Interviews

Brendan Murphy – Counterparts ‘Dropping It Out of Nowhere Was Cool, It Got A Lot of People Talking’

Walladmin

Heavy Metal Wordsmith

Feb 5, 2025

7 min read

This June, the venomous might of Canadian hardcore heroes Counterparts will once again make its way to our shores, with the Hamilton-hailing quartet heading to Australia this June for a headline run, supported by Dying Wish.

Fresh off the tour announcement and the late 2024 surprise release of Heaven Let Them Die, Wall of Sound spoke with Counterparts frontman Brendan Murphy about the magic of spontaneity, levelling up the heavy on the latest EP, and what a potential Aussie setlist may look like as the band ramps up their live dance card in 2025.

After a few months away from the stage since supporting Knocked Loose in Florida last November, Counterparts are roaring into the new year with a huge North American headline run about to kick off in February, joined by Pain of Truth, Malevolence and Foreign Hands. And for Brendan and Co., the rare chance for downtime before a relentless international touring schedule in 2025 is something to be relished in trademark Counterparts fashion.

“Everything’s going well,” shares Brendan. “We’re just enjoying the last couple of weeks. We’ve been off for a minute. We’ve had some stuff, but overall I think last year was more of a slow year for us. This one is gonna be the opposite!”

“We’re all just kind of chilling, enjoying our last couple of weeks at home, and then the tour starts. And then it’s just tour after tour after tour, all over North America, Japan, Australia, South East Asia, Europe…we’re going to be moving quite a lot. We’re just kind of working that out, trying to get some stuff sorted for the headline tour in North America right now. Just classic stuff that we should have figured out six months ago and now we’re scrambling. But that’s Counterparts for you!”

It’s also that very nature of spontaneity that stokes the insatiable allure beating at the Counterparts core; a fact firmly on display both on the notably heavier new EP Heaven Let Them Die as much as it is on the band’s seven full length albums, with several appearing in the Billboard Top 200, and their multiple EPs and horde of singles that have clocked millions of streams along the way.

“That’s how I write lyrics,” Brendan reveals. “That’s why when I go to the studio, everyone is like: do you have stuff prepared? I’m like: nope, have not even started. I’ll wait until pre-production is done, then it’s like: here are the songs, they are not changing, do your lyrics now. Then I’ll just have to write all day, track all night, write all day. And it sucks, it’s the worst. But if I have all the time in the world, I’m going to overthink it, and I’m going to be like: oh, I’ve got a year to write this song, what do I want to say? And then I’m going to keep changing it and doing all that stuff.”

“Whereas, if Will [Putney] says: okay, it’s new now, let’s work on these six. It’s like: oh! Okay, I can’t overthink. I just have to go with what feels right in the moment. And usually, that’s the best, as far as my lyrics go anyway.”

For a band who have maintained a steady flow of material since branding themselves under the Counterparts moniker in 2008, Counterparts have also routinely picked up where they left off with each new release, with subtle foreshadowing often at play. While Heaven Let Them Die may be the band’s most aggressive outing to date, it also organically continues from where Eulogy ended, with Brendan also declaring the EP the “most authentic representation of Counterparts to date” in press material on the day of the surprise release.

“We didn’t think too much about it until maybe a month or two before we went into the studio to start tracking it,” reveals Brendan of the Heaven Let Them Die’s origin story. “We had the studio time booked, we knew it was going to be an EP, but we didn’t have the idea that we were going to surprise drop it, or that it was going to be really heavy or anything like that.”

“We were just kind of like: well, it’s an EP. Let’s go in, we have two weeks with Will. Let’s just see what happens. And I think even a couple of weeks before day one, everyone was like: oh yeah, you record soon, you stoked, you got a lot of demos? And I’m like: I don’t know! I don’t actually know how many demos we have, I think Jesse [Doreen] has two or three, I don’t know if Tyler [Williams] or Kyle [Brownlee] have any? I’m like: I certainly have nothing. Maybe? I don’t know what we have going on.”

“There was a lot of it when we were going over the music, and they ended up having 30 songs or something insane. We could’ve just done a full length. But we were like: yeah, let’s narrow it down. And then we had to decide: what are we gonna do for this EP? How are we going to do something that’s smaller scale, I guess, because it is an EP and not a full length. How are we going to make it stand out and hit, and get people talking about the band?”

“Collectively, everybody was like: Eulogy rocked, and we’re stoked on that. And I’m sure we’ll come back to the more melodic elements in the future, but it was just timing and everyone was like: what do we want to do? And we were like: that one heavy song on every record? Let’s just do six of those. So we did it, and it was really exciting. Everybody was having a fun time in the studio. “

“When I say it’s an authentic representation, I don’t mean necessarily: oh, we hate our old stuff and this is what we want to sound like. But it was literally a representation of all of us working together, not just Jesse writes the music, sends it over and then I write the lyrics, and the other guys just play the song. We were all together in the room. Even me, I don’t write music for Counterparts, I just write the lyrics. But I’m in there throwing around ideas like: oh, maybe the breakdown should be like this, what if this part was like this?”

