One of the coolest parts of growing up a metal kid in Toronto was that Protest the Hero were doing it too, except they were the ones up on stage. They certainly weren't the only metal band from the Toronto area (or from Whitby, if we're being pedantic) but there was something just so special about seeing this group of kids not much older than I was absolutely melting faces with this bizarre blend of aggressive punk rock and intricate prog metal. And it just never got old that they were from here; that the video for "These Colours Don't Run" showed them busking at Nathan Phillips Square, that the sweeping section in "Sequoia Throne" was written somewhere probably a few kilometres from where I lived.
But now it's 2026, meaning that by some metrics I might not be a kid anymore. And yet Protest are still around and lighting it up, releasing excellent material all these years later while earlier releases like Kezia (2005) and Fortress (2008) continue to age like fine wine. With latest release Within on the horizon, I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with vocalist Rody Walker about the new record. We discussed his current playlist, the lyrics and themes on Within, his thoughts on anniversary tours, his recovery process after some difficult times managing his voice and more. All this, of course, was right before he had to run off to do a "country night" DJ set at Whitby Music Fest, as metal vocalists are wont to do.
I've edited down the transcript for readability, but Rody is so easy to talk to that our conversation veered off topic far more than it should have, and I've left some of those tangents in there for completeness. Of course, be sure to pre-order Within over at Sheet Happens if you haven't already—it's the band's first independent release!
To start with, what are you currently spinning? What's on the DJ set for tonight that you're jamming?
So it’s Whitby Music Fest, and this is kind of like an after set, but it's ‘country night’. I’m starting it with some John Prine, some Guy Clark, some Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton, and then I sorta… I wanted to play S Club 7. You remember Rob Dyer used to do that all the time? He would play S Club 7 at all the fucking DJ events that he did, and everybody went off. But then it's mostly gonna be skate punk and fuckin' straight edge 80s hardcore. So, uh… I just wanna make sure that nobody has a good time.
I'm also gonna play “Fishhook” from our upcoming record. Like, by the time this is out, it won't matter, because… you know, like, it's just mixed in there. I just put it in, and it's gonna play, and hopefully it takes people off guard, and nobody takes a fucking video.
Nice. Well, I mean, you guys have done that one live a few times. I'm sure there’s grainy YouTube footage.
That's right. That's right. But this is the final master. I am essentially…
You’re leaking!
I’m leaking it!
Oh my god! With that perfect Derya Nagle mix.
Oh, it’s [Adam] Nolly Getgood! Dez [Nagle] is involved in the production. He recorded the guitars, he engineered the guitars, and then also we used him as, like, the fuckin' session master. So everything that was recorded just went to him, and he assembled it. He was some kind of a middleman, and it was really unnecessary, but we just love him so much. It's nice to work with him.
Yeah, I mean he’s a great musician, and apparently—I saw on Instagram this morning—he can hear the existence of a window from a recording, which I didn’t know was humanly possible.
You know what's really weird? We went in and we re-recorded the song, and then we A–B’d it. You can hear the window.
It's like, as soon as you know it's there, you can hear the reflectivity of it or something like that. We couldn't hear it without the other example, but yeah, it was incredible ears on him. Like, we sent it to him, and he was like “there's a big window”. And, well, yeah, there is.
Crazy. So—backing up—out of all the stuff you're spinning tonight, from the John Prine to the Dolly Parton to the skate punk, what are you yourself actually spinning right now, on your own?
A lot of older hardcore. You know, I sort of fell in love with a lot of the new hardcore that was coming out, like End It, and Drain, and Speed… Scowl and stuff like that. It led me backward, and I ended up really diving into Gorilla Biscuits. It just sort of reminds me of an era of things. I think we kind of sounded like Start Today at some point, you know? Like, if we go back to, like, “Silent Genocide” and stuff like that, when we were young and aggressive and didn't really know what we were doing.
Right.
