Many are undoubtedly familiar with vocalist Alex Varkatzas due to his tenure with the band Atreyu for many years. After he and the band parted ways, he formed Dead Icarus as his musical outlet with intent to write the music that he wanted to hear. Zealot is the group’s first full-length album, and while it captures some of the early Atreyu sound, it branches off in different directions and is never held hostage by it. We spoke with Varkatzas about his approach to this new group, things he tried to avoid this time with Dead Icarus, how he challenged himself with vocals, the pros and cons of starting a new band, and more!
Dead Rhetoric: What was the biggest thing you wanted to get across with Dead Icarus, as a band?
Alex Varkatzas: I don’t know if it was something I wanted to get across, I think it was something I wanted to do more for myself. I wanted to make some music that was exactly, more or less, everything that I wanted to hear in a band, and maybe everything that I didn’t get a chance to do in the past – the past few Atreyu records, and how their career arc went. I just wanted to make music that I could sit and listen to over and over again and enjoy it, and be proud of it. I think that, in my opinion, for me, I accomplished that. No one can take that away from me. Other people might not like it, or like it, but I didn’t make it for those reasons. I didn’t want to leave the 20+ years I have making music and have it end with the last few Atreyu records. I feel like I had other stuff in my heart that I wanted to get out, and I didn’t want it to stop the way that it did.
If it stops now, at least I made this and got it out of my system. I validated myself to myself. A lot of times we look outwards for validation and when you look outwards, it can never lead anywhere. It’s a temporary thing. The words and nice things people say to you, that’s fine and it’s really cool, but that shouldn’t be where you derive your self-worth about feeling good about something. With this, I just wanted something I could jam a great workout too, or go for a walk and listen to it and enjoy, for 100% selfish reasons.
Dead Rhetoric: Doing whatever you want, does that energize you then?
Varkatzas: 100%, I think more or less I was mentally checked out of Atreyu for the last couple of records. When we came back from hiatus, we made a record that I was checked in and locked in for, but after that record cycle happened, we went back to working with our producer John Feldmann and the dynamic in the music veered a bit again and I never recovered from that. It changed for me.
Dead Rhetoric: Is this kind of what you mean with conviction, as I saw it a bit on the press release, since it’s something you are doing for yourself?
Varkatzas: Yeah, the title of the album and the title track is “Zealot,” and it’s kind of an underlying theme of the record. It’s someone with fanatical beliefs, whatever they may be, they are a fanatic for their beliefs. They truly believe in it and nothing can shake that belief, for better for or for worse. But I think that kind of feeling came back to me, and I haven’t had it in years. I would second guess myself about certain things in the past that [Atreyu] was doing. With Dead Icarus, I don’t. What we do feels natural and it feels right. That’s kinda the road we take.
Dead Rhetoric: So how do you feel about yourself and Dead Icarus at this point?
Varkatzas: I’m much happier and kind of a different person. A lot has changed in my life. In a way, after Atreyu and I parted ways, I kind of bottomed-out emotionally. I was pretty depressed and bummed about numerous things – related to and not related to that event. It was time to rebuild myself, mentally. Dead Icarus has given me the space to do that.
I wish I didn’t have to play music anymore, to be 100% honest with you. I have three kids. Life is different and it’s more expensive, and it requires more of my time. The band takes…Dead Icarus as a band is me putting out time and money. It’s not really me taking in any of those things. I’m happy to do it because I still have that belief. My belief has been renewed in what I am doing and that’s a great feeling. But I had to be destroyed and pick myself up to be able to do that.
Dead Rhetoric: On the hypothetical then, if you didn’t have to do music, ideally if you could do anything at this point: what would you do?
Varkatzas: Profession-wise, I would either just do art full time or I would work in the fire service. In southern California, there’s a ton of fires. I have a lot of friends who work for different fire departments, and I would probably do something with that.
Dead Rhetoric: Is there anything that you saw that didn’t work well for Atreyu that you tried to avoid with Dead Icarus?
