Waterdown is a German band that is relatively unknown in the U.S. They were recently signed to Victory for their new release "Don't Kill the Boy on the First Date". They are one of the most amazing hard-punk bands that I have ever heard and parallel to that of At The Drive-In..

Waterdown Interview

Question: How did you get your name ?

Waterdown: As we have six people in the band, it was very hard to find a name every bandmember would like. A friend of the band (Ingo, the singer of the german punkrockers Donots) then came up with waterdown, and we all liked the sound of that a lot. And we thought that would be a good name because we try to "water down" the barriers between different musical styles like punkrock, hardcore or metal

Question: How did you all meet?

Waterdown: We all knew each other for some time, as we live in the same area, and all played in different bands before. Some of us like Jörg and Christian or Axel and Marcel played in bands together, and when all of our former bands split up at the same time, we decided to do something together

Question: What is the idea behind the first track on your new release?

Waterdown: The first track on "Never Kill The Boy On The First Date" is called "Impress Me". It is mostly about people who like to critizise everyone else and never have anything good to say. It's about people who rather talk shit about someone else than do something valuable themselves. It is an important thing within the hardcore and punkrock community to question the things people do and how they do them, but some kids are just too quick to judge without really thinking.

Question: Who are some of your influences?

Waterdown: We are influenced by many things in life, and of course we are influenced by many bands, too many to mention them all. We listen to all kinds of music from metal to oldschool-HC to punkrock to "emo" and so on. We are probably as much influenced by bands like Obituary as by bands like Mineral.

Question: What is your most memorable concert experience?

Waterdown: my most memorable concert experience is seeing Christian's former band play their record-release-show. I knew then that I would start a band with this guy, no matter what! The things you remember of shows are most often the people you met there and maybe new friends you made, as we did with Grade, Avail and Snapcase, for example. We're happy that we did not have any really bad concert experiences yet ...

Question: How did you begin to play music?

Waterdown: Like everybody else did: you buy an instrument, you learn to play it, you form a band with some friends and hope that somebody will like what you do. (In fact, that's exactly what we're still doing!)

Question: What is your opinion on internet music?

Waterdown: The internet is a good thing for small bands to be heard by people all over the world. We don't understand why huge bands like Metallica should have a problem if kids can download some of their songs for free from somewhere on the internet. Of course, it would be a problem if nobody would buy any records anymore and just download everything for free, because then especially the smaller bands could not afford to record their songs anymore - but we don't see that happening yet. If you really love a band, you want to support the band and you just want to have their original release in your hands. Downloading songs from the internet is a good way to get to know bands that you maybe read about somewhere, but if you have to pay for that download, most of that money should go to the artist and not to some company.