With the band having recently reunited after a few years away, Bleeding Through frontman Brandan Schieppati has had time to reflect on what went wrong during their initial run. Speaking recently on the ‘Talk Toomey‘, he further elaborated some more on the issues the band faced. Outside of the immediate label woes however, Schieppati feels that the band’s reluctance to embrace social media played a part, as did fans taking the group for granted after a prolific period of activity in the early 2000s.
Regarding the social media pitfalls and more, Schieppati stated:
“I remember lifting with Matt from Avenged Sevenfold one day when they got signed to Warner Brothers. And I remember saying to him ‘Dude, aren’t you kind of nervous what your fan base thinks of you signing to a major label?’ and he said ‘Brandan, I want to play fucking arenas.’ And I’m like, fair enough. I’ve never said that in my life ever. So it’s like one of those things where I feel because we didn’t push the envelope and try to like be this enormous band.
I feel like we stayed in the underground and we kind of got forgotten about and pushed aside a little bit. I think one of the things that pushed us aside was we weren’t really a social media band. Then when social media started really blowing up, we were the old dinosaurs and the old fucking people like oh, we’re just doing what we’re doing we don’t need to switch our marketing tactics.
But the rest of the world was changing they were changing through everything at your fingertips. If I can’t open my app, and within three minutes, see the name of your band, then I’m going to forget about you. I think that we were stubborn and trying to keep things old school because we’re stubborn punk rock kids and I think that that’s why people forgot about us.”
Referring to the band’s original farewell show back in 2014 and how being so active may have worked against them, he offered:
“I said ‘You know what I love you guys, we grinded out a 15 year long career, no one ever had faith in us except us and we did everything the right way that we wanted to do. We helped pioneer a fucking genre and hopefully we’ll never be forgotten about’. I just said I was proud of everybody in the band and that we should keep going.
I remember Marta saying ‘they’re going to miss us when we’re fucking gone’. That’s funny because five years later I’m doing more interviews than I’ve ever done in my fucking life even during the Truth And Declaration days. The response to this record, the song is gangbusters and we’re not used to that. We’re used to being kind of shit on and kind of being like the people’s champion. I kind of feel like now we’re getting this response and I think Marta was right.
I hate to have that come off as slightly arrogant, but she’s right people missed us when we were gone. They didn’t know what they had because Bleeding Through was all so accessible to them. Almost too accessible, always on the road where people kind of swept us aside and said ‘I’ll see Bleeding Through next time’ or ‘I’m not gonna buy this record but I’ll buy the next record’.
We kind of got Slayered for a little bit and then Slayer kind of took a dip for a little bit and kind of disappeared for a few years and came back and they were Slayer again and I feel that sometimes that’s a good thing.”
Bleeding Through will officially return tomorrow, May 25th, with the release of a new album titled “Love Will Kill All” on SharpTone Records.
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