And it makes me nostalgic. You know, like, all that stuff is really authentically recorded. There's mistakes, it's not perfect, it's sloppy, but it's fun, it's melodic, and it reminds me of why I started making music. So… listening to a lot of Gorilla Biscuits, Seven Seconds, Uniform Choice, Youth of Today—stuff like that. And it's really just getting me excited about music, even though most of it was recorded like as I was being born.
I mean, I'm mentally taking notes here… I think a lot of these I'm gonna have to check out afterwards. In my mind, hardcore is mostly Converge onwards, but I think I gotta go a bit further back.
Yeah, it's interesting to me that there's this more "punky"-based hardcore, and then there’s more metallic-based hardcore. And I really want to gravitate towards the punkier stuff. I like some of the really metallic stuff. That recent Knocked Loose record really fuckin’ got me. But for the most part, the stuff that I gravitate towards is the stuff that comes more from punk.
Gotcha, gotcha. Bit messier, bit more human, for sure.
Well, speaking of authenticity, that actually sets up a segue perfectly to talking about the album, which lyrically seems very personal. Contrasting that with the previous album [Palimpsest], which had this whole concept about American history and focusing on specific segments of it, the new album seems way, way different from that, and I suppose the first question here is: Why? What made you decide that there’s no concept this time, and the lyrics were going to be more personal?
So there is a concept, right? You know, the very concept of “within”, it is how the outer world affects the inner world, which gave me an excuse to write more personally. And I didn't really realize until I was doing these interviews and talking about it. It's like I’m revealing things to myself. And I sort of realized in an interview with a lovely German fellow yesterday that I had written very impersonal stuff on the last record, and this seems like a very natural reaction to that, where I am not in those songs in a very significant way, and I think subconsciously I wanted to write something where I am very much in the songs.
Right.
You know, unfortunately, I had to be very vulnerable at moments, but I also think that that's important: to show other men that you can be vulnerable and you can express emotions that aren't just anger.
Right, yeah. I was reminded a bit of “Tandem” from Scurrilous, which I think was maybe one of the only other older songs that had that sort of bent to it. It sounded like it was coming from a pretty sad experience, and there’s a lot more of that going on in this album.
Another aspect I noticed is that there are also more political songs like “Fishhook” and even “Mouthpiece”. They made me think back to “Tilting Against Windmills” (2013). That song came out a minute ago! When you wrote that song versus now, how do you feel things have changed, or how has your outlook perhaps changed on, well, the big fucking mess that we’re now in?
Yeah, you know, I don't think my outlook has changed very much. I don't think my politics have changed very much. I think that as much as people would maybe look at me as a "lefty" or a "radical"—part of the "radical left"—my politics essentially always boiled down to "everyone deserves to be treated equally and fair". You know?
Oh yeah, crazy. What a concept.
Just like, empathy for other human beings. It's not that radical, it's not that crazy. [laughs] But the ethos remains the same. I'm saying things a little differently on this because times have changed. There's a lot worse motherfuckers out there, and they seem to be around every corner, on every driveway, promoting themselves on television as fuckin’ populist politicians. So, the message has not changed that much! It's still the same ethos that it stands on, but the world has changed.
God, yeah. Yeah, I know. As someone who moved to the States last year from Toronto, I can get behind that.
I think Boston's quite wonderful, though!
Oh, I love Boston.
Yeah, like, you know, like, I've grown up with such hatred for Boston because of the Bruins [laughs].
Yep. Celtics for me.
But, every time I'm there, the people are fucking wonderful, you know? I've always had an amazing time wherever I've been, and Boston or the surrounding areas—mostly Worcester—but I love Boston.
Yeah, I mean, I did move here for a reason. I do love it. And it doesn't feel like it fits a lot of the usual stereotypes. But that's a topic for another time, or a different album from 2020, rather.
What I will say, though, is that, after the anniversary tour for Volition, you posted at some point that you don't want to do those anymore. Which means Scurrilous never got one, and Pacific Myth will not get one.
Yeah, that's right.
What is it about those that you didn't like so much? You did three of them!
