Dark Divine has come a long way since Live Metal’s first encounter with the band in 2022. Since we interviewed vocalist Anthony Martinez and drummer Triston Blaize, the spooky act has released the “Halloweentown” EP in September 2022, followed by the full-length “Deadly Fun” about a year later, garnered airplay on SiriusXM’s Octane and embarked on multiple tours. A couple weeks before the band was set to head out with Black Veil Brides for the second time, Live Metal’s Greg Maki caught up with guitarist Robby Lynch and Martinez to talk about life on the road, the new album and more.
LIVE METAL: I interviewed Anthony and Triston about a year and a half ago, and that was before the first EP had come out, and I think at that point you had only done one two-week tour. So now you’ve got the EP, the full-length, you’ve done a bunch of tours. How has this ride been so far? Has it been everything you hoped it would be?
ROBBY LYNCH: Absolutely. It’s been everything I hoped it would be, everything we hoped it would be and then some. It’s definitely been a rollercoaster, just as anything in life. There’s the ups, there’s the downs, there’s the loops, and there’s the drops—all that stuff. But it’s been absolutely amazing. The support from our label, the support from our management and, mainly, the support from our fan base has been absolutely phenomenal and to see our fan base growing in the sense that it has in just a matter of two years since we’ve been touring at this point. It’s also been a lot to learn. There’s so many things. As a kid dreaming about going on tour and being a musician, you don’t think about all the things that really go into it. So as a band, we’ve also learned a lot about road life and being on the road with other bands.
What has been the biggest, most important thing you’ve learned?
ROBBY: The biggest thing that I have learned is not to rush anything. (laughs) At least for me, because it is our first few years touring, we don’t really have a crew, so a lot of the gear would fall on my hands to set up, and whenever something goes wrong, you want to fix it as soon as possible because that’s showbiz, it’s showtime. But I’ve learned anything on tour that I’ve ever rushed, decision-wise or gear-wise, has backfired on me. It made things worse. So I try to be as patient as possible on tour. (laughs)
Have any of the bands that you’ve gone out with taken you under their wing and shown you the ropes out there?
ROBBY: Absolutely. Every band that we have toured with, we’ve always learned something from those bands, as we hope they would learn something from us because we all do things differently. The biggest band that’s definitely taken us under their wing has been Black Veil Brides. I remember we were on tour with Catch Your Breath and Until I Wake at the time, and we were driving somewhere—I can’t remember where—but we got the call that Andy from Black Veil had specifically asked for us to be on tour with them, and that was a big moment for us. We didn’t realize how much they were going to be taking us under their wing. We learned a lot from them, we learned a lot from their crew on the previous tour that we were on, and they asked us to come back for some more. I thought maybe they would be tired of us crazy, Halloween-looking dudes, but they’re all for it, they support us, and they’ve given us a very good backing. It means the world to us.
(Anthony joins the call.)
Yeah, so you’re about to go out on your second tour with Black Veil Brides, also with Creeper and Ghostkid on the bill. Are you excited for that?
ANTHONY MARTINEZ: Absolutely. It’s super cool to be able to go back out on the road with Black Veil because we got pretty close with them on the last run. So it’s cool to see old friends and make some new ones.
Aside from playing the shows, what has been your favorite part of being on tour?
ANTHONY: Me, personally, it’s all the in-between show stuff. The show kind of works like clockwork after a while, but we definitely like to go visit whatever we can in the moment. Some stuff that stands out in past tours is in South Carolina, we were playing in Myrtle Beach and we went to this gator sanctuary with some of the Black Veil guys. It’s little stuff like that that kind of takes you out of the repetitiveness of tour—that kind of stuff is the standout moments for me.
ROBBY: For me, my favorite is whenever we’ve gone and stayed at campsites or whatnot and kind of explored the area that we were in. Last tour, we were in Colorado Springs, and even though it was a pretty basic campsite, it was nice because we got to go out and explore and kind of take our brains off of the road and take our brains off of performing just for a night or two. It’s a good little reset.
On the other hand, what has been your least favorite part of life on the road?
ANTHONY: Driving through cities, I think. That’s so stressful. Anytime you have to drive a big-ass RV through traffic and people that don’t follow the rules of the road and all that stuff, it’s just a stressful time. I don’t wish that on anybody. (laughs)
ROBBY: Mine’s pretty similar. My least favorite thing about touring is vehicle issues, especially because we are in an RV and a trailer—mainly the RV. Those things, there’s always something that’s destined to go wrong. So that’s always been the least liked or most annoying thing to me on the road—vehicle troubles.
From what I’ve seen on social media—there’s the Facebook fan group—you guys have been very fan friendly, especially on the road, meeting fans and stuff like that. How important has that been to you as a band?
ANTHONY: They’re the reason we get to do what we do. I think it would be a disservice to not at least try to make an effort to see as many people as we can. If there wasn’t the dynamic of us being a band and them being fans, I like to think that they’re friendly people that we would get along with in general. We have a really cool fan base. It’s cool to meet them. They’re genuinely pretty cool people.
