THE AGONIST singer Vicky Psarakis spoke to Rock Confidential about the band’s upcoming album, Orphans, and what caused the delay of the record.
“Basically, the main thing is that we didn’t have a label at the time. And that is for reasons aside from the music,” she said. “A lot of things happen that I personally don’t deal with at all. I don’t even wanna deal with it. I’m just here to write music and sing.
“Some people out there didn’t want us to release this album and we just kept really, really pushing and pushing and we almost considered just releasing it on our own — which isn’t a smart business decision. But we were, I think after six months, we were frustrated and sitting on this album that’s so good and we couldn’t do anything about it.
“And then finally, Napalm reached out to us and proposed to release it under a sub-label of theirs called Rodeostar. And as far as we’re concerned, we’re using all the same resources from Napalm — the same team of people, same social media outlets. So we were, like, ‘Okay, let’s do it.'”
She also said that that current ARCH ENEMY and former THE AGONIST frontwoman Alissa White-Gluz was the one that’s been trying to hold the band back.
“I think it’s okay if I were to speak openly about it,” Vicky continued: I’m not one to cause drama but I think for anyone that’s out there and watching and kind of seeing what’s going on, I think it’s fairly obvious that the person that’s been trying to hold us back is Alissa.
In the beginning, she was doing it a lot through interviews and just talking very badly about the band members. That is super awkward for me, because this is a person I’ve never met in my life, so it’s weird for me to be talking about it.
“There’s no knowing how far and to what extent her reach could be to hold this band back. I definitely know some stuff that she’s done and other things are just speculation. So, I don’t wanna throw that out there, but I will say that she has been trying to kill this band ever since she was fired.”
In 2017, THE AGONIST guitarist Danny Marino claimed that Alissa “was playing both sides to have her cake and eat it too” and accused her of not “factoring in the other four lives in the band and their aspirations.”
“THIS was the betrayal. She was playing both sides to have her cake and eat it too,” he said. “She didn’t factor in the other four lives in the band and their aspirations.”