Varkatzas: I think just not pandering and no compromise. When Atreyu first started, we were very young and unadulterated in a way. We did what we did and no one got in the way of that, because nobody cares at first. As the train gets going and builds up momentum, there’s other people who become financially invested in what you are doing, and all these people want to have a say and have input. I don’t like all that outside input. For better or for worse, I just don’t like it. Other people might function well, but I don’t want eight people to work on a song. I don’t want the label to tell me that we need a single. I don’t like any of that stuff. I never really have. So with Dead Icarus, we got to avoid all that.
When we made our EP, Ad Infernum, it was self-financed, but MNRK ended up putting it out. So there was no one having a say. No one told us what to do. There was no outside input. When we officially signed with them, and worked on the full-length, they just let us do what we do. Gabe [Mangold] writes all the music and I do all the vocals and lyrics. We are very happy with that, and not having too many cooks in the kitchen. For some people that dynamic is great, but for me, I want to get my ideas out with the least amount of other people’s ideas perverting or adulterating what I am trying to do. I think that’s what makes a lot of bands special. You listen to Hatebreed, because that is their sound and that’s what they do. They don’t have cowriters come in and say “you know what we should try, a DJ.” Fuck that. This is their honest interpretation of life and feelings and how they want to show it in the music.
A lot of bands do co-writes and ghost writes and that’s cool and one or two songs is fine. But I want to hear say, Anders [Friden] from In Flames, I want to hear his interpretation of life. I don’t want to hear his interpretation of life ran through five other people’s ideas. I don’t know how they do it but I’m just using those as examples. But that’s what makes an artist special. That’s what makes their crazy point of view on things. Bob Dylan…I’m sure there was someone at some point who was like, “your voice is weird, you should try doing something differently.” But he said he’d rather keep on keeping on, and that’s why you love that. Because they had the strength and courage to be themselves. I’m a big fan of that.
Dead Rhetoric: I imagine it was pretty freeing then to just work with the two of you for everything.
Varkatzas: It was great. Gabe, my partner, also plays in Enterprise Earth. We just did a tour together and I had a good time with them, so I feel like the sixth or seventh band member. He sends me a demo of a track and it’s basically a riff, a verse, and a chorus for a song. I listen to it and I’m like, “Ok, this is badass!” There has really been no case where I’m like, “this is shot dude.” I might think it’s too long or needs to be shorter, when I hear the full song, but it’s generally minimal input.
Gabe knows what he is doing, and he trusts that I know what I am doing. He gives me those bits and pieces and then he finishes writing the song. I finish writing a verse or a chorus, then he sends me the full song and I send him the verse/chorus that I can record here in my home studio, and I have the ability to fully record myself. I can hear my harmonies, I can do layer tracks…whatever I want to do. I sent him what I think the verse and chorus sounds like, and 90% of the time he will say it’s cool, then I will finish the song to what he has sent me. That’s basically the process. Every now and then he will add in if there’s an extra vocal or a different harmony, because he has a better grasp of actual music and I’m just making sounds that sound good together. It balances me out and has helped me improve in that area.
There’s no “where’s the single” or “this has too much screaming or singing.” I wanted to challenge myself with this Dead Icarus stuff. I didn’t want it to be one dynamic. I wanted to see how much stuff I could do at least ‘good.’ I’m happy with how I pushed myself and practiced in how I could grow, later in the game.
Dead Rhetoric: I think that there’s a pleasant diversity to the music. It wasn’t like you were just aiming towards the early Atreyu stuff. You have been aiming out and going in different directions.
Varkatzas: There was no point for me to relive anything with Atreyu. I’ve accomplished all I wanted to with that band. It was an amazing ride for almost all of it. Why go relive that. I think naturally, if people are familiar with my work and they listen to some of this, obviously it’s going to sound similar, because I’m the same human making these sounds. But I worked to not only develop different ways to use my voice in clean singing or dirty singing, but I also worked to improve the elements of my scream and things like that. To make different voices and make it more dynamic.