Yeah, we did three of them. It felt like it was the only thing we were doing for a long time. And it's like... nostalgia baiting! There's an element of it that's extremely limiting, you know? Like, there's some people that are like “Oh! You know, I like this band. I'll go see them because I listened to Kezia or Fortress”, and then they hear “oh, well, they're just playing fucking Volition”.
So it's hyper-specific, and the other thing is that every night after we finished Volition, we went into “Bloodmeat”, and then we went into “Sequoia Throne”, and the room just went [makes explosion gesture]. And it was like, man, we gotta be able to play our other stuff, because I don't want to fucking play a full album. I don't want to hear a band play a full album. I'm sick of bands announcing fucking anniversary tours. It's cheap. And, like, we all know it's cheap. It's just trying to make fucking money, and seems to me it's actually a pretty bad way to make money [laughs]. It's like you're limiting your audience.
Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. I wonder if it's the sort of thing where, for certain bands, they kind of know they only had one really big album, and they're trying to replicate that.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense for, like, Hawthorne Heights or something like that. You know, where it's like, they got one song that everybody loves…
I screamed along to it at Warped Tour 2013, but I don't know much else of their stuff.
Yeah, they’re gonna beat you over the head with it.
Yeah. I was wondering about that because I love Scurrilous, but I've made my peace with the fact that there's many tunes on there I'll probably never see live, and that's probably fine.
That might be the case. I'm very sorry.
That's all right. So it goes.
We'll always try and sprinkle them in. And if you can get to me and you can say, hey, this one song, like, a couple months out from a tour, I will do my best to work it in if you know you're gonna be at one of those shows.
Well, it's “Termites” for me, but I'll just…
“Termites”? We can do “Termites”. We've done “Termites”.
I've not seen it in, like, 5 to 6 shows, but maybe I've just gotten unlucky.
We'll get there. We used to play it all the time when the album came out.
Damn. Yeah, back then I was too young to be regularly going to shows.
I'll work it back in there for you, buddy. I'll get it in there.
Appreciate you. Appreciate you.
Alright, well, I did want to go back to the new album for a second here. I'm actually remembering at the Fortress anniversary tour—the last show was in Toronto at the Danforth—and I remember your voice was not doing so great. And I'm sorry to bring up what might not be the happiest memory.
No, that's okay.
I remember that the show had to end a bit sooner, and I think a lot of people in the crowd were confused, worried, and not sure what was going on. From what I can gather after that, you've had a bit of a rough period with your voice.
Obviously, you probably didn’t want to share too much with fans as you were actively dealing with stuff, but now on the new album, the last song, “The Mariner”, seems to really dive into all of that. So I'm curious, if you're more open to talking about the process: What was that like? Retraining your voice for the last album, and now for this one?
Yeah! Well, I didn't really retrain it for this. What had happened is roughly the same thing that's happened before. I have an inflammatory illness. It's a chronic illness, it inflames all my fucking joints, they click like crazy, and my throat also suffers from it. I lose my voice pretty easily. But I'm on a biological medication, and it's helping me get better, and it's helping even with my voice. But yeah, “The Mariner” is a song that is about that Toronto show, and—
Really?
Yeah, it's all about losing my voice at that show, and it's about the audience singing along. If you listen very closely at the end, you can hear there's a chorus that rises and falls before the interlude takes over, and it is the audience singing along. But we didn't have any crowd mics, so the audience is being recorded through my mic line as it laid on the stage. And it's this really cool and beautiful moment. They're singing “From the Sky” and it's really small in the production—it just sort of like waves in and waves out. But this is the moment that I'm talking about in the entire song and how important it was to me, to hear people sing along to a song that was somewhat about my aging voice.
Right, yeah. I didn't catch that at all on the listens. I mean, I saw the lyrics, but I didn't realize there was… that's really cool.
I was not at that show, where “From the Sky” was played, though — I was thinking of the 2018 one, the Fortress tour.
Oh! Yeah, the first time I fucked up my voice.
Yeah… either way, I mean, it sounds like you're in a good spot now with the medication, with the way you're sounding on the new album. I'm hearing a lot of those theatrics that were on Fortress even.
