting and it's got that catchy hook in the chorus. There’s not really any crazy bells and whistles on this one, it's just straight up heavy and straight up Alpha Wolf. And Lochie sounds fucking dope doing crazy fills.
- Sucks 2 Suck (feat. Ice T)
Sabian: This song was so much fun to build in the studio when we were writing it. For those that don't know, we self produce. Scottie actually records all of our vocals in the studio where he’s sitting now, right behind him is a little vocal booth and we would just sit there for days on end. And during that time, Lochie had a lot of ideas for the vocal flow on this song - and we loved every second of it. All the verses sound sick. From that, we just built this really fun song. We decided to incorporate the cheerleader squad in there as well, which is actually our girlfriends doing the cheers in the studio.
Scottie: Also you and Lochie are in there (laughs).
Sabian: Me and Lochie had to demo it pretending to be cheerleaders. Writing that song was so much fun. And it almost wrote itself in a sense because of the vibe of the instrumental that Scottie had written. And then it came to the Ice-T part! We gave Ice-T an empty blanket of music, there were no guitars or drums. We just wanted some aggressive pep talk and he delivered exactly that. “This is Alpha Wolf, motherfucker” was all Ice-T. We showed him our lyrics for the song, but we didn’t write lyrics for that part at all. And as soon as soon as we heard it we were like, “It is perfect”.
- Whenever You're Ready
Scottie: I remember when Mitch came to the table with this. From the first demo we had, I knew it was something special. I think it was very early stages, but there was the repeating lead hook there early. I knew it was going to be a good song, but it was probably the hardest one on the album to finish, it went through so many iterations. Sab had a whole set of lyrics, Mitch had a whole set of lyrics, there was a chorus with no chorus melody. And this took the most work vocally to get finished. It was like puzzle pieces. We ended up getting the chorus and we had the start, and there was no second chorus in the first version of the song. Hearing it now, I'm super happy with how it turned out. It just took a lot of work, and especially for a band like us that doesn't do much melody stuff, getting a chorus that worked that didn't feel out of place or too out of our skills was a bit of work. But it’s probably, again, one of my favourites on the whole record.
- Pretty Boy
Sabian: This was another song that really fell into place in the studio when we were tracking vocals. Lochie had maybe half or three quarters of the song demoed himself. He brought it in and we wrote the rest of it together - and everything fell into place. It has this sexy type of vocal thing that he put in, and we just built off that to create another fun song. It all flowed really well. And this had John [Arnold] on clean vocals again, but in a different tone than we've ever done before. He nailed that. This song pieced together to be probably one of our favourite songs to date.
Scottie: I think I remember you demoing the chorus to that. I think I have a thing of that somewhere!
Sabian: Oh yeah, that sounds about right. I cannot sing, but I’ve got all these ideas, and I have to lay them down a lot of the time. And I think some lines have been buried in the final mixes!
- Mangekyō
Scottie: This is probably another stupid Alpha Wolf song in the way that it’s just so heavy. And again, it was a lot of fun. With this one, John actually came to the table riff-wise, which is very rare. He's not much of a riff man, but he was trying. Then this was sitting in a folder of maybe 20 demos, and one day Lochie sent us a video of him doing the entire verse in the car, just like a whole car demo. I think the song was maybe only a minute and a half long at that point. But as soon as he sent that, I was like, “All right, this is actually going to make the album. John, give me the files. Let me dig deep into this”. We went away to a little holiday house, just the five of us. And in the end, this was a song that was the most collaborative effort. It was probably half done at that point, and we just all sat around a computer throwing ideas at each other and we got the whole song finished. And it turned out to just be a total ass beater.
Sabian: Yeah, it was also definitely written under the influence of much alcohol as well. And us championing the shit out of the song by the end of it.
Scottie: Sitting in the bush with monitors blaring going, “Fuck, this is sick!!”.
Sabian: Scaring the possums!
- A Terrible Day For Rain
Sabian: This song was written with all of the tracks on A Quiet Place To Die, but it was so stupid at the time that we didn't think it was “us” at all. I think I personally fought for this song pretty hard because I’ve always enjoyed it. And by the time this album’s writing session came around, I kept digging it up out of the vault and saying, “We need to give this some love, see what we can make of it”. And by the time we sat around and placed vocals to it, structured it a bit better - it turned into probably the heaviest song that we've written.
Scottie: It’s definitely the lowest song we’ve ever written.