ROBBY: Yeah, it’s really nice to connect with them and learn about what our band has become to them and what it means to them. We hear a lot of stories, and we get to spend some good time with them at each show. We try our best to at every show for at least an hour or so. That’s extremely important to us as I feel it’s extremely important to them, as well.
ANTHONY: Also, you get the feedback. You get direct feedback on what you’re doing. If I suck, I want to know. (laughs)
Your debut full-length album, “Deadly Fun,” came out last September. It came out a little less than a year after the EP, so I was wondering when and where the songs came from. Were they from the same writing sessions as the EP or separate? How did it come together?
ANTHONY: The EP was primarily me and (former guitarist) Jason (Thomas) at the time. The album, we kind of reached out. We worked with a producer, Zach Jones, who helped out on a lot of the songs. A lot of the lyrics, I did co-writes with Bryan Kuznitz of Fame on Fire. It was a lot more of a collaborative process, and it was a lot more moving parts involved. I think it kind of showed growth of us as writers and willingness to work with others. I think going forward, we’ll work with even more people, just to experiment with new sounds and that kind of thing. I definitely think that there will be different writing processes for different parts of whatever we do next.
Is there a central theme or message that goes through the album?
ANTHONY: The title track, “Deadly Fun,” is kind of all encompassing. It’s a spooky carnival. We wanted stuff that kind of fit the vibe of the spooky carnival in your mind, so to speak. I think that a lot of those songs play on fears or anxieties or parts of life, and it’s all played out through this carnival theme, almost like a freak show. That central freak show message is sort of the overall symbol.
What are your favorite songs from the album? Any that are especially close to you?
ANTHONY: I definitely like “Moving On.” That one is my personal favorite. It’s definitely a close one for me because I wrote it about personal experience. What about you, Robby?
ROBBY: I have two favorites. They’re tied with each other. One is “Moving On,” and the other is “Reaper.” For me, personally, I just absolutely connect with those lyrics, and with “Reaper,” I’ve always wanted to see what Dark Divine could do going as heavy as we’ve gone, at least so far, and I think we did pretty good with that one.
Yeah, I like that one a lot. I hope you go more in that direction.
ANTHONY: We’ll experiment with stuff, for sure.
ROBBY: Sprinkle it in here and there.
The EP came out on InVogue Records, and this one is on Thriller. What has that been like?
ANTHONY: It’s definitely cool to be on a smaller roster of artists. InVogue and Thriller are, for the most part, run by the same people. There’s different people that are allocated to different areas of the label. For the most part, our team has remained the same. We have a couple new people that were introduced to us. They’ve been incredible. The InVogue/Thriller team has been amazing to us. They’ve been super helpful with what we should do to promote ourselves. Anything that we don’t already know, they teach us. It’s been a beautiful, collaborative effort.
ROBBY: To be able to have the support from our fan base and then that support being matched by the label that we’re with, that makes you feel good as a band.
ANTHONY: You hear a lot of horror stories about people being signed to labels, so it’s nice. It’s not a little fish/big pond situation, but it’s also not a label that’s just trying to get something out of you. They genuinely work with us, and they genuinely are a part of the team.
Speaking of horror, I know you’re all big horror fans. Have you had time to catch any new horror movies?
ROBBY: I saw “Night Swim.” That was a Blumhouse movie. I thought it was OK. I’ve seen better Blumhouse movies. I’m one of those horror fans that rewatches older movies. Even if I’ve seen it 100 times, I’ll rewatch it. I don’t care. It’s background noise to me sometimes. So I’ll always go with “Friday the 13th” or “Nightmare on Elm Street.”
ANTHONY: I was gonna say I’m a retro kind of guy. I’ll go back and watch “Texas Chainsaw” before I see a new horror movie. I think the last horror that I saw that was new was “X.” We’ll usually play something on the TV on the RV, too. We watch a lot of ‘80s horror, a lot of the cult classics.
You mentioned “X.” Did you see “Pearl?”
ANTHONY: I actually haven’t seen “Pearl.” That’s been on my bucket list to do, but I’ve been so busy.
ROBBY: “Pearl” was wild. I saw “Pearl.”
They just released the trailer for “MaXXXine” yesterday, too.
ROBBY: Really? I haven’t seen it yet. I’ll have to check it out.
What’s the plan for the rest of the year? This summer, you have the Inkcarceration festival. Anything else you can talk about yet?
ANTHONY: I have nothing that I can share at the moment, but there are things. (laughter)
ROBBY: Nothing that we can confirm nor deny.
ANTHONY: I cannot confirm nor deny there are plans, but we are not folding as a band yet. (laughter)
ROBBY: We definitely have things to look forward to throughout the rest of this year.
Anything else you’d like to say before we wrap up?
ANTHONY: Potentially, expect some new music pretty soon. We’re excited. Potentially—can neither confirm nor deny, but potentially. (laughs) And we hope to see everyone on tour.
LINKS:
Buy/stream “Deadly Fun”
www.dark-divine.com
www.facebook.com/darkdivinemusic
www.instagram.com/darkdivineofficial
www.twitter.com/darkdivinemusic
www.tiktok.com/@darkdivineofficial
YouTube channel
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