Have some instrumental prog for your daily dosage of new bands.
Simple things first – where are you guys from?
Birmingham.
How did you meet?
Josh (drums) and Zaid (guitar) met through a bass player we both found on joinmyband.com. This project never quite gained traction until life-long friend of Josh moved back to the UK from Japan; Stuart (bass).
How long have you been playing as a band?
Josh and Stu have been playing music together on and off since they were in school, but the current iteration of the band has only been going since January 2017, with us starting gigging mid-2018.
Before you get sick of being asked… where does the band name come from?
We were struggling with names for ages before Stu joined and immediately chimed in with “Axiom”. We all found different reasons to fall in love with that name, whether it be the mathy/logical connotations, the root meaning of the word (“something worthy” for all you Latin buffs out there) or just that it sounded cool at the time.
What are your influences?
There’s so much good music and great artists out there that inspire us, so between the three of us the list would be far too massive! We have been compared to Alpha Male Tea Party, Toska and Plini.
Describe your music. What makes you unique?
We all have quite different musical influences and backgrounds, and as we write all the music together, the product is always something none of us would ever have written alone. We always fall back to calling ourselves instrumental prog rock/metal but it’s tricky to pick one genre of music we fit neatly in. Only way to find out is to listen.
Do you have any particular lyrical themes?
Ha. See above!
What’s your live show like? How many shows have you played?
With no vocalist or frontman we have to work really hard on making compelling music, and balancing giving a performance. Our live shows are pretty high energy and to the point. At time of writing we’ve played maybe 15 shows (and counting). Things got pretty intense three gigs in when we found ourselves opening for I The Mighty, and gig four being the mighty Toska.
What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen or done at a live show?
We’ve had a couple of things happen, but not to sure they are that “wild”. We were booked for the main stage at HRH Prog just five days before it started! We barely a handful of gigs under our belts – that was kind of wild!
What kit do you use / guitars do you play / etc.?
Stu (bass) and Zaid (guitar) both run Line 6 Helix LTs direct to front of house. These puppies have been a godsend!
Zaid plays Strandberg guitars (Prog, and Fusion models).
Stu plays Spector basses.
Josh uses a Mapex Saturn kit with Stagg cymbals.
What, if anything, are you plugging/promoting at the moment?
We are just about to drop our debut EP Metathesis. After such a whirlwind of great live shows, we really felt like it was time to take what we do live and commit some of it to recordings. So it’s actually captured “live in the studio”.
What are your plans for the rest of 2019 and into 2020?
We’re planning to drop the EP by the end of September and will be producing a video for one of tracks to release shortly after it. Ultimately we want to keep playing shows; preferably some of the more niche festivals in our genre as well as working towards an album.
If you were second on a three-band bill, which band would you love to be supporting and which band would you choose to open for you? A chance to plug someone you’ve toured with, or a mate’s band we’ve not heard of before!
Oh wow, this one is a toughy! Having opened for a couple of bands we really look up to already, I think we’d probably love to play before Alpha Male Tea Party. We’ve met a stupidly talented bunch of bands in the last few months, so ‘our opener’ would likely be a nuts three-piece called Brocken Spectre.
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