“I’m sorry. You’re kind of like my therapist right now.”
This isn’t the Jason Aalon we’re used to. Several weeks before the announcement of FEVER 333’s new album, Darker White, Kerrang! catches up with the frontman in a park in Venice Beach, California. Under a typically sunny sky, he gets his morning coffee and tells us he’s unbothered by the early hour, being a father to two young children. Nodding at his surroundings, he remarks that, “Trees and play equipment, that’s pretty much my life now.”
Quickly, though, it becomes apparent that all is not well. Usually a fireball of wild energy onstage, and a man who talks in determined, forward-looking words off it, sharing at length ideas for the change he wants to see in the world and the importance of putting your energy into it, today he often talks as if that man is a once close friend he hasn’t seen for a while. Not least when, asked about the new album, the first with the band’s new line-up (completed by drummer Thomas Pridgen, bassist April Kae and guitarist Brandon Davis), you’re not met with bullish, cast-iron confidence and purpose in what he calls “the mission”.
“I am currently experiencing a very real and threatening type of darkness in my own mind and my spirit,” he says. “I don’t think it’s forever. But it’s consuming me at the moment, so I don’t really know what to expect from this album or from the people.
“I’m trying to work through all of this in real time,” Jason continues, apologising for neither the first nor last time that perhaps this interview isn’t the usual. Indeed, he admits that the black cloud had him less than enthused about doing it, knowing where he was going to go with it, but he’s glad he’s here. “Before, I would really practice, and I made sure that I had answers for everything. [Now] I would like to show a type of humanity and humility and emotional authenticity to people now, versus having an answer that is seemingly didactic every single time. I would like to just work it out in front of you, bro. So that’s kind of what I’m doing now.”