The Scream Queen Interviews Ryan Waste of Municipal Waste!

You guys have created a cult following with your last few albums...What goes through your mind when you see hundreds of people going crazy in the pits and screaming your lyrics out?

My mind just smiles. I don't know, all of the hard work feels like it's paid off you know? When you see people catching on; maybe we're like corrupting young people, maybe in a negative way, yet it's-- I feel like we're still a positive band having fun. We sing about booze and stuff. We're kind of moving away from gimmicks and just kind of like playing aggressive music and just getting kids get into it. Everyone's involved, we're not singling any type of group out. It's like we're trying to bring everyone to one thing. You know, aggressive music!

Did you ever into intend for your music to be influenced by horror movies, comic books, and stuff like that?

Yeah, I think I was a fan of that stuff, mainly horror movies. I was never into comic books or anything. But I think horror movies, its' just like a fantasy based thing. I think gore is funny, I think that stuff is-- you know, if you're not really doing it and you're talking about it, it's like innocent, kind of. It's fun to write a story that maybe never happened and then say it's true and then see if people believe it or not. We do that a lot. I'm giving all my secrets away!

If your music wasn't inspired by horror movies, comic books, etcetera, what would it be inspired by?

Well, sometimes it is actually personal. Like, the new album, some songs have some reality based themes, which we've never really done before. We've always been like "save that for the political bands that want to preach." We're like, "lets just have fun, sing about monsters," you know? As political as we used to get was "We want to kill George Bush!" And he's out now, so it's like "what do we sing about now?" -- Maybe someone screwed us over, and we're really mad about it, and we're going to write a pissed off song! We've touched on that now and some stuff. I think you can run out of topics, you just got to create concepts that are fresh, or that all sound like horror movies half the time, and we're totally fine with that.

You just said you have a new album coming out, can you elaborate?

Our new album, we just finished a week ago, and it'll be out in August. It's called Massive Aggressive. So that's touching on some more personal stuff, moving away from a lot of the gimmicks. Like, we did a party album, you know? And that could be considered as a joke type thing; we want to just squash anything like that. That's just one record, but that's not what we're all about granted that we drink and have fun, obviously I'm half in the bag right now. But the new album, it's more personal, it's more like, we're not necessarily trying to prove a point but we're like grabbing heavy metal influences, punk rock influences, and just blending it into something that we've always wanted to do. We're the most happy with this album. Any band will tell you that about their new album, you know? But this is the one, I think, for us; it's exciting. Massive Aggressive, out in August-- late August!

Being from Richmond, Virginia, do you sometimes feel or think that you have to meet a certain expectation musically?

No, not at all. I feel like Richmond is a really small town. Everyone has either been in a band, maybe even a famous band, and they're just walking the streets and everyone is friends. Like, you got GWAR from there and of course Lamb of God, who are touring with us. We all live down the street from each other. If you're an outsider coming in you'll be like "I can't believe it's him!!" But, they're at that bar every weekend and you're going to run into them on the street; it's just normal. So, it's really like a small town community; there's something special about Richmond. It's exciting, you know? You don't think about it when you're from there; there's nothing odd to me about it. But yeah, it's a tight-knit community; Virginia's great.