Sabian: Lowest song, and it’s still got Alpha Wolf hooks in it. It’s not meaty as such, in the sense that it's not just an onslaught. You can still bop along to it and sing along to it. But it came together really well. I'm glad we finally laid it down and gave it some love. And I feel like it could be a crowd favourite - if we can play guitars that low (laughs).
- Feign
Scottie: This is one Mitch came to the table with instrumentally. Overall, Mitch was writing a lot more guitar-wise on the album, which was fun. On the last album, we did a few sessions together, but obviously he lives in a different city, so he was doing a lot more writing by himself. He would just come to the table with a whole three or four minute song, which he'd never done before. And that was this song. I don't know if the instrumental of this is the least “Alpha Wolf” song, how would you put it?
Sabian: It was written from a different brain that we hadn’t used before.
Scottie: Yeah, which was a good thing. We needed a song like this. It's got that triplet-y feel, it's a bit groovy, and it has a massive fucking riff at the end, which is fun. And the chorus of this song is where Sab is hidden in the chorus. If anyone can spot it, he is buried deep in there somewhere!
Sabian: Also touching on Feign, we like to pay a lot of attention to the way songs hit the very first moment you hear them. So many demos of our songs have a sample-y intro that goes for 10 seconds into the riff. And more often than not, I think we delete that to hit exactly as soon as you hit play. With this song, we had a lot of trial and error until we came to how it starts now with Lochie doing the first syllable of his vocal into the song. And that geed us up so much more than it had previously without vocals there, and it just created what became an onslaught of a song.
- Garden Of Eyes
Sabian: Mitch wrote this one again, another Mitch demo. And I think he was very overexcited about his brand-new Whammy pedal. And, as we all are when we first get Whammies, you want to put them everywhere. And this song has it everywhere.
Scottie: I think that sound is such a staple of ours that we tend to try to not do it anymore. Out of all the songs, we heard this and were like, “This is the one Whammy song”, and everyone listening will be like, “Ohh, they still use the Whammy!”. So it's just everywhere in this song. I feel like out of all the songs, especially the lyrics in this one, with Lochie: you can visualise what he's saying with the words he's using. You can put yourself in a place with him. He’s really good with that, but I think with this song especially, the imagery he uses connects with the song really, really well.
Sabian: And we let Lochie get really loose on his vocal techniques for this one. We love Lochie’s mid range when you can understand what he's saying, but he's got so much more technique than that, and he’ll do that live all the time and showcase how heavy he actually is vocally. And this one catered for it, I feel. We let him go balls to the wall with vocal styles, and he really enjoyed it. He’s really happy with his delivery on this song, we're really happy with it. It's cool to hear it on a record finally.
- Half Living Things
Scottie: I don't know how we always land on the weirdest songs having the album title. I don't know if this is even the weirdest song, but it wasn't a staple song for everyone. I think it was nearly on the chopping block with other songs that didn't make the record. But the vibe of this song wasn't really covered in the rest of the songs, which is a big thing for us, making sure we have different styles going on. It’s a fun song with Lochie’s delivery of the vocals, and there are verses that are more upbeat. It’s got a really pacey chorus that I don’t know if we’ve got on many other songs. It ticked a lot of boxes than a lot of other songs.
Sabian: We like to have a lot of different vibes on our albums. We don't want to have 12 straight ass beaters. We always want to mix it up, give the listeners something unique to listen to, because it’s 40 minutes of heavy music. You don't want to just have an onslaught for that amount of time. I can't handle that. We had another song that didn't make the cut in a similar vein to Half Living Things, and ultimately we found the vibe of Half Living Things to be the better of the two. It's more attitude-y than the other one was. And once we laid down the vocals we were like: “It's a banger”.
- Ambivalence
Sabian: With this song there was…I don’t know how many iterations. There was a track that was meant to come before it, or after it, in the same key. Scottie, you tried to write this song backwards?
Scottie: Yeah, that didn’t work (laughs). It was originally a seven minute song. There were two parts, a front end and a back end. I literally tried to finish this song for maybe three years over different periods and I just couldn't get it to work. And I was so angry trying to finish this song.
Sabian: I loved every iteration of this song, and I really wanted it on the album. But I think because of the texture of the song, everyone was afraid to write to it. One night in our Airbnb up in the woods, I think I just had a brainwave moment and started placing vocals here, and placing vocals there. The next day I brought it to the table and everyone built from that into what it was. It was cool to just have a different vibe. It was originally written for the score on our documentary that I made about the COVID lockdowns and all tours getting cancelled. So it's this really sad piece that was written way back when, turned into what it is now. And it is a sad song. It's okay to have sad songs, it's okay to be sad.
