Nashville’s Orthodox delivers some of the most intense metalcore you’ll ever hear. Their 2025 release, ‘A Door Left Open,’ showcases the band at their peak, packed with relentless breakdowns, mind-bending guitar sounds, and an overall sense of danger that’s amplified in their live shows. Guitarist Austin Evans draws significant inspiration from his anime background, a influence that subtly or overtly shapes the band’s unique approach.
We sat down with Evans to discuss their latest album, the drive to create the craziest music possible, and the shared passion for guitar music that bridges the metalcore and anime communities.
**Q: You recently wrapped up your headlining tour and are now on the road with Dying Wish. How has the new record been received live?**
**Austin Evans:** It’s been incredibly cool! I honestly didn’t expect so many people to show up, and the shows were amazing. Fans really embraced the new songs live, which was exactly our goal when writing this material – to create something that would thrive in a concert setting. It was great to bring those ideas to life and see the crowd reactions. Even for songs people might not have heard as much, they still had a blast, which is always reassuring. Playing new music live can be nerve-wracking because there’s always a chance people aren’t as familiar with it as the older tracks. You have to adapt your approach to make sure it connects, and thankfully, it did. I’m thrilled with the reception. The new songs are definitely my favorite to play, though that might just be because I’ve played the old ones for so long. They feel incredible, it’s sick.
I’m genuinely blown away because I’ve rarely played shows where it felt like the crowd was primarily there for us. For most of my career, I’ve approached live music trying to win over audiences. So, walking onto stage now and hearing crowds cheer specifically for Orthodox feels like we’ve truly entered a new chapter. Our older music is fantastic, but ‘A Door Left Open’ is on an entirely different level. It feels like we really went ‘Super Saiyan’ on these tracks!
**Q: Did you approach the writing and recording process for ‘A Door Left Open’ differently?**
**Evans:** Not drastically. I simply aimed to make everything even crazier, somehow. It’s not that I thought we weren’t already doing that. ‘Learning to Dissolve’ was my first record as a writer for the band, and my first LP overall. Moving to this album, I had the benefit of seeing how the last one was received, how people reacted to it live, what ideas worked, and what didn’t. This gave me a clearer vision and a better understanding of what would resonate, helping to shape the kind of songs I wanted to create. While I often say ‘I,’ it’s truly a collective effort. If the band doesn’t like something I bring to the table, we don’t use it. Plenty of my ideas didn’t make the cut, and conversely, some I thought would be scrapped ended up staying – which is cool too.
Mostly, I tried not to stress myself out with the writing process. I’ve felt pigeonholed by time constraints before, feeling like I needed to finish things immediately. For ‘A Door Left Open,’ I took my time, spreading the writing process over an extended period. This allowed new ideas to flourish, preventing us from getting stuck in a repetitive rut. I’d write a song or two, then step back, put them aside, and revisit them later with fresh perspectives. Anytime we’re in the studio, we look at the collection of songs and wonder how they’ll blend, but then we put it all together and realize, ‘Oh my god, this is actually just sick.’
**Q: At the end of the day, making music should be fun, and it should incorporate all the new sounds and inspirations you’re discovering.**
**Evans:** Exactly. I want to be happy with what I create. Whenever I’m pressured or lack the space for my ideas to develop naturally, I’m never satisfied with the outcome. It doesn’t matter how ‘sick’ it is; if it feels forced, I don’t like it. I prefer to approach it only when it feels right, which works better for me personally.
**Q: Was anime a common topic of conversation on your recent tours? I know some bands on the bills are big anime fans.**
**Evans:** Surprisingly, I didn’t talk to most of them about it more! They’re absolutely 1000% into anime. They’d comment on my ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ poster in my room just from selfies I posted on Instagram, saying, ‘We know you love this, that’s awesome!’ I wish I’d deep-dived with them, and I’m going to try to do that more on this Dying Wish tour. What’s cool about bands like Fromjoy and Omerta is how genuinely they want to get to know you. They ask a lot of questions, and I was equally keen to learn about them. Every day was a gamble; they’d come up and ask something like, ‘So, what’s your favorite riff of all time?’ How did we even get here? But we never got to anime, which is surprising. It would have been sick if the whole squad had bonded over it.