When I first did my pre-production for the EP songs, it was all screaming. I didn’t feel like I was taking any risks and it was very one-dimensional. There’s tons of bands that I like that are all screaming. But for me, I didn’t want to approach it that way. I don’t know how many more ‘at bats’ I have, and I want to make every swing the most interesting I can. Do I always hit it out of the park? I don’t know, but I feel good about my attempts and thats what I want to do. I want to feel good about trying to get what I hear in my head out into what I hear in the music.
Dead Rhetoric: As a listener, that’s more interesting to hear. Even if, like you said, not every swing is a home run. But there’s at least the attempt to do something different than do the same old song and dance every time.
Varkatzas: I think too, a lot of people mostly expected me as ‘the screamer from Atreyu’ to just go all-screaming. That’s cool, I mean I scream about 60% of the time. But then there’s also the dynamic element. I wanted to take risks. I wanted there to be peaks and valleys. I wanted the heavy parts to sound heavier because of the melodic parts, and the melodic parts to sound more interesting and catch your ear because of the heavier parts. It’s that juxtaposition that earlier Atreyu, at least in spirit, captured. That was something I wanted to recreate again.
Dead Rhetoric: What would you have wanted to rekindle from those early days of Atreyu? What do you recall from then?
Varkatzas: Just that spirit of unbridled not giving a fuck. No one was giving Atreyu insight on the first three full-lengths. We worked with guys as producers, but the guy we worked with for Suicide Notes & Butterfly Kisses, I think we just annoyed him. I’m sure he had a little input but I don’t remember it, and I don’t think the other guys do either. He was a cool dude, Eric Rachel, he did a bunch of bands of that era, but we weren’t even legal to drink. We were like 18 and 19. We were just going for it. He was telling us stuff and saying things like repeat the chorus…I don’t know what it was at the time.
Then with The Curse, we worked with this guy, GGGarth. I think I was one of the first dudes that screamed that he worked with. I remember I was upstairs in the studio room and screaming and he was like, “that was a good one!” He left the talking mic on and I heard him saying to Brandon, asking “is that how he’s supposed to sound?” And Brandon was like, yeah that was a good one. So he didn’t even know what to do with it. He know how to help us compose a sonically great sounding record and keep it rolling and I’m grateful to him for that, but he didn’t know what to do with me as a screamer. That was on us.
The third one, where we were completely unadulterated was A Death-Grip on Yesterday. We worked with this dude, who was a big name producer, and he was just never there. We were working with his engineer. I remember one time our manager called us and asked how the recording was going. We said it was going great and how we were working away, and he says, “I’m looking at your producer right now.” We were in LA and he was in New York. He told us he was going out for lunch! Literally, that day, sessions start later so we didn’t get there until 10-11am. By 11:30 he said he was going to lunch, and he went to NY. We never saw him. Respectfully, but he was never there. We had to create what we honestly wanted to make, and bounce ideas off of each other, and there was a tiny bit of input, and that was the record.
I like doing things that way. This whole interview I have said I don’t like outside input. That’s not what makes art to me. The art is the uniqueness of the one or two humans creating it, and it’s their fucked up, selfish vision and that’s what works for me. I’m supportive of other people’s creative process, but it’s not a process for me and I’m not for it. It doesn’t like me either.
Dead Rhetoric: You’ve had an identifiable voice in the genre for decades. What was your thought process in terms of keeping it so that long-time fans wouldn’t find the experimentation weird while still progressing?
Varkatzas: I tried not to let the first thing you said get in my head too much. There are going to be moments where I’m clean singing for like 30 seconds straight because it fits the mood of what we are trying to do. It fits the atmosphere of what we want. I tried to focus on that. I don’t want to say I tried to make the screaming more brutal, but by focusing on a couple different types of screams: low, middle, and high would be how I would refer to it. False chord and fry scream developed after my vocal ship had developed. I tried those things out, but I just kind of do what I do now. I wanted to pay tribute to those people and have a shitload of that – this record is mostly screaming, but there is a lot of melody and clean singing and throaty clean singing…I don’t know how to qualify it. I wanted to satisfy those people to an extent but I wanted to satisfy myself as well.
