ARCH ENEMY guitarist Michael Amott has said that he’s bandmate, Alissa White-Gluz, has been treated very unfairly by the music media in recent months.
In December 2018, Alissa engaged in war of words with a concert photographer after she allegedly posted one of his photos of her online without his permission.
Also, she was accused by the vocalist of her former band, THE AGONIST, of trying to hold the group back in the five years since her departure from the group.
During his recent appearance on “Vox&Hops”, the podcast hosted by Matt McGachy, Amott spoke about the way Alissa has been portrayed in the metal media.
“Yeah, it’s very unfair towards Alissa, I feel,” he said. “Recently, there’s been a few very unfair things — unfair towards her. I know her quite well now, after spending five years on the road with her and working with her very closely.
“But it’s always gonna be more interesting when, one, she’s female; [two], she’s in one of the most popular metal bands; three, she’s very vocal about certain issues, like veganism and stuff like that. But that’s very positive, and she can use social media to her advantage to spread that message.
“But there’s a backlash sometimes, and it’s a back-and-forth; so, it can swing both ways. Those are the times we live in. I don’t really have any advice for her or anybody else. She’s doing a great job doing what she does, and I respect her tremendously.”
He also talked about how the clickbait culture has affected the world of heavy metal journalism.
“It is just how it is nowadays,” Michael said. “I never thought that kind of journalism would come into the metal scene, or the extreme metal scene; I just never saw that. Of course, with, like, [the members of] MÖTLEY CRÜE, they married people off TV shows or whatever, [and] they were a part of that mainstream… But I never thought that kind of journalism would come into our world, into our scene; I never saw that coming. But now it’s here, and it’s probably here to stay for quite a while.
ARCH ENEMY‘s latest album, Will to Power, was released on 8 September 2017 via Century Media Records. This is the first album to feature guitarist Jeff Loomis who joined the band in November 2014. It is also the first ARCH ENEMY album to feature a song with clean singing as lead vocals, that being “Reason to Believe”, referred to as “their first ever, largely clean-sung power ballad.”
