Fun Fact: Ocean Grove actually premiered 'Ask For The Anthem' twice at UNIFY Gathering...

Walladmin

Heavy Metal Wordsmith

Feb 9, 2019

7 min read

If you're a fan of Easter Eggs, not the chocolate kind, the movie kind, then you're gonna love this, if you don't know what a non-chocolate Easter Egg is, catch up here: Its a sneaky homage or throwback to something in a movie/tv series that connects everything together OR makes fanboys squeal with delight when they notice it. Marvel do it all the time and have perfected the art of showing things in their moves that come back somewhere down the track.

Well, Ocean Grove pulled out a pretty big Easter Egg of their own at UNIFY Gathering this year when they premiered their new song 'Ask For The Anthem', less than a month before it was actually released earlier this week. In this week's Wall of Sound: Up Against The Wall podcast, now frontman Dale Tanner revealed to us they actually played the new song twice to gauge audience's reactions to it and to see if anyone would notice. He told Browny:

"The first time was, I believe, it was during the changeover before Underoath went on. We went up into the DJ booth... cued up the song and played it and we just sort of stood there and kind of watched and it was this very interesting social experiment whereby we were seeing people's responses to this song with no context. Obviously not knowing who it was, what song was this, have I heard it before, whatever. But seeing some people nodding along, some people with a bit of a swagger in their stride or some people dancing or some people even trying to mouth the words..."

[caption id="attachment_70424" align="aligncenter" width="639"]

Ocean Grove backstage at UNIFY Gathering 2019[/caption]

Dale went on to say it was something really special most bands don't get an opportunity to do nowadays because of how social media/YouTube/streaming sites has made getting access to music so much easier. It was good to see first hand the reactions on the spot, without warning:

"That's so interesting to actually get that insight, it's something that we don't get often because I guess in everything we do nowadays, it has that cloud of prior knowledge and context and people sort of make comparisons and judgements based on what they already know..."

"...getting that raw, primal, instinctual insight into how these human begins are responding to our music was really special." - Dale Tanner on people hearing their new song 'Ask For The Anthem' without warning at UNIFY Gathering 2019

He also revealed the second time it was played, more people were aware and actually pulled him and the band up about it, after the song had finished:

"The second time we played it, it was during the day so people could actually see me up in the booth and I was sort of dancing along. I think the second time definitely some people up the front noticed me and they kind of put two and two together and they were cheering and I went down and said 'you just listened to our new song, what do you think' and they were like 'yeah it's awesome' so that was really cool, it was a really awesome experience to be able to do that..."

Now a lot of you may be racking your brain right now trying to remember if you were present for any of those times he mentioned (or if you were the fans he spoke to), either way, that's a pretty fucking cool idea and more musicians should do that in future years. Only now we'll all be waiting.

Check out Dale's full interview in this week's episode of Wall of Sound: Up Against The Wall right here

Browny @brownypaul

Ocean Grove are on tour with Hands Like Houses right now