TOXICON // Through Fire And Wind

It has been a long wait for the second album from Melbourne five piece Toxicon.

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Slowly coming together since the release of Purge in 2016, Be the Fire and Wish for the Wind was delayed by the COVID pandemic, with the band opting to hold off on putting it out for almost three years. Far from being idle, the band has used the time to build their presence online with a YouTube channel laden with content that includes playthroughs, clips and more. Drummer Tom Nunan explains why Toxicon has chosen a video platform over streaming as he talks about the process behind the album.

Be the Fire and Wish for the Wind is a long album. Was it always the plan to make it so long?

It’s 58 minutes, but it’s not like we’re trying to make ridiculously long albums – the first album is 55 minutes. But being the type of band we are – we’re not a hardcore band that’s going to pump out a bunch odd three minutes bangers chock full of breakdowns – and because we’ve all got heaps of prog inspiration that we draw from, a lot of the time we’ve got songs that average out around five minutes, and when you go for ten or eleven songs, they do tend to add up. It’s not intentional, but it just seems to happen! I don’t think it’s a horrible thing, though. The last couple of bands I’ve been into that have released albums have left me wanting more.

The danger with making an album this long is that people can skip ahead. You want to make sure the songs are good enough that people aren’t going to do that!

That’s sort of what we’re going for. Everything that’s on the album has been thought through three or four times, and rewritten to the point where we’ve killed off anything that we thought might have been a boring riff. It’s made the whole thing must-listenable.

There was plenty of time to do that too, because this album was planned quite a long time ago.

The last album was 2016, and we started writing immediately after releasing that. We had one really good song, which ended up being Circling, which was a stand-alone single. Then we wrote somewhere around the vicinity of forty songs. We’ve all watched band docos and we all thought, you know, this is how professional bands do it! So we wrote stacks of songs and then cut them all down to a few, but by the time we got in the studio to record the thing, it was mid-2019 and the pandemic was just about to start, so to this point it’s been nearly three years.

So you’ve waited almost three years to release it?

We’ve just been sitting on it. There’s been nothing to do. You can’t do shows, people weren’t exactly in the best financial situation so nobody’s going to be going out and buying records, so the entire situation was just essentially a no-go. We have friends in other bands that released albums during the pandemic that were really, really good. Guys that were on labels and had that kind of support, and even they weren’t getting as much attention as they should have been getting for releasing really great music. So we just decided to hold off on it for a couple of years because there wasn’t a lot going on. Our singer had a kid, and then he had a second kid, and we weren’t gigging that much, so we decided to build a presence on YouTube.

In terms of the release for it, we’re probably going at it – by today’s standards – very abnormally. We made the decision not to put it on Spotify or any of the streaming services, which is obviously a major source for people listening to music these days. After seeing a lot of our friends’ bands essentially get no return from releasing music that’s cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, we just decided to go this YouTube route.
[ Tom Nunan ]

That sounds like a major drama, to hold onto the recording for such a long time. Your original guitarist Paul Jones left in that time too – did that happen after the album was finished?

That was after the album was done. We had gone through and recorded everything that had to be recorded, and towards the end of that process… the way we wrote wasn’t great. It was all done via correspondence, throwing demos around on Google drive files and whatnot and we never really had heaps of time to get together and actually write stuff. By the time we were actually going in to the studio to record these songs, Paul didn’t know a bunch of them and there was a rush to learn a whole lot of stuff, and it was a major stress point for him. He was in the middle of changing jobs and the whole thing just caught up to him. He going through a really shit time and he couldn’t put the time into it anymore, which is a shame. Paul’s been my friend for over twenty years! I’ve known him since primary school. So it was a shame that he had to stop back.

What are the plans now that the album is finally out?

In terms of the release for it, we’re probably going at it – by today’s standards – very abnormally. We made the decision not to put it on Spotify or any of the streaming services, which is obviously a major source for people listening to music these days. After seeing a lot of our friends’ bands essentially get no return from releasing music that’s cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, we just decided to go this YouTube route. We’ve spent eighteen months trying to build this YouTube channel, doing all the videos to support the songs we’re releasing. We decided that was the route we were going to go. We’ve still got digital sales out there. You can buy it on Bandcamp if you want to, but the streaming option is gone in favour of YouTube. We’re part of the YouTube Partnership Program, so we get revenue through that and YouTube is arguably a bigger medium for sharing music because everyone has it. Streaming is spread over a lot of different platforms, and YouTube is a great way to discover new music. I’m in a lot of Facebook group where they share YouTube clips almost exclusively. The ad revenue is also a lot better than what we would make streaming!

This conversation might make it sound like it’s about the money, which it’s not. It’s not at all. But the hardest part of being a local band is that we need to be able to produce more music, and the reality is that music costs shitloads to produce. We would have poured enough for a house deposit into this album alone, when you add up recording costs, production of physical media, artwork, all that stuff. We would have spent upwards of twenty grand at this point. It seems insane! Especially to not have anything come back. We want to keep making this music. It’s not just a hobby. It’s very much something we would love to do as a career.

When it comes to getting music out there, it’s really whatever way you find that works best for you.

We’re lucky that we make music for a demographic between about 25 and 45, and we’re stuck between a bunch of people who want to use streaming and those who still collect CDs and go to shows every weekend, which might be framed as an old-school mindset, collecting physical media but those sorts of people are doing more for music than anyone else at this point. They’re still out there going to shows, buying merch, buying CDs. That helps more than sitting around pumping streams through your Spotify.

Do you feel like you’re starting to really get back on your feet now?

The process over the last eighteen months of creating the YouTube channel has really kept us busy. A lot of bands are putting their time and effort into live shows and building the fan base that way, but because of how we’ve been working over the pandemic, YouTube seemed the better way to do things for us. Having content there for everybody to see. If you can’t be at a show, we’ve got stuff on YouTube for you. We produced a really short live EP that we put up that showed what we do live very well, and that was fun, and all these other little bits and pieces we’re trying to put up is to try and replace the need to tour constantly. Touring takes a long time and costs a lot of money.

Are you seeing the results from this strategy?

Yes we are. That presence has kept us busy for almost two years, so moving forward with the album, it’s the same process. Our singer’s just moved to Queensland, so that makes things difficult logistically for touring, but the rest of us are still meeting up and putting together content, and trying to save the money from advertising to get people to see our stuff on YouTube. It’s all been two years in the making and that’s the process we’re going to go with now the album is out.