After December's release of the collection of singles, III, which signified the departure of their vocalist Jason, the Inside the Muzic crew were invited to chat with Will, Jared, and new vocalist Rhys about everything Primacy.

Check out the video below:

Alex (Interviewer): Alrighty. Welcome to this interview from Inside The Music. Today we've got Primacy. Why don't you guys tell us your names and your roles in the group?

Jared (Guitarist): I am Jared. I play the rhythm guitar and I am also the engineer for the bands' recordings.

Will (Drummer): My name is Will, I'm the drummer

Rhys (Vocalist): Hi, my name's Rhys. I'm the lead singer and I just recently joined primacy.

Alex: You guys are in the groove metal genre?

Rhys: Yeah, We're a combination of everyone's different styles, so I think we've ended up being in a pocket that could be defined as that, but we try to fluctuate out of that and not be quite so obvious.

Alex: What would be the big musical influences that shape your music?

Jared: What's it? That's a difficult one because it's completely different for everybody in the band. Personally, I'm a big fan of alternative metal. Deftones is a big one for me. I also listen to a lot of different genres though, so quite a bit of hip-hop and ambient music as well. So maybe not the hip-hop, but most of it makes its way into the music.

Will: I listened to a wide variety of music. My father introduced me to a wide variety of music when I was a child, but I tend to listen to a lot of extreme music, but also hip-hop, and from time to time I try to listen to new music as well. When somebody releases something locally, I try to get it and listen to it and expand my horizons, stay current, rather than getting stuck listening to Judas Priest, which is what I tend to do.

Rhys: Yeah. Lots of different styles of music, but I think vocally, Bring Me The Horizon and newer nu-metals styles like that are big influences on me and even older groups like Linkin Park. It got me to love metal and it's just grown from there. I'm looking forward to putting some of my influence on the new music that comes from the band. Basically just been trying to take over where it was left off with Jason previously.

Will: He's been pretty busy recently because he's got to learn all the old tracks that had lyrics written for them. We've got eight tracks waiting, that are already tracked to add vocals to those. So he's got quite a bit of work on his plate at the moment. 

Alex: These tracks that you've done already, were they written with Jason (ex-vocalist) in mind?

Jared: When Primacy writes stuff, I would start with the guitars and the drums. I'd create a rhythm track, program some drums using Superior Drummer, and then distribute that to the band to add their bits. Vocals are generally last anyway. We had sent a couple to him but he hasn't really broached them to any significant degree. The tracks are raw, and Rhys has the opportunity just to write what he feels. I'm kind of interested to hear what he's going to come up with because we up to this point, the lyrics had been Jason's ideas. Interested to see where Rhys' lyrics come from and what happens to the music once he starts to guide the music that way. We are all kind of curious.

Alex: How did you find Rhys?

Jared: I've known him since Intermediate school, at least at least 15 years. He's been living in Canada for the past ten or so years and when the opportunity for the new vocalist for Primacy came up, it was like, "Oh, Rhys is here. He can sing really well." He was still in Canada which was a small hill, but we figured it out.

Rhys: It seemed like a great opportunity, I've considered New Zealand my home since I moved to Canada 10 years ago and I've always known that I was going to come back at some point and everything just sort of fell into place. I got the opportunity and I thought I'd take the chance to come over and that's how it happened. A song was sent over and I tracked some vocals on it, and everyone was happy so I just made the move.

Will: We were only able to audition him by sending him an instrumental of a previous song with the lyrics that were sung, and he did a test demo of that, and it was really good. We were really impressed. He has the potential to do very well from here on in.

Alex: How long have you been doing vocals for?

Rhys: Quite a while, even Jared and I, back in the day, had a little band going.

Jared: Making recordings that you're never ever going to hear. 

Rhys: It's probably Jared that got me into this love of music at the end of the day, and what started my interest in vocals. I started off playing the guitar, but I found myself a lacking on the amount of practice I was doing and I slowly moved into singing more than playing the guitar. I've never stopped singing since. I just love it.

Alex: You guys released an EP in December, which was the last one with Jason?

Will: They were the three remaining tracks. They were originally going to be tacked on to a bunch of other songs that we were yet to complete, which has now fallen into Rhys' jurisdiction. As these were the last three tracks that Jason had actually written for and recorded, we decided as a good way to say thanks for all his previous work that we'd just release it. We released them as three singles because we had to fill in the gap where we had no vocalist, so we staggered them over a period.

Jared: It's taken about the whole year. I think we released the first track in March and the last one in November. It was more a collection of singles than an EP, like the previous one, Failure and Sacrifice EP. The new tracks are being recorded with the idea in mind that it's going to be released as a whole release.

Alex: The eight tracks are completed, instrumentally?

Will: It's all completely recorded. We've done the drums, guitar, bass, everything. The vocals will be next, and then we'll get to the mixing stage. Vocals may take a wee while.

