Q&A - Vigilanti

Emerging from the lockdown in 2021, VIGILANTI, a rock band born from the camaraderie of school friends, has been on a meteoric rise. Since February 2022, they've tirelessly honed both their music and stage presence.

Their journey has been nothing short of spectacular. They've conquered multiple cities, celebrated a sold-out show at SWG3 in March, and headlined a packed King Tut's in the heart of summer. Sharing stages with renowned acts like The Luka State, Himalayas, and Daytime TV, VIGILANTI's magnetic performances have left audiences craving more.

It's really exciting to see you guys are about to release your debut EP '' Pick Your Poison", how do you guys feel and what was the process like for making it?

We are absolutely thrilled for our Debut EP to be released into the world, what was once some silly ideas & lyrics written washing dishes & waiting tables we turned into visual and audio spectacles, and it will now belong to our family, friends & fans to listen to wherever & whenever they want – which is what we started the band for.

The process was strangely overwhelming to say the least. Because The Four of us have busy work/life schedules in the restaurant industry it was quite hard to organise the required time and energy it takes to produce a full EP – Especially one as intricate & as eery as ours. The process had a strangely addictive feeling to it, spending hours in a DIY studio playing the same parts for days on end is torture for most people but for us we couldn’t contain our excitement or our laughter though the whole experience.

Initially we started off with the idea of releasing one single, but we weren’t too happy having so much anticipation for our first track of 2023 with just the One Track.  After finishing track 2 we were set on piecing a Creepy Halloween storyline together through a 5-track record. We scraped as much money together as we could, one thing led to another and we finally finished our first record – it got mastered, polished and is now ready for the perfect launch at our favourite time of the year!

We've seen from the likes of TikTok that you seem to be fan of Panic at the Disco and Arctic Monkeys, who are your biggest musical inspirations? 

The musical journey of the likes of Arctic monkeys, Panic! At the Disco & Måneskin are what make them our biggest influences, although it is somewhat surreal how far these bands have come their journey is what inspires us to perfect and have fun with everything we do. Recently However, our musical pallet has been enjoying the likes of My chemical Romance, System of a Down, Deftones & Nothing but Thieves.

  If you could collaborate with anyone on future music, who would it be? 

 The music we play just now varies between Heavy Rock & Alternative Rock with slight elements of funk, realistically we would be ecstatic to collaborate with a rap artist such as Bemz or have Dead Pony’s Vocalist ignite a track Of ours – but an all-time goal of ours is to collaborate with Queens of the Stone Age.

From an outsider’s perspective, it's really nice to see how united you all are, how did you guys form the band? 

Forming the band took a long time, Nico and I met with a few mates in High school to jam but it didn’t stick, through lockdown it was harder to see each other and practice but we were able to make TikTok’s & started gaining popularity as a bassist and singer. It was at a secret house party we met our drummer Ryan and the same week Adam, our guitarist, came into the picture.

Within a Fortnight we knew we had something special, something Nico and I waited over a year for – and the rest was history.

You've recently played at King Tuts, and it looked like an amazing show from the theatrics to the crowd, tell us your favourite parts of the gig?

The theatrics definitely took our fans by surprise, what took us by surprise was Ryan’s drums breaking at our fully coordinated introduction to the show just he stepped on the stage… there was at least 2/3 minutes of us quivering with fear that the Gig was over before we even started but he managed to keep his cool and fix them as our mate (dressed at the Circus master) cleverly stalled the crowd.

In all honesty when you are on the stage you can’t fully comprehend the impact your performance has on the crowd. On top of entertaining, we had costume changes, fake blood, make-up & our instruments to worry about which made it almost impossible to take in everything at once. Seeing our little community of fans congregate to see us was heart-warming but I think the best part of that show was us collapsing after it finished on the stairs outside King Tut’s.

We were practically drenched in sweat and fake blood, as we came to terms with basically selling out a venue of that capacity and stature and being fanned by the Organisers & Reps as they told us that was one of the best performances they had seen in that Venue.

Follow Vigilanti’s socials here

Vigilanti’s debut ‘EP’ comes out tomorrow on the 27th of October, look out for it! In the meantime, listen to their other singles down below!