From the outside, it would seem that 2022 was a very turbulent year for As I Lay Dying. Word of the departure of bassist/vocalist Josh Gilbert and the seemingly ongoing feud with estranged drummer Jordan Mancino certainly made headlines. Beyond that, guitarist/vocalist Nick Hipa exited the band in 2020.
However, Tim Lambesis, who fronts the Californian metalcore outfit, has painted a different picture, revealing that some of these changes were in the works long before being publicly announced. In fact, according to Lambesis, the group are still moving forward with a new album expected to emerge in 2023.
Speaking recently with Metalshop, Lambesis stated of the shifts in personnel:
“I think for our fans, they think that the changes happened all in a very short period of time, but they actually happened over the last two years. The first change was on guitar we invited Ken Susi to fill in for us. And that was about two years ago that we invited him. But then, of course, the pandemic happened and so we had a lot of breaks until we had a tour again.
So Ken‘s been rehearsing with us, or talking about rehearsing with us, for the last couple of years. And on drums we have Nick Pierce, who joined us. Nick Pierce was previously in Unearth; Ken is from Unearth as well.
And Nick stopped playing with Unearth and coincidentally at the same time we needed a drummer, because our previous drummer hadn’t been communicating with us; he went very isolated once the pandemic hit.
And so there wasn’t an argument or anything like that; it was just a situation where when the pandemic hit, he decided to take a new direction in life and kind of cut himself off from the rest of us. And we decided we wanted to keep going forward. Phil and I had been the ones writing the songs all these years, so when Nick Pierce left Unearth, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to have him perform with us.
And then Ryan came from Miss May I. He was the last guy to come in. And he didn’t come in until a couple of months ago. Our bass player, Josh, previously left, and he’s with Spiritbox now. And when he decided to go perform with Spiritbox, we called up Ryan, who was with Miss May I.
And Ryan Neff was on tour at the time. And then we asked him, ‘Can you start touring with us as soon as this tour is over?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m only gonna have three days off to rehearse in between tours.’ He said, ‘If you guys want me to do it, I’ll make sure I come prepared.’ And he had a lot to learn in three days, but he pulled it together. He’s a very, very hard-working guy.”
As for the next studio effort from As I Lay Dying, the vocalist shared:
“Well, we have demos going back and forth between Phil and I. The two of us have been writing songs for 20 years, and so we have a very, I guess, refined method of writing where we exchange demos early on so that they have room to be pulled apart.
And then once there’s a full instrumental, then I start writing lyrics. And I typically don’t write lyrics until after we have all the instrumentals together. So pretty shortly after this tour we’ll finish the demo process and then I can start writing lyrics. And hopefully by the end of the year we’ll finish recording so we can have an album next year.”
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