Rhys: Yeah, trying to get my head around everything that's been done previously, I'm making sure all the old songs are all down and then move on to the new material. 

Will: I don't envy vocals. If a guitarist leaves and a new guitarist arrives, I think it's easy to blend into the style of the band and then slowly introduce your own style. But as a front man and a vocalist, you may very well be painting the entire band a different colour with your vocals and your ideas. Lyrics can change an entire bands image from other people's perspectives. So I don't envy vocalists at all.

Alex: Do we have any sort of timeline? Expecting these to be ready by the end of the year?

Jared: It's up to Rhys. He's got eight tracks, which is a lot to sort completely fresh vocals over. The idea with the tracks was to release them all individually as singles about a month apart. When that first one's going to be released? I'm not sure. We're hoping the first half of the year, all going according to plan. Then once they were all released, released the whole album. It gives each song it's own attention rather than releasing an EP, and having the one or two singles get the attention when you've got other tracks that you've worked really hard on and they get completely ignored. With digital and the way people release music nowadays, it's a lot more logical to release them all individually.

Alex: You guys have a gig coming up?

Jared: 7th of April we'll be playing at the Ding Dong Lounge for our first gig back, and then on the 14th of April we're playing the Tauranga Tattoo Festival, which will be a good one.

Will: The boys are going to get some sick sleeves. That's all we've got on at the moment because we've been focusing on practicing with Rhys, and trying to set some time aside to be able to work on the releases as well. That's the priority at the moment, getting everybody up to speed.

Alex: These songs you've recorded, parts were recorded in here?

Will: We were originally going to record all of it in here. We'd never really recorded in here before, so we needed to test out whether it was going to work. Jared was the sound engineer and I was the drummer obviously. We set up my kit here we are and started recording. The drums sounded great, but then we tried to record Adrian's guitars but it didn't work. It was really muddy as the room has a lot of soundproofing

Jared: It was also the middle of summer in the middle of that big heatwave. We set the guitar amps up, all the tube amps going, locked ourselves in here and about 10 minutes later we were just completely covered in sweat. It just wasn't going to work. We ended up tracking guitars at my studio at the time. It's a bigger room, more comfortable, and got a bit of room sound for the guitars as well, which was nice.

Will: But for drums, this room was definitely good. Fully soundproof. So you can play anytime, which is nice. It can be a little bit of an issue with the hours of studios.

Alex: Do you have band practices here as well?

Will: No, this is just my drum room, I smash drums in here for about an hour a day. We have a storage room that's set up as a practice space, So we have a gear there and practice hard out there.

Alex: You said your dad got you into a lot of music when you're younger. Is that what got you into playing instruments?

Will: I don't know if that was the reason why I found myself playing music.When I was about two, I used to always ask my dad to put Black Sabbath on. I would ask for the coughing man, "Play the coughing man".  It was a Sweet Leaf that has the coughing at the beginning. I was also into Jesus Christ Superstar, the musical, another one that I loved. My dad listened to a lot of a swing and jazz, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, a really wide variety of obscure tastes. I didn't grow up in a home that just had the radio pop music playing, that was more, my mum. She was into a bit of ABBA, Beatles, but dad was quite eccentric in many ways. I just found that I started smashing on things. There's a picture of me playing on the metal rubbish bin when I was like one, with two big bits of wood. I was just drawn to it.

Jared: My uncle we were visiting in Australia when I was about six years old and I saw him playing the electric guitar for the first time. He used to jam to The Shadows and bands like that. He had a Stratocaster with a whammy bar and I thought that was really cool. That opened my eyes to a guitar as an instrument. Musically, the first band that made me want to pursue music was Blink-182. That's when I was six or seven and I thought "they're a band, they're awesome".

Will: What's important to know about Jared is he's a multi-instrumentalist. He plays Bass in another band with me, Remote. He plays the guitar in Primacy and he's even recorded EP's yourself, playing most of the instruments.

Jared: That was back when I was playing the drums, which I can't do anymore. It all started when I was six or seven, Blink-182 is pretty badass when you're six. Everyone else is listening to S Club 7 and Backstreet Boys, I was the rebellious one listening to Blink-182. Linkin Park was the first heavy band, with screaming.

Rhys: That first year that we met at school, for my birthday he brought me over two cassette tapes of Linkin Park, the two albums, Hybrid Theory and Meteora. I remember your mom coming over and checking with my mom that it was OK because there was a warning label on it.

Jared: It all started from there, spiralled out of control and here we are. 

Alex: That's pretty much all the questions I've got. You've got eight tracks waiting for vocals, to be released. You've got two shows coming up, and a brand new singer.

Will: Thanks for coming to interview us. Coming all the way out to my house, even.

Rhys: Thanks very much. Looking forward to this next year is going to be epic. 

Jared: Cheers.

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