When British rockers Asking Alexandria put out their sixth album, Like a House on Fire, last May, it was in the early months of the pandemic. Grounded from touring while waiting out self-isolation like most everyone else, they dove back into the studio and created See What’s on the Inside.
Frenetic on the surface and contemplative beneath it, the 10-song project finds the group lyrically grappling with issues of personal identity and redefining its public persona. Musically, See What’s on the Inside combines aspects of ’80s arena rock, ’90s metal stomp and touches of 2000s rock. Fans of earlier albums like Reckless & Relentless and From Death to Destiny should enjoy the band’s highly energized latest set, where frontman Danny Worsnop unleashes many of his trademark screams and lead guitarist Ben Bruce lets rip in a few spots. The group even uses live strings on the new album’s “Alone Again” and “Find Myself.”
Bruce formed Asking Alexandria in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2006. In 2008, he relocated to his native United Kingdom and assembled the band’s current lineup (which includes bassist Sam Bettley, drummer James Cassells and guitarist Cameron Liddell) for its 2009 Sumerian Records debut, Stand Up and Scream. The group rose rapidly up the rock ranks by combining modern metalcore sounds with Euro-trance underpinnings and classic hard-rock influences, the latter becoming more prevalent over time.
But as it was riding high in popularity, Worsnop, having damaged his vocal cords with screaming and his body with substance abuse, left the band in January 2015 to pursue a solo project, We Are Harlot, that allowed him to explore new sounds and ease up on his voice. Asking Alexandria soldiered on with Russian singer Denis Stoff, reaching No. 9 on the Billboard 200 with 2016’s The Black, but in late 2016 reunited with a sober Worsnop and learned to better navigate their personal chemistry.
Asking Alexandria have done three albums with Worsnop since, including its latest. The group has scored three top 10 titles on the Billboard 200 albums chart, and its previous four singles are part of a top 10 Mainstream Rock chart streak that current single “Alone Again” may extend. (It’s at No. 16.)
See What’s on the Inside is the band’s first release on Better Noise Music, and the act and label are optimistic that this new union will extend the group’s international reach even further.
“As longtime fans of Asking Alexandria, we thought the band was a great match for our global marketing team,” Better Noise Music COO Steve Kline tells Billboard about the band’s signing. “While we knew that we could continue and build their success in the U.S., our excitement was furthered by the idea that we could grow their global footprint in the same ways we did with Papa Roach and Five Finger Death Punch … As a U.K. band, Asking Alexandria is uniquely poised to follow a similar path, and replicate that level of success.”
With two recent albums of material in the bag, the hard-rocking quintet has plenty of material to pick from for its forthcoming U.S. tour that commences Sept. 25 in Louisville, Ky. Just prior to their recent festival show at the Blue Ridge Rock Festival in Danville, Va., Bruce and Worsnop sat down with Billboard via Zoom to chat.
You already put out a new album last year. That was fast!
Ben Bruce: Hey, at the end of the day, we’re musicians. This is what we love to do. We weren’t allowed to go out and play music. So what were we going to do? Create more.
Danny Worsnop: We need time off, but we’re bad at time off.
Ironically, during the era of COVID-19 and self-isolation is when you guys decided to get together in a room to record an album for the first time in a decade. How did that actually work?
Bruce: It was literally just us.
Worsnop: Also, by me, the pressure was off. No one was really freaking out at that point. I’m in Florida, so nothing closed here at all. I just took 20 months off. Florida wasn’t even in quarantine. It was just like, “Hey, just so you guys know, you can’t go other places for a while.” By that point, that kind of stress was lifted. We were able to get in there, but it was all closed session. We just locked ourselves away, and that wasn’t even so much to do with everything going on more than we just wanted to envelop ourselves in the music and in this album and just surround ourselves with it.
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The album opens up with a song called “Alone Again,” and at first, I thought it was going to be the Dokken song. But it’s not.
Bruce: You know what’s insane? The first single off this album is “Alone Again.” It’s [the name of] a Dokken song. The first single off our self-titled [album] when Danny returned was “Into the Fire,” which is [also] a Dokken song. And Danny, you’re going to sit here and tell me you’re not Dokken’s biggest fan? I don’t believe you.
Worsnop [Laughs.] I didn’t even put two and two together.
At the end of the last song, “The Grey,” there is a guitar doing a Wall of Sound imitating strings, but it sounds like there are real strings in there.
Bruce: The end of “The Grey,” that’s like 84 guitar tracks layered on top of each other.
Brian May-style. And you used an EBow!
Bruce: It was like, “Do another one, do another one.” By the end of doing that, I had a dent that went from the tip of my finger basically through the back of my nail. I’d been pushing that string for so long, doing 84 takes of the same thing, my finger was destroyed. It’s way overkill to listen to it. It sounds cool, but no one’s ever going to know that effort and pain that went into capturing that moment on the record.