Yeah, the old Mike Patton bag of tricks.
That's what it is. Is that the term you're using? Because if not, you should. That's excellent.
That's typically how I describe it when I'm doing anything kinda wacky. He rips.
So I also just wanted to zoom out a little bit and ask about the process of writing vocal parts and how that might have changed over the years.
I imagine when you guys started out, you were in a studio and it looked really different from now, where you've got your vocal studio in your house, and the other folks are presumably just working on their parts independently. So how's that changed? Is my reading of that even right?
I mean, it is and it isn't, right? It hasn't changed very much for me since… well, the very last song we wrote for Kezia was “No Stars Over Bethlehem”, and I wrote it on my own with a little tape deck. I'd recorded them playing the instrumental, and I wrote all the vocals to that on my own with [ex-bassist] Arif [Mirabdolbaghi]’s lyrics. And then, with Fortress, it was a very similar process. We were in a different place, in a jam space. They recorded it, we recorded it live off the floor, and then I took my computer and had a microphone in a separate room, where I recorded all my parts.
I've been doing it on my computer alone for a very long time. My setup has gotten better, and I'm much better at recording my own voice [laughs] but it is essentially the same process I've been using for a long time. Sometimes I think I'm, like, really good at it, and I'll get my setup all in and go [mimes doing vocal parts] but then sometimes I get stumped by the song almost immediately, and I go, “oh, I'm as fucking bad at this as I've ever been”.
I feel like that never goes away, though. Like… There's no way you just wake up one day and you're like, that's it, I'm the god of vocals.
Yeah, that’s true [laughs].
But yeah, that’s good to know. Listening back to those earlier albums, I couldn't help but wonder just how different things might look, just the process of making them.
Yeah, it is different mostly for the instrumentation-alists, right? Like they used to sit in a fucking circle and write the music. And for Kezia, I was there and we wrote the vocals at the same time too. And then when it came to Fortress, it was like, nah, this is so inefficient. Just write the fucking song and I'll come in afterwards.
And then I'm sure like Guitar Pro and other software came along and that's totally changed the process.
That's right. Mm-hmm.
Cool. So the last few questions I did have—and this was gonna be my segue into the anniversary tour thing, since they're about touring—but I imagine there will be plans to tour for Within. I think you guys have a European tour coming up and probably more after that. So first up, what’s a current favourite song you’ve not yet played live that you’re just raring to go with?
Oh, “Grandfather's Axe”, for sure.
Oh, that one's so good. I was hoping you'd say that.
I'm really excited for people to hear that one, you know? And we're not playing it on this upcoming tour, but I'd really like to.
Yeah, that one's real saucy, so I can imagine a crowd really getting down to it.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, speaking of touring, too, I saw you've got a fitness newsletter out, and you’re posting a lot more about that recently. Then, in hindsight, I remembered on past tours seeing little vlogs and stuff of fitness things you guys did on tour. So, first of all, that’s really cool! I imagine a lot of artists don't think about that as much as they should.
I just wanted to hear more thoughts about that, and maybe anything that you might have wanted to tell younger you on your touring adventures. Or maybe even younger artists starting out on tour?
So I started a business called No Spotter Coaching. It's online coaching. It's something that I'm very passionate about. It's been a long time that I've been really interested in fitness and nutrition and general health, shit like that.
But one thing that I'd love to tell my younger self is in 2005, when we're on tour with Trivium, and Matt Heafy offers me weightlifting fucking coaching: take it! I was just, like, a scrawny little drunk fuck, and I was hanging out with Matt Heafy, who is just a very lovely person, and so kind. And he was standing there, jacked and looking great, and he was like, “uh, if you ever want to, like, lift with me, I'd love to show you a thing or two.” And I just laughed. I was like, “Yeah, okay. No.”
Oh my god.
And so many years later… I love lifting weights, and I wish I'd started younger, because I started in my late 20s, and I feel like that was even too late.
