Culture
Attack Attack! talks touring, fake breakups, and Louder Than Life
By: Bradley Cunningham
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LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (WOUB) – Attack Attack! is an Ohio-based metalcore band that helped pioneer the “electronicore” sound, blending heavy breakdowns with electronic and pop elements.
I caught up with the band after their set at Louder Than Life, where they closed out their One Hit Wonder tour with a bang. Before the interview even began, drummer Andrew Wetzel placed a plastic lizard toy on the table, and the entire band broke into a chant of the “lizard” meme.
In that moment, I knew I was in good hands—we clearly shared an internet-poisoned hive mind. What followed was one of my favorite conversations of the weekend: unfiltered, hilarious, and refreshingly honest.
Find a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Bradley Cunningham: I’ve been opening every interview with this and it weirdly always works — what do you guys want to vent about? The floor is open.
Andrew Wetzel: Anything? Oh, I can vent. So, on this tour we had a driver for our bus — until we didn’t. Through a series of unfortunate events, we suddenly had no driver and couldn’t get a replacement. So…I picked up driving the tour bus in Seattle and drove it all the way to San Antonio. 2,500 miles. In 10 days.
Have you ever driven a bus like that before?
Wetzel: Yeah. Driving is like a special interest of mine. I’ve driven a lot of trucks and other things. Chris [Parketny] and I worked corporate event production in Cleveland for a long time, so we’re used to hauling stuff from one place to another.
Chris Parketny: He bought the vest and everything.
Cameron Perry: The checkpoint didn’t even stop us. They just waved him right on through. He was so professional. They believed in him.
Wetzel: I bring a certain level of authority. My bald head, big mustache, and bright orange vest.
You mentioned Cleveland, did you guys ever play the attic in Kettering, Ohio?
Wetzel: Absolutely. We played The Attic a bunch of times, like probably at least four or five times. I think we did a couple of different New Year’s Eve parties there. I think two of our first times headlining were there. The Attic was kind of the spot.
You recently collaborated with Will Ramos of Lorna Shore on the song Dance!. Tell me about that.
Parketny: It was great. We wrote and recorded all of Dance! in one or two days. We had a breakdown in it, and we didn’t quite know what to do with it yet. We knew we wanted it to be extremely heavy. We started brainstorming and we were like, ‘You know who’s heavy? Will Ramos.’ We hit him up, and he immediately sent back a take. We fell right in love with it. He crushed it.
The new record, Attack Attack! II jumps genres. You worked with writers and producers outside the usual heavy world—how did that affect your process?
Wetzel: This is a funny layer to the lore. We joked that we were “going country” before we dropped Dance! It was upsetting to people. The irony is that a majority of our production team works in country music. They write and produce almost exclusively country. They did, however, grow up listening to a lot of heavy music and were genuine fans of us. It’s funny because we are drawing from these influences and reaching out in a covert way. I think that made this album really special because it brought a level of lyricism and melody that other people don’t have access to.
Wetzel: These songs are going to basically underperform every other hit they have in their catalog, but they helped us anyway. It was fun for everyone. It was a change of pace, and we approached the whole thing with zero rules. We were like, ‘let’s just run it.’
I have to ask — you guys stirred some chaos on social media with that fake breakup drama. Marketing move?
Wetzel: The band has had a lot of controversy in the past. Once we had the record done, we couldn’t just give it to them. Chris and I were having a couple of beers in the studio, and we just started hatching this plan. Chris looked at me and said ‘I think we need a villain. I need you to be the villain.’ We started talking about causing this huge fight at the photo shoot. And we didn’t even tell the other guys that it was happening. Only Chris and I knew.
Parketny: We wanted it to be a natural reaction when we filmed it. We didn’t want people to think it was staged. Only we knew. We started arguing and everyone’s looking around each other like, what the is going on here? The energy was weird on the set.
Wetzel: My drum tech was sitting in the back filming from his lap, which we told him, ‘Something’s gonna happen. You just need to start filming it.’
That’s so funny. So what is Attack Attack! now—compared to those early days?
Wetzel: So this was another thing that Chris and I had talked about a lot of was trying to find ‘the essence of what made Attack Attack! special.’ During the course of writing these EPs, we were just throwing darts at a board—like, what even is this? Does it matter? Is Attack Attack! still relevant? Should we still be doing this? Are we doing anything right at all?
Just through talking, I managed to think about what was happening in the room when I was with the boys in Caleb [Shomo]’s parents’ basement writing songs like Stick Stickly. I realized we weren’t thinking about anything. We were just writing songs that we liked. And everything outside of that room didn’t exist to us. And we were like, that’s what needs to happen here.
The art of letting go.
Parketny: Right. We were adding like Mario Kart Sounds and trumpets. I’m like ‘yeah, that sounds stupid. Throw it in there.’ Bongos in a breakdown? Throw that in there too. We’re just trying to have fun at this point, you know what I mean?
Any regrets with that approach?
Parketny: Zero. We’re having a blast. The tour ruled. This festival ruled. We’re just out here having a good time.
How did it feel closing the tour here at Louder Than Life—back in the Midwest?
Wetzel: It was great. This is definitely our best festival appearance of our career for sure. Like that set was perfect. It was sick.
Last one, if Attack Attack! was the soundtrack to a movie or cartoon—what would it be?
Ryland Raus: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
Perry: Cast Away.
Wetzel: Airheads — the one with Brendan Fraser, Adam Sandler, and Steve Buscemi.
Great movie. Lemmy is God.
Parketny: Terminator. All of them. Just Terminator.