Everyone in Omerta, for sure, are huge anime fans. They even incorporate it into their songs, and it’s sick. That’s why I love that band – they write a lot of that old-school, crazy stuff. I remember when they dropped ‘Charade.’ There’s a ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ song I can’t recall that it reminded me of so much. I sent it to Gus, saying, ‘Your music reminds me of this,’ a really slow, moving Japanese song I used to play on DDR. Hearing that influence in their music still hypes me up to watch them perform every single day because they’re just wild.
**Q: I think Orthodox has an anime opening energy, but in a different way.**
**Evans:** That’s kind of how I approach music. There’s so much music, especially in the States, that walks the line of what I’d call ‘anime music.’ In my mind, Counterparts is a shining example. When I hear their music, I immediately think, ‘Okay, this belongs over the opening of some shonen series,’ with people flying around, using superpowers and all that. I feel like a lot of American bands do this without even realizing it. I definitely infuse that into Orthodox’s music in our own way, because I really enjoy writing like that. I even wrote a standalone anime opening song once, with piano and crazy guitar solos, and it’s been sitting in my Dropbox for about six years. I made a video for it, but the footage got corrupted, and I was so frustrated I just gave up on it. But it was sick, I’m not gonna lie. It was awesome. I’ll send it to you, straight up. It’s hilarious!
**Q: Yes, please do! I think AMV culture needs to make a comeback. So many of us are where we are today because we saw one that changed our lives.**
**Evans:** I used to do that so much as a kid! I’d go on YouTube, find AMVs of series I liked, but I didn’t care for the songs. So, I’d open a separate tab, mute the original AMV, and play a song I liked over the footage. I’d just sit there and watch, thinking, ‘Man, this is so awesome.’ It was always an interesting mix of songs, like equal parts Linkin Park, Slipknot, and Papa Roach.
**Q: Yes, it was always like ‘Headstrong’ or ‘Down With the Sickness.’**
**Evans:** Exactly! I remember an AMV someone made for the old Broly movie. Dude, I’d mute it and play ‘God Hates Us’ by Avenged Sevenfold over it, just watching and thinking, ‘This is so awesome.’ I didn’t know what the original song was, but bye! Just breakdowns. This is what breakdowns were truly meant for.
**Q: They were. You look back at all the old Dragon Ball Z movies and they had Drowning Pool, Deftones, and all those bands. Watching the Cooler movie and thinking, ‘Damn! This meshes so well with what’s happening!’ Which is why I love those movies so much.**
**Evans:** I grew up on the Bruce Faulconer Dragon Ball Z score and the Toonami mini-movies. When I first discovered the original Japanese score, I actually didn’t like it because I was so used to that early 2000s, guitar-driven Faulconer score. So, watching the old Dragon Ball Z movies with guitar riffs playing behind the fights, I just thought, ‘This is so sick!’ That’s the kind of Dragon Ball Z I prefer – the old-school guitar riff fights. It’s sick.
**Q: The Bruce Faulconer score was actually the first album I ever bought on iTunes, so I totally get it.**
**Evans:** Oh yeah, it’s just so good. I know there’s some controversy surrounding it, which I looked into eventually. But for me, that’s the Dragon Ball Z I know. It’s like an insane solo over an opening, and you’re six years old, thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?!’
**Q: Exactly. You understand. So, would you say Dragon Ball Z is where it all started for you?**
**Evans:** I think Dragon Ball Z was the first time I ever saw anime. This is so specific, and I don’t know how I remember it, but I was at a Pizza Hut buffet with my grandparents. They had a TV in the corner playing Cartoon Network, and it was Super Trunks versus Perfect Cell. You know how old Dragon Ball was – everything took an eternity to happen. I just remember watching them talk the entire time, not fighting. They were just like, ‘You suck, I am better than you.’ I was probably five years old, and I thought, ‘I don’t know what this is, but they look cool with the hair and giant muscles. I’m into this.’
My first true active introduction was probably ‘Budokai 3’ on PlayStation 2 or ‘Budokai Tenkaichi.’ I played the hell out of those games. Then Naruto came along eventually. I was the stereotypical Dragon Ball Z and Naruto fan. I didn’t really watch anything else when I was super young because I didn’t have streaming; it was whatever I could catch on TV. Naruto was the first series I really actively followed and delved into the lore. The first arc probably got me. I loved that so much, and then I got ‘Ultimate Ninja’ on PlayStation 2.
