Palaye Royale - 'We Despised One Another' After 2019 Tour

The road can put a strain on even the closest of bands, and during a recent chat with Stryker on the Tuna on Toast With Stryker podcast, Palaye Royale revealed that their in-fighting reached a troublesome point while touring in support of their last album.

The trouble peaked shortly after the band's 2019 tour with Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson, with guitarist Sebastian Danzig revealing, “We came off the tour, we were really mean to each other. We couldn’t be in a room with one another. We were playing Reading and Leeds and we were getting into fights ... We despised one another.”

The guitarist adds, “[In] 2015-2018 we were okay, but 2019-2020 was like, if you looked at me, one of us, it would just be fist fights. It was ridiculous. It was full brawls, no one on our crew could be around us. We were just throwing stuff at one another, like bottles. It got really bad ... We got home and were just like, 'What happened?'"

Simply put, the stresses of the road and the pressures they had put upon themselves to oversee much of the day-to-day business got to them.

Danzig, who says the band played 700 shows in five years, recalls, “The people that only cared about his band from day one was the three of us and our mom ... We were doing everything, from managing and doing the agent work and doing everything in our career, I was driving, doing everything, selling the merchandise, we were setting up the stage, you had no one helping, and so all the stress was on us. And I think, over time it just built up.”

But the band has bounced back from the rough times stronger than ever, owing credit to their producer Chris Greatti, who helped to break them out of their funk.

“He reeled us in. He took all of our madness and passion and creativity and helped us really, almost like a therapist in a way,” drummer Emerson Barrett explained. “We want to make music that lasts a lifetime, but also we want to have relationships and a love connection as brothers that lasts a lifetime.”

And speaking of making music that lasts a lifetime, Palaye Royale have been doing that of late, working up their next studio album. The record will be called Fever Dream.

“It was kind of very symbolic about everything that we’ve gone through,” Danzig explained. “There’s a lot of ups and downs through a lot of things in our lives, from personal relationships to substance [abuse], to a lot of things and I think that it embodied so much.”

“Especially, you know the past two years, the pandemic, it actually did feel like a fever dream,” added Barrett. "It just did not feel real. And somehow I feel like two years of our lives just disappeared. But we came out with something on the other end.”

The group later described the album as “one of our most prized pieces of work we’ve ever done in our lives.” Stay tuned as more album details become available.

Check out more of the Tuna on Toast With Stryker chat with Palaye Royale below.