Dead Rhetoric: What are the pluses and minuses of starting over with a new band after being in a very established one?
Varkatzas: It’s emotionally gratifying to be working from the ground-up again. We just did a tour with Nekrogoblikon and Enterprise Earth and I helped drive every day. Everybody drives every day to some degree when you are out there in an RV. I pushed and unloaded gear and sold merch with the help of Travis, the singer from Enterprise Earth showing me the ropes of what I should be doing. I just pulled my weight. I was out at merch talking to people and having a good time. That aspect of it is great, especially coming out of the pandemic. It was difficult.
There was a lot of stuff that didn’t go right at the beginning. I almost wish I didn’t announce the band until later, because we got so bogged down with stuff behind the scenes that I choose not to get into because I don’t want to talk about anyone in a certain way. And just to be clear, the delays had nothing to do with Atreyu or any of its members. I know people’s minds like to go there for different things. In this particular instance, it was just other bullshit behind the scenes. Record industry, and it was terribly slow and weird throughout the pandemic, and it is still weird. It’s also this social media game. You have to be an influencer and a musician. I tried it for a little with Dead Icarus and then I deleted my videos off of Instagram. I support it for people who are good at it and know how to do it. I’m not hating on them at all. But you can tell. No matter what, it’s disingenuous to a degree, but it’s palatable for some people. But if you have not taste for it, like I don’t. “Of course, I’m in a band! My shoes smell! Here’s three records!” No! Shut up, nobody cares. It’s just a silly thing to me. I don’t want to do that.
If you like this band, you like it because you like the music and live show. That’s what we do. Not because you think I’m some sort of fun personality. I’m not. I have three kids, I work out five days a week, I try jujitsu three days a week, I eat healthy, I rarely drink at home, I love my wife, I coach my kids jujitsu and basketball teams, that’s not exciting internet stuff. But that’s what I do. I go to bed by 10 or 11 at the latest and I do not go out and socialize and drink for the most part, unless it’s with ‘my dad group.’ And then it’s because the kids are out and we are all watching UFC after a kids party or something. That’s my life and I love it. But it doesn’t look cool. I don’t know how to quantify my 30 minute conditioning workout to make it seem sexy and fun. It’s me gasping for air, sweating, and wearing short shorts.
Some people are really great! But I don’t want to sit there and edit or set up the camera and do different shots of it. Like, Matt [Heafy] from Trivium is excellent at all social media, Twitching and streaming and all that good stuff. Awesome for him, and financially I’m sure its super helpful too. That’s great! I think for people like that, it’s awesome! He’s providing good content and it’s great. He has the patience and mind to pull it off. I do not. I don’t know, I’m a little older at 42, and I’m not that old but old enough not to give a fuck. When I see people out at the gym with cameras, I’m of the age group that’s angry about it. Get that shit out of here. Nobody cares about you and your little trip. That’s a weird thing for me and it’s a big part of being in a band these days. I think we should get rid of it.
We should stop demeaning artists and making them jump through those fucking hoops. It’s so fucking stupid. You don’t see Matt from Avenged Sevenfold jumping through hoops for the camera. He doesn’t need to do that. He’s pushing himself to be better in real life and his band to be better. He’s there for his family. Why ask us to do that stuff? A lot of us should stop, because it sucks. It looks contrived. Other people see that and don’t like it. If you are good at it, you know I’m not talking about you, but if you are bad at it or you feel angry at me for saying that, then you probably shouldn’t. I’m a case in point, I tried to do it and deleted it.
Dead Rhetoric: What are your plans for the rest of this year and into 2025?
Varkatzas: Nothing that I can announce or talk about yet. Except the record coming out on Halloween. We are excited and we are focused on getting there. It feels like we should have a full-length out but we don’t. Just getting people to hear it and give it a shot, that is what I am about. We have tour stuff in the works, but until I get the green light, I can’t talk about it. Sometimes I have talked about stuff too soon and then it takes 8 months for it to happen, so I just keep my mouth shut now. But stuff is in the works, and I’m sure I’ll have stuff to blab about soon!