uni/vs hysteria
Mar
01
8.00am

UNI/VS // Five Minutes With Scott Willis


Brisbane’s UNI/VS are set to have a big 2019. In celebration of their last EP Smile, which dropped late last year, the heavy hitters will embark on their first national headlining tour.

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This March/April, the band will visit Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Rockhampton. Before they hit the road, we caught up with frontman Scott Willis.



Hysteria: Before we get started, are you able to confirm how your band name is pronounced?

Scott: It’s Universes!

Nice. Your tour’s coming up, how are you getting prepped for that?

We’ve been playing a few songs off the Smile EP at our last few shows, we’ll be playing all those songs live on the tour. Basically we’ve been practising as much as we can and promoting the tour as much as we can to get the word out there.

You’ve got some support slots on this tour with some pretty significant Australian bands like Confession. How are you feeling about all that?

Good! Hopefully those shows will be bigger than our own headlining shows, it’ll be an opportunity to play to a crowd that might not have heard of us yet and that’s always a good thing. We’ve played with bigger bands before; generally it’s a good time.

You’ve mentioned that this tour will focus on both the new EP and some old favourites. What are some of your older songs that always seem to get the crowd going?

We generally get a pretty good crowd reaction from the biggest single off our first EP, which is Deaths Door. We’ll be playing that and we’ll be playing Upside Down which we released as a standalone single. There might be a few other songs off the first EP that we play as well.

Did you put together this tour run yourself?

Yes, most of it. I guess we pieced a lot of it together, some of it we were just lucky with like the Confession show. We were looking for a show in Melbourne, and since we’ve never played there before a lot of the venues were a little sceptical about booking us to play as a headliner. We had the opportunity to play with Confession so we took it, we’ve known the Sienna Skies guys for a long time now and they got us over the line for Sydney.

I guess playing shows and seeing how people reacted to different sounds helped us shape this second record.
[ Scott Willis ]

Other than the scepticism you mentioned, did you run into any other challenges piecing the tour together yourself?

Look I’d be lying if I said it was easy, you’re dealing with a lot of people. Booking the venues is one thing but then you have got to book the supports. It’s very hard to try book a venue because they want to know what bands are playing but you can’t book those bands unless you have a confirmed venue. It’s a lot of back and forth; it’s just a lot of communication to get it right.

Just back to the Smile EP, how did you find working on that went? How did it compare to your first EP?

I feel like we found our sound a lot more. We had never played shows when we wrote the first EP, so I guess playing shows and seeing how people reacted to different sounds helped us shape this second record. We knew what direction we wanted to move in with our sound. We haven’t changed too much, but it is a more mature version of Deaths Door.

Putting together that EP must have been one of the highlights of 2018, but did you have any other real standout moments?

We played a few really cool shows; we got to play with Silverstein and Comeback Kid in Brisbane. We got to play with Stick to Your Guns and Being as an Ocean. We played two nights in Brisbane with Dream on, Dreamer. Apart from the actual EP, it was really cool to just play those shows.

Who’d be some dream bands for UNI/VS to tour with?

Ooo tough question. Personally. I’d want to go on tour with The Ghost Inside and Wage War.

What does 2019 hold for UNI/VS?

We’ve started writing again so I’d say there will be some new music this year. I’m not sure how much though, but it will likely be released towards the middle of the year. We’ve got some other shows in the work after the tour, and we’d like to go on another tour this year if we can do it.

Catch UNI/VS on tour with Above, Below:

Friday 15th March // Factory Floor // Sydney (18+) w/ Sienna Skies, Resist The Thought,  Above,Below, Watchtowers & Bloom
Saturday 16th March // Hamilton Hotel // Newcastle (18+) w/ Above,Below & Bloom
Friday 22nd March // Stay Gold // Melbourne* (18+) w/ Confession, Honest Crooks & Starve
Saturday 23rd March // Enigma Bar // Adelaide (18+) w/ Resist The Thought, Mauvais, Above,Below & Relapse
Friday 5th April // Crowbar // Brisbane (18+) w/ Crave Death, Above,Below, Isolation & Affinity Minus Perfection
Saturday 6th April // O’Dowds Hotel // Rockhampton (18+)  w/ Affinity Minus Perfection, Wildheart & Above,Below

*Above, Below not supporting

Tickets available here.





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