TWENTY BIG ONES with 100% ROCK MAGAZINE – MITCH ANDERSON, EYE OF THE ENEMY

TWENTY BIG ONES with 100% ROCK MAGAZINE – MITCH ANDERSON, EYE OF THE ENEMY

Melbourne’s EYE OF THE ENEMY are setting the controls for DEVASTATE for Saturday’s ELECTRIC EYE FESTIVAL at Freo Social (Sat 4th October 2025). Frontman Mitch Alexander kindly agreed to tackle twenty big ones for 100% ROCK MAGAZINE.

Hey all, Mitch is answering all these questions, for better or worse!

1. How long have the band been together, what’s the lineup and how would you describe what you do?

The band has been around long enough to be a fixture of the Melbourne scene, like trams and hating Sydney. I (Mitch) joined about a decade ago, which seems like a long time until you remember that time is a construct used to make fun of old people. We’ve got Maurizio on guitar, James on bass, Simmo on drums, and Kano as the original founding member (also playing guitar). We do “Australian Melodeath” – it’s probably melodeath but can be heavier, meaner, more aggressive and less “triumphant” or happy-sounding than the Euro bands. Maybe a better term than “Australian” is bogan.

2. Tell us a little about your latest release. Are there any hidden nuggets the band put in the material that only diehard fans might pick up on?

Only Equals Negotiate is a four-track EP that can be listened to as one continuous, looping song. I love putting easter eggs, little allusions or references, into lots of different things in my lyrics, so if anyone wants to dig around, that’s where you’ll find some. There are also little motifs and musical foreshadowing/call backs throughout the whole thing, but pointing them out would ruin the fun of finding them!

3. What got you into music, and can you tell us about the moment you realised you wanted to be a musician?

I was watching Video Hits as a 9yr old on a Saturday morning, and KoRn’s Freak On A Leash came on. That was it – I went from never having heard metal to knowing it’s all I wanted to consume and produce and immerse myself in, over the span of 4 minutes and 26 seconds. I originally drummed, because I love the percussive sound, but moved to vocals because I was bored being stuck behind the kit, and screaming into people’s faces looked like a grand ol’ time. I wasn’t wrong.

4. What is it about music that makes you feel passionate?

It’s that someone can induce emotions in you – that someone has taken the time to craft the audio representation of their inner experience, and you can stumble across it and connect with it. And once it mixes with your thoughts and emotions and life, it creates a new emotional resonance, something the artist has no control over but knew full well – hoped without reservation – that it would happen. It is the selfless sharing of the sublime that we get to do during this one temporary, fragile, beautiful life, and sometimes that involves beating the shit out of each other to sick riffs in a mosh pit.

5. Who would be your main five musical influences?

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Most Nu Metal bands from the 90’s
The union movement
My bandmates
Righteous fury (the emotion, I don’t know if that’s a band)

6. If you could call in any one collaborator to do a song with, who would it be?

That’s a brutal question. Given I got Mark Samual Bonanno from Aunty Donna, a fucking comedian, to do guest vocals, the sky’s the limit. I’ve got a list for the next album, from Brendan Sloan, Mudrat and Purplepingers to C. W. Stoneking, Bob Vylan, Jerry Cantrell. Why not? The main thing for me is that the collaborator needs to be as integral to the song as the tempo or the key. The song needs to need them. I don’t just want Hetfield to weedle out a solo he doesn’t care about on top of a track we’ve already finished writing…

…though if he’s reading this, hit us up!

7. How would you describe your music to someone who’d never listened to you before? What is the one comparison a reviewer or fan has made that made you cringe or you disagreed with?

We have very graciously – absurdly – never gotten a comparison that’s made me cringe or think “nah you missed the point.” This is not, by the way, an invitation for that to start happening.

I’d describe the music as “aggressive and considered.” I’d describe our live shows as an energetic, rowdy and a furious good-time everyone can get involved in. We pride ourselves on the live show, it’s the point of the band.

8. What is your favourite activity or hobby outside of music – what do you like to do to unwind?

Unwinding sounds great and I can’t wait to try it one day. But outside of music, I like playing DnD, lifting heavy things and cycling, reading fantasy and scifi, getting on the streets to play any small part I can in reversing the injustices foisted upon the least deserving like our Palestinian brothers and sisters, and cooking. I have recently become fixated on cooking the perfect roast potatoes, but I don’t write anything down so the process is joyously Sisyphean (but at least I end up with roast potatoes).

9. Do you have a best and/or worst performance anecdote you’d like to share, and if things do go awry during a show, how do you try to turn things around?

The only time I have ever fallen off-stage was during what I still consider to be one of mine and the band’s best gigs – I just had to admit I needed to start wearing my fucking contacts on stage. I think the idea of “things going awry and turning them around,” isn’t how I approach it – the whole point of playing live is that things will go awry; the social contract of live performance is that the crowd is watching a show where shit isn’t overly managed, pre-recorded, and perfect. So if things going pear-shaped is the point, there’s nothing to turn around! You just roll with it, incorporate it, it’s part of that show now. Thinking about it, this was probably informed by seeing my two favourite live acts perform so many times, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Every Time I Die.