Scottie: And John’s having a sing, it’s good!
Sabian: Yeah, and also getting the chance to have a lot of our vocalist friends on the track was a highlight as well. It’s so easy to invite friends into Scottie’s little studio and do gang vocals, but we figured we’d try and do something different and do an uncredited gang shout with heaps of our friends that we’ve made over the years.
Scottie: There’s been some speculation about who’s on it, and I think people are going to hear it and be instantly let down because it’s not what you think it is at all. It’s just a bunch of dudes fucking yelling. Everyone’s going to think it’s just crazy! But I think it’s dope. It turned out exactly how I wanted it to. It’s not like everyone gets their own verse or whatever, it’s just a big gang shout with all of our friends.
Sabian: Just a cool execution of a generic idea!
Half Living Things is out now.
About Alpha Wolf
Never ones to do anything by halves, Alpha Wolf have relentlessly sharpened their trademark intensity over the years, from releasing their critically acclaimed sophomore album A Quiet Place To Die amid the pandemic in 2020, snagging a #6 spot on the ARIA Charts and a nomination for Best Hard Rock or Heavy Metal Album at the ARIA Awards, to releasing a split EP, The Lost & The Longing, with Welsh rockers Holding Absence in 2022. And, as of 2024, the band now sit armed with the entirety of Half Living Things out in the world; a release guaranteed to catapult the Alpha Wolf legacy to even more dizzying heights.
Launching their own curated festival CVLTFEST in 2022, Alpha Wolf also continues to powerfully fly the flag for their incredible wares as well as the local heavy music scene and exciting international acts, with CVLTFEST returning earlier this year for its second edition to critical acclaim, headlined by Alpha Wolf themselves alongside friends Emmure, Crossfaith, Ocean Grove and many more.
Ticking off their biggest North American run to date with Motionless in White and tearing up multiple stages as part of the inaugural Knotfest Australia last year, Alpha Wolf kicked off 2024 touring nationally alongside The Amity Affliction, and are now set to embark next week on a massive North American headline run, supported by Emmure, UnityTX and Chamber, before heading to the UK to appear at Download Festival alongside Queens Of The Stone Age, Fall Out Boy, Avenged Sevenfold and more.
Alpha Wolf are also locked and loaded to whip Australia into a frenzy this August, headlining their Half Living Things Australian Tour alongside supports The Devil Wears Prada (USA), Invent Animate (USA) and thrown (SWE), with Melbourne's first show as well as Sydney and Newcastle entirely sold out, new dates in Melbourne and Sydney added, and venue upgrades in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane due to overwhelming demand.
And before they trek off to North America next week, Alpha Wolf will also be performing an extra-special hometown show this weekend to celebrate the release of Half Living Things, with the Half Living Things Live At Revs show taking place this Saturday 6 April at Revolver Bandroom in Prahran. Supported by SIGNV/S, this is strictly a walk-up-only event. The event is either $40 entry or $50 entry, with the latter including a clear with red and black splatter Half Living Things vinyl. Doors open at 6 pm for what is guaranteed to be a once-in-a-lifetime Alpha Wolf Aussie show.
Alpha Wolf knows how far they have come, but the road ahead keeps the band hungry.
Alpha Wolf - Half Living Things - Live At Revs
With Special Guests Signv/s
Saturday 6 April - Revolver Bandroom, Melbourne
Walk Ups Only, Doors At 6 pm
Alpha Wolf - Half Living Things Tour
With Special Guests
The Devil Wears Prada (USA), Invent Animate (USA) + Thrown (SWE)
Thursday 1 August - Metropolis, Fremantle 18+ Venue Upgrade
Friday 2 August - Chelsea Heights Hotel, Melbourne 18+ Added Show
Saturday 3 August - Forum, Melbourne 18+ Sold Out
Sunday 4 August - Hindley St Music Hall, Adelaide Lic Aa Venue Upgrade
Wednesday 7 August - Liberty Hall, Sydney Lic Aa Added Show
Thursday 8 August - Liberty Hall, Sydney Lic Aa Sold Out
Friday 9 August - King St Band Room, Newcastle 18+ Sold Out
Saturday 10 August - Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane 18+ Venue Upgrade
