Code Orange: "We wanted to drop this thing like a bomb"

The best hardcore bands are the ones bold enough to look at the line that borders their designated genre with an eye of disdain, before taking a defiant step over it. One foot may still be planted firmly in the hardcore camp, but they're not afraid to have a kick around with other challenging tones and techniques with that liberated appendage. Not convinced? Look at the likes of Converge, Botch, The Dillinger Escape Plan, even the less complicated bands that toy around with unexpected turns of pace, and with their third album 'Forever' now firmly under their belts, Code Orange could be next to ascend to that league. "We love hard, heavy music," says the Pittsburgh four-piece's drummer and lead vocalist, Jami Morgan. "But I feel like a lot of the bands that are more artistic in some kind of way lose that love for those hard parts. To me, though, those harder parts are still something we're all totally in love with." Throughout the course of Jami's half-hour phone call with Upset, which he answers from Seattle while on a victorious US headline tour, he speaks as passionately about Hatebreed and Earth Crisis as much as he does Sonic Youth and Nine Inch Nails. "I feel like that was the line I wanted to walk," he says with vehement pride for the band's Pennsylvanian upbringing. "Being from Pittsburgh, we learned about the most violent forms of hardcore, and we also learned about art music in the same city. Both of those scenes kind of thrive in that city, so it almost creates these sort of hybrid people." It's this love for hybridity that Jami, guitarist Eric 'Shade' Balderose, bassist Joe Goldman and guitarist Reba Meyers push to its gasping limits on 'Forever', an album that nails a tricky balance between intricate and incendiary, perplexing and punishingly heavy.