Worsnop: That’s a very Mutt Lange/Def Leppard thing to do.
What inspired the whistling on “Never Gonna Learn”?
Bruce: Because of COVID-19, there was a lot of initial writing ideas that were bringing sparks between me and the producer much like this by Zoom and FaceTime calls. We did most of the music [for the song] in a session, and we were like, “OK, I’m tired. I’m going to go to bed. We’ll reconvene tomorrow.” I got in bed, and I was listening to it over and over again. I just was like, “Man, all I want to do is whistle over this. I just want to whistle over it.” I made a mental note to see what Matt [Good], our producer, thinks tomorrow.
The next day comes around, and I go in for a virtual writing session. And I’m like, “How’s it going, man? Are you ready?” He was like, “I’ve actually been at the studio for two hours already.” I said, “Oh, sorry, am I late?” And he was like, “No, no, no, I just had an idea I had to get out. Now, you got to hear me out. I know it’s weird, but just give it a listen.” And he’d gone into the studio early and whistled over the song. We hadn’t talked about it. So it’s one of those things where it just had to be there. The song asked for it.
It’s like [Guns N’ Roses’] “Patience.” If “Patience” didn’t have that whistle, it wouldn’t be “Patience.” I like it. It is kind of corny, and it is kind of weird.
It has this schoolboy wistfulness, but the lyrics are like, “You dumbass.”
Worsnop: [Laughs.]
Bruce: Blissfully ignorant; that’s what the whistle is.
That’s a great way to put it. It seems like there’s are a lot of transitional stuff here — “If I Could Erase It,” “You Made It This Far,” “Find Myself.” Are there any actual life transitions that influenced the lyrics?
Worsnop: Yeah, I think having all this time by myself… Since I was 17, it has been this band. And everything we’ve done has been in front of cameras and fans. I never really had the chance to do all that finding yourself that people go through. You’re a kid, and you try a bunch of different things. Like, “Ah, that doesn’t feel right.” “This might be a part of me that I didn’t know about.” All that kind of soul searching and figuring yourself out.
Bruce: Like chains on a wallet, you know?
Worsnop: We were doing that on tour in front of people. So it wasn’t necessarily what felt good to us. It was what felt good to other people. I think a lot of times during the way, there were parts of our personalities that were more just kind of impressioned on [us] by other people. Having all this time off really gave me a chance to sit with myself and [do some] soul searching, maybe filter some things and be like, “That’s been a part of me for a long time, and I don’t really like it.” And ultimately meet myself, and all of us meet our respective selves, for better or worse. But it really gave us a chance to sit and figure out who we were. That was a lot of the content of this record.
When I interviewed Aerosmith’s Joe Perry 15 years ago, I asked him what advice he would give to younger musicians. He said to document as much as you can, because in the early days of Aerosmith, they didn’t have a lot of stuff on film. These days, it’s the opposite: Too much is documented. How do you find a balance so your lives aren’t turned into a three-ring circus? In the ’80s, the rock circus was private. Now it’s not.
Worsnop: It’s hard. And it’s complicated. And it’s confusing. Where do you draw the lines? And after this much time of being so right there in front of everyone, how do you draw the line? Ben managed to do this really well over the last 20 months. How do you initiate that separation? Personally, I’ve said this for years: if I could go back, I would be so fucking mysterious. But I can’t disappear now because people are used to me being there. They’ll think something’s wrong. [Laughs.]
Bruce Like Danny said, it’s hard to figure out where to draw that line. But it was drawn for me. You’re told you have to be on social media, you have to post twice a day. And if you’re not getting this many likes, you’re failing. That’s not just instilled in us as artists now — that [has] leaked into the general public. People think that they have to share everything now. But the line in the sand was drawn for me when someone on social media threatened the lives of my children. They said, “I’m going to come and kill your children.” I was like, “That line has just been drawn. And I’m out.”
What would you say is the most personal song on this album?
Worsnop: “Find Myself.”
Bruce: “Find Myself.” Yeah, that song almost opened the album, just the first words you hear. Danny says, “How do I kill myself?” It makes you go, “Whoa” — but then the following line comes back to what we’ve been discussing, all the parts that have been created to please. The bits that became you because you were told that that is who you have to be. And I just think that’s probably the most powerful line definitely of any Asking Alexandria song. But I’m going to throw it out there as being one of the best lines of any rock song I’ve heard. I love that.
Worsnop It’s back to, “How do you draw that line?” People have known part of me and us for so long. They think that’s the real thing, and we’ve lately figured out that it isn’t. And how do you shift that? Even when it comes to musical stylings or tastes, how do we communicate that to people where it’s like, “Hey, that isn’t me. We thought it was for a minute, but it isn’t.” How do you create that separation where people understand it? And they’re like, “OK, I get it, I respect it”? How do you kill that part of you?
It’s what you were saying with the technology, everything being far too documented now. How do you get rid of that bit? You can’t. That’s there now.