Oh, man. okay. That's really funny. And the fact that in 2005 he [Matt Heafy] was already on that, because Trivium also started pretty young. Dude was getting jacked back then, too. Crazy.
Yeah, and following his fitness journey has been really interesting—watching as it evolves—because he participates in some different stuff that I'm not totally aware of, and it's had an amazing impact on his body. It looks like he's fucking sub 10% body fat.
And he also figured out that alternate guitar strap, the ergonomic one that some people gave him shit for for no reason. But he's really on top of that stuff. You can tell he thinks a lot about it.
Yeah, he's a dude who's looking after his body, which is something you gotta do as you get older. Otherwise, you're just not gonna move at all.
So, separate from touring with Trivium, is there anyone out there right now you haven't toured with and you’re excited about the idea of maybe touring with some time?
I'd love it if we could get more punk tours. We end up with all the metal bands and the prog bands, and that's great. I've made a lot of lifelong friends throughout these tours. But I think about how back in the day we did like three days with Bad Religion, and that was so cool for me. I'd love to go out with a fucking punk band like Descendents or something like that, or Millencolin. Something that wouldn't make any sense, but that I'd like anyways.
We played this show in Norway and I think about it all the time. It went us, Millencolin—doing the 10 years of Pennybridge Pioneers (2000), which is a fucking awesome record—and then… Gojira! And then Avenged Sevenfold! And that was the whole show, this one-off in fucking Norway. And it was just the weirdest, coolest show that I've ever participated in. Man, that would have been a fun tour.
That sounds awesome. Weirdest I could think of is when Deafheaven toured with Between the Buried and Me.
Right! Yeah, you know who else was on that tour? The Kindred were also, yeah.
And the Kindred, yes! Yeah, I saw that at the Phoenix way back when, and man, I was just like, this is such a weird little assemblage. But I think you got me beat with the Norway one.
I saw that show in fucking Milwaukee. And then we also did a tour back in the day: the Never Say Die tour, 2008. It was us, Despised Icon, Carnifex, Whitechapel, Parkway Drive, Unearth, Um… fuck, did I say Architects? Because Architects were on it.
Holy shit. No, you did not, but yeah, them too, I guess. So half deathcore, half metalcore.
Seems crazy. It was like it was eight bands and it was just fucking bonkers. I'd feel terrible if I'd left anyone off that because everyone was just the best. It was amazing.
How did they fit that many? Were they, like, 15-minute sets?
Yeah, it went something like, Carnifex, Despised, us, Architects, and then into the headlining bands. All of us played for half an hour.
Jeez, okay. That's… I gotta look that tour up afterwards, that is nuts!
And it ruled. It ripped.
That's, like, 3 tours rolled into 1. But yeah, like, that would be really sweet, seeing you guys in some sort of punk billing of any sort, whether headlining it or… because I hear that still in a lot of the material. The way “Fishhook” opens, even. Immediately sounds like a punk cut, much more so.
I think, yeah, “Fishhook” and “The Orchard” are like very much sort of calling back to our punk roots, but still needlessly complicated bullshit.
Well, yeah. I mean, it wouldn't be right without some of that going on.
All right, just two more quick ones. So first, the artwork. You've got two albums in a row with horned beasts running facing right. What’s the deal?
Yeah! That is just a coincidence. It's a happy coincidence. They're both done by Martin Wittfooth, who's incredible, but there's no real connection.
Okay, sounds good. Nothing more to that then. And then the last one: this is kind of dumb, but we always ask this at the end of a Heavy Blog interview.
How do you like your eggs?
Uhhhhhhhhh.
Yeah, sorry, it's a curveball.
What's the one where you, like, just boil it? You boil it in the water and… poached. That's it. Poached. I like poached, because then you don't have to put, like, oil and shit.
Yeah, yeah, I'm a fried egg person, which is a lot more involved, but that's nice and simple.
Yeah, fried eggs is nice. Yeah. I like eggs just in general.
Awesome. Sounds like the answer is poached and that's what we'll go with.
Well, you gotta do a DJ set now and get paid in beer.
I got a big DJ set!