INTERVIEW: SOiL is ready to go Underground
Photo: SOiL will head out with The Union Underground, RA and Flaw on the Back to the 2000s tour. Image courtesy of the bands / Provided by O’Donnell Media Group with permission.
SOiL and The Union Underground, two important nu-metal bands who made their mark on the music industry 20-plus years ago, are heading out on an American tour that begins tonight, March 1, in San Antonio, Texas. They’re bringing along RA and Flaw, and the bands are calling the trek the Back to the 2000s tour, a fitting name that speaks to their now-classic tunes that dominated airwaves two decades ago.
On the tour, The Union Underground will play songs from its impressive debut, … An Education in Rebellion, according to press notes. SOiL, on the other hand, will skip to its sophomore album, Scars, and bring the sonic onslaught to their legions of fans. RA will pull from From One, while Flaw will pull from Through the Eyes. Expect some loudness.
“We’ve been getting a great response for it,” said Tim King, bass player for SOiL. “We decided to do something a little out of the box and kind of retro, and it paid off.”
This tour came about because King is good friends with Bryan Scott, frontman of The Union Underground. Their friendship goes back more than 20 years. In fact, when SOiL was signed to Clive Davis’ label, and they eventually put out Scars, the first tour they did for the album was with The Union Underground.
“They were on the end of their touring cycle, and we were just on the beginning of ours,” King said. “We just got along super super well and kept in contact all these years. Union Underground went on hiatus after that first record, and me and Bryan still kept in touch. We actually formed a little side project called Into the Fire. We did a few songs and just put them up on the internet and did a video. It was fun to work together on, and he had told me that he had been working on new Union Underground material. We were talking about the good old days.”
King suggested that Scott should reintroduce to the audiences the power of The Union Underground, which has been somewhat quiet these past few years. Then, the conversation turned toward a tour steeped in nostalgia for that turn-of-the-century metal sound.
“Nu metal is really coming back around in a big way,” King told his friend. “You want to reintroduce Union Underground, and SOiL hasn’t toured since the pandemic. Let’s grab a couple other bands from the era, and we’ll all play songs off our biggest records from that era. He was into the idea, and we have the same booking agency. We talked to them, and they were into it. Then we grabbed RA and Flaw into it. I came up with the idea, because I was kind of laughing about it, I’m like let’s grab the DeLorean and go back in time to 2001-2002, and we just started laughing because of how the tour poster came about with the DeLorean and a post-apocalyptic kind of thing. The reception to it has been great. That’s pretty much the gist of how this all came about. It was a brainchild of me and Bryan Scott from Union.”
King said he cannot believe it has been more than 20 years since Scars. The songs on that album, including “Halo” and “Unreal,” are still anthems for metalheads. This tour will allow the band to give the fans those beloved classics, plus some deeper tracks that haven’t been played live in a long time.
“I was just thinking the other day, man, I’m still doing this all these years later,” he said with a laugh. “What’s wrong with me? The great thing about it is we decided that we’re going to do all songs from the album Scars on this run, and we tested it out last year. We did a tour in Australia with Static-X, and then we did some festivals here in the States. We just tested it out, and it was really fun playing some of those deep cuts on that Scars record that we haven’t played in 15, almost 20 years for some of them, like ‘Understanding Me’ and ‘Two Skins.’ Songs like that were deep cuts off that record. It was really fun playing.”
He added: “Me, personally, I always like to watch audience reactions. Is the audience going to wait for ‘Breaking Me Down’ or ‘Unreal’ or ‘Halo’ to come on before they go crazy, or are they going to get into every song on the record? Are they going to be standing there staring at us when we’re playing the deeper cuts? It was great because they just got into every song. It was like they were listening to the record on their stereo back in the day. We’re going to continue that all this year. We’ve got the Back to the 2000s tour. We’ve got a European tour that we’re going to announce. We’re going to announce a UK tour, and then we’re going to be doing some more U.S.A. dates. We’re going to be pretty jam-packed, and it’s all going to be all Scars material this year. So it should be pretty fun.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
SOiL and The Union Underground will join with RA and Flaw on the Back to the 2000s tour, which kicks off tonight, March 1, in San Antonio, Texas. Click here for more information and tickets.