“It was collaborative and everybody was on the ball, and everyone had a good time. We were actually working together, all four of us. It was like we were all one wheel on a car and we all had to come together to make the thing move. It ended up working out, and it’s great. I loved it. And then obviously people liked it, everyone’s just like: oh shit, this is so heavy! Dropping it out of nowhere was really cool, it got a lot of people talking. “It just kind of worked! I never think that things are going to work out. I always go to the worst case scenario in my mind, but I don’t think it could have had a better reaction.”

“Unless maybe it was like, oh yeah we have 2 million monthly listeners and now I’m rich,” Brendan adds.

Surprise releases are certainly nothing new, with everyone from Radiohead and Avenged Sevenfold through to David Bowie, Beyoncé, Rihanna and Taylor Swift all dipping their toes in rewriting the standard promotional playbook and delighting fans (and often the charts) in the process. But outside of the streaming and industry giants, it’s a potentially risky practice for those in niche genres and/or without a stranglehold global platform. Fortunately for Counterparts, the risk to whittle almost 30 songs down to a six-track fast and savagely furious surprise EP undeniably paid off.

“The music was definitely all over the place,” shares Brendan of the mass of material on hand going into the studio for Heaven Let Them Die. “Jesse probably had 10 songs that were super melodic and not heavy at all. And then Kyle had some that were insanely heavy, and Tyler had some other ones that were more emotional, I guess? I don’t know the word, but they just sounded sad.”

“We were listening to all of these demos, we’re with Will, and he’s like: alright, we have two weeks. We can probably do five songs. And we’re like: five songs and an intro or outro? He’s like: yeah, maybe…? But then he’s like: okay, we gotta pick the six, we just gotta go with the six songs. And those six songs that ended up on the EP, those are the demos that we picked.”

“Doing that too, I like it more so than doing full length albums, I think EPs are way cooler. I hate writing and recording, it’s the worst. But I would be way more stoked instead of doing one album where there’s 12 songs and we cut it to 10, and I have to write lyrics for 12 songs in four weeks type of shit, I would much prefer to be like: okay, we have two weeks. Let’s do three or four songs, and do that two times a year, or three times a year, whenever we feel like it! That sounds way cooler to me. Then people aren’t waiting and it’s not like we’re playing live stuff and just being like: god, this is all the same stuff that we were playing two years ago, or three years ago. It just gets kind of boring.”

“I would like to keep doing the EP thing,” Brendan adds. “I definitely don’t think anyone else is going to be cool with that. I think the management and label, everyone’s going to be like: you have to do a full length. I don’t want to, but we’ll see. If it were up to me, it would be two EPs a year, or just even better for me: whenever we have a song that’s sick, we just go record it and put it out the next day. I would love to do that, that would be sick. But unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.”

With only one performance under their belt since the release of Heaven Let Them Die last November, 2025 will offer both Counterparts and their fans a joint opportunity to experience the most ferocious side of the band to date; with a heads up for punters that the EP’s title track and its extremely achievable lyrics will be on the menu as a potential setlist closer.

“We’ve only done ‘A Martyr Left Alive‘ and ‘No Lamb Was Lost‘ once,” shares Brendan. “We did both of them at our show in Florida a month or so ago with Knocked Loose and that was it. We’ve only played each of those songs one time.”

“I think we’re going to do the whole EP, at least for North America. We have all six songs in the set. They’re not in order, but you get all six of them throughout the set. I’m stoked to do ‘To Hear of War‘, I think that’s going to be a really good one, crowd-wise. That ending breakdown’s going to go pretty hard.

“And I think if people learn the words, it’s not like there’s too many of ‘em or they’re particularly difficult… I think we’re ending the set with ‘Heaven Let Them Die‘ as the outro. That has the potential to be a really big singalong part. We’ll see. I mean it’s what, four words?”

“Hopefully people can learn it!” Brendan laughs.

Sharing with Wall Of Sound back in 2023 some of his favourite Australian tour moments, which spanned everything from Aussie fans coming to the rescue when Jesse’s guitar was stolen while touring with In Hearts Wake through to witnessing a huntsman spider in person for the first time, Brendan also declared at the time that he felt like he’s “the most fun when I’m in Australia”. So what could possibly still be on Brendan’s Australian bucket list at this point in time?

“I’ve done most Australian things, you know what I mean?” says Brendan. “The only thing I can think of is stuff I see a bunch of my friends do when they’re over there, like cliff diving and swimming. And I’m like: well, we’re going to go when it’s Australian winter, so I don’t think that would happen. Also, I’m really afraid of heights, so maybe if it was a 10 foot cliff, I’d jump off of it. But anything higher than that – nope!”

“I love Australia, it’s one of my favourite places on earth. I would live there so fast if I didn’t have to do all the visa stuff where it’s cool for a year, and then after a year I got to work on a fucking farm or something. If I didn’t have to work on a farm and I could just get citizenship, I would live in Australia for sure. It’s the sickest place, but I’m just stoked to be back.”

“It’s going to be awesome. I’m stoked to see all of my friends. It’s a crazy flight, and I don’t expect them to ever fly and be like: oh, I’m going to hang out in Hamilton with Brendan for a week. So when I go there, it’s always really fun. I’m looking forward to it!”

Interview by Tiana Speter @tiana_elena

Heaven Let Them Die is out now via Pure Noise Records.
Stream and order here.

Catch Counterparts touring with Dying Wish this June.

Tickets here