10. What’s the best piece of advice another musician ever gave you?

“The pulse of the triplet interchanges hands.” I was maybe 13, taking drum lessons, and was told this, and it just clicked. I could instantly play triplets. I think the best advice isn’t a deepity, it’s practical, applicable, and precise. Which also means it’s usually incredibly niche and mundane, but that’s what makes it “advice” – you struggle, you receive advice, you struggle a little less. Life continues, you think about what’s for dinner.

11. Do you follow a process or ritual before a performance to get rid of nerves or performance anxiety?

Nah, I’m a self-obsessed vocalist – I was born for the stage and you’re all blessed to see me there. I’m kidding, Christ, I suck. Honestly I don’t get nervous anymore. I’ve been lucky enough to be screaming into a mic in front of people – whether that’s as a vocalist, comedian, at conferences, whatever – for my entire adult life and then some. I either get excited that the crowd seem like they’re ready to burst, or determined that what is currently an average crowd might need some work to get on board. But I always look forward to trying.

12. When was the last time you were starstruck and who was it?

As part of my work, on the same day late last year I got to sit in on interviews with Shaun Micallef and Glenn Robbins, two men who have made major impressions on my life, shaped my tastes and sense of humour. I wasn’t “starstruck” per se, partly cause I was on the clock, but it was pretty fucking cool. I will say, not a single musician has ever left me “starstruck” and that’s because they’re either petty shitheads that instantly put you off, or very nice, normal people who deflate your unnecessary idolization. “Never meet your heroes” cause they’re boring. Maybe grab lunch with your heroes?

13. What’s the best thing about being a musician? If you could no longer be a musician for whatever reason, what would be your dream job?

The best bit about being a musician is that it doesn’t pay a living wage in this fucking backwater bastard cuntry so I get to pursue my dream job at the same time! The best part of being a musician is shepherding art into existence, something that might conjure in others the same feelings that other pieces of music conjure in me. Music is my artistic core, so I don’t know how or why I could stop making art – I mean, I incessantly finger drum, or use my teeth like a drum kit (back right molar the kick, left eye tooth the snare, obviously) so it’s compulsive. But if I had to stop, if the Riechard Marles Dictatorship of 2032 outlawed all music besides the state-approved Gang of Youths and Rudd’s ‘07 victory speech, I think I’d get back into other live performance (maybe comedy again? Live podcasts seem like a great grift; pay me to talk utter shit for an hour) or game design, both world-building and mechanics. I can’t draw for shit, and writing is too insular and navel-gazing. Something that I love about DnD and heavy metal (besides both being sanctuaries for the most unfuckable losers on the planet) is that it’s collaborative creation – I firmly believe the best artistic work starts as a collaboration between people, whether that’s your fantasy world where you and your friends create meaningful, lifelong bonds through Dadaist storytelling and do silly voices, or your metal band where you and your friends plumb the depths of the darkest conceivable emotions and do silly voices.

14. When the band are all hanging out together, who cooks; who gets the drinks in; and who is first to crack out the acoustic guitars for a singalong?

We are all of an age now where we order food at restaurants, drink our own expensive craft beers or whiskeys, and have sworn a blood oath to bludgeon to death whichever cunt reaches for the acoustic first.

15. Looking back over your career, is there a single moment or situation you feel was a misstep, or you would like to be able to “do over” even if it didn’t change your current situation??

I’d like to not have fallen off the stage at our best gig. The only thing I’d like to “do over” is the time before we had this line-ups working relationship figured out. It always takes time to settle and get into a flow, and time is a finite resource. If there was any way to just get in a band hyperbolic time chamber and work through that while no real time passes, great. But I guess working through that just is how art gets made, and given the shit we’re currently writing for our next album, I absolutely wouldn’t risk changing anything.

16. If you were made ruler of the world, what would your first orders be?

I would make sure those with nothing were given enough, and I’d do it by stripping the vast, demi-god levels of wealth from the least deserving, most cringe morons we currently have clotting the upper echelons of our society (everyone go read I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers). We have enough for everyone, literally everyone on earth. The only people who are our real enemies are the people trying to convince you otherwise. I wrote a whole fucking song about it on the EP. I don’t care what happens to those people, but either literally or definitionally, they can’t be allowed to exist any more. We have a gorgeous world to gift our children, full of wonder and free of want, and I would give it to us in this hypothetical world as quickly as our real-life leaders could give it to us now. The second order would be to instigate reverse grid racing for at least the F1 sprint weekends, award points all the way to 20th, and force the Monaco GP to be run on classic spec series.

17. What is your favourite rock n’ roll movie, and why?

Sinners. It is the only rock’n’roll movie, not a movie about rock’n’roll.

18. Talking about songwriting, where do you think the magic comes from?

Collaboration.

19. If you could magically go back in time and be a part of the recording sessions for any one record in history, which would you choose – and what does that record mean to you?

Slipknot’s self-titled. Seeing some of the footage is hair-raising; they are trying so fucking hard to compress their energy into a recording, and it’s how everything should be recorded. Fuck this sitting in your chair, screaming one line over and over again to a click until you hit the perfect take. If the song doesn’t make you want to smash your room to bits as you’re performing it, why should I want to listen to it?

20. What, for you, is the meaning of life??

Helping others.

https://eyeoftheenemy.bandcamp.com/

Category: Interviews