It wasn’t until we got streaming that I really started diving into more anime. I remember getting into ‘Blue Exorcist’ pretty early on, and ‘ERASED.’ It blew my mind that anime could be something beyond just superpower battles, that it could depict real-life situations and tell stories outside of fighting. ‘Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood’ absolutely destroyed me.
**Q: It’s a pretty crazy way to be introduced to the darker themes of art, via animation placed alongside Looney Tunes and Dexter’s Lab.**
**Evans:** It was crazy, man. The big thing for me was that it just looked so much cooler than typical cartoons. Any story behind it at all was probably the key to pulling me in, because television at that point was just whatever funny episode of Spongebob was on. Anything with a story, I was usually getting from video games or movies. So, seeing it in ‘cartoon’ form really drew me in.
**Q: As you were discovering heavier anime, was that around the same time you were getting into heavier music?**
**Evans:** It was maybe a little before or around the same time. I got a Dragon Ball Z DVD – it was Super Saiyan 3 Goku versus Fat Buu – from a Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. Around that time, I was also getting into CDs and music because my mom’s boyfriend had a huge CD collection. He was into thrash and old eighties hair metal, but he also had a lot of newer things. I don’t think he liked it, but he might have picked it up just to have it. He had ‘Ashes of the Wake’ by Lamb of God, and a few Slipknot CDs. He didn’t like any of that ‘screaming stuff,’ which is weird since he owned the CDs!
Around then, he gave me a Walkman or a CD player and told me I could pick out whatever I wanted. I’d sit in the corner of my room, turn off the lights, put on a CD, and just listen. It’s funny to think I used to do that, but it was so cool and really expanded my tastes. We live in an age where there’s so much happening, so many distractions, especially with cell phones. But back then, I’d just sit down, put on a record, and truly listen to it. Same with Dragon Ball Z and other anime – I just wanted to take it all in. That’s all I cared about: anime, skateboarding, video games, and metal music.
**Q: Once you started getting more into music and unpacking these albums, did that affect how you watched anime? Did you start noticing the Faulconer soundtrack and realize there was a soundtrack at all?**
**Evans:** Kinda, yeah. It wasn’t really until ‘Dragon Ball Z Kai’ started rolling out that I noticed it specifically as ‘music.’ Because my brain just went, ‘What the hell is up with this music? This sucks!’ It wasn’t the old music!
With the metal stuff, the Faulconer score, and all those early Dragon Ball Z and Naruto video games that had crazy soundtracks – ‘Budokai Tenkaichi 2’ and ‘3’ still have some of my favorite video game soundtracks ever. I go back and watch those YouTube videos with the soundtracks as one long track. I’ll listen to them while playing Tony Hawk even today. Anime games were definitely a push for me in terms of what I liked in music, especially heavy music, because the guitar work was sick. Everything was sick, the electronic layers and all. Maybe that’s why I incorporate a lot of that into my new music. Any of that old 2000s-era PS2-core stuff is huge for me. I listen to breakcore and breakbeats all day. I love reminiscing about that 2002 to 2006 pocket so much. It’s awesome.
**Q: Or even playing something like ‘Tony Hawk’s Underground,’ switching the disc, and the music isn’t that different. You’re skating to Black Flag, and then you’re fighting as Gotenks with something just as guitar-driven playing. They really aren’t that different, are they?**
**Evans:** Yeah, it was just so huge back then, and it still is conceptually. But it definitely had such an impact on me growing up; it absolutely shaped me into who I am right now, for sure.
**Q: On that note, there’s such an overlap between these two communities. Even the bands you just toured with and are currently touring with, like Dying Wish and Static Dress. There’s a clear crossover between anime fans and heavy music fans. Why do you think those two scenes specifically go so well together, or why those things hit you so hard at the same time?**
**Evans:** I’m sure it has a lot to do with what I said earlier, just how they meshed, at least in the early days. I feel like even now, anime in general tries to get even crazier with how they incorporate music into the medium. Guitar music is such a part of the fabric of both communities. There’s an artist from Japan called Sokoninaru. They are the embodiment of peak, ADHD, super-fast anime music, where everything’s cut incredibly fast, and the guitars, drums, bass – it’s all insane. Every time I listen to it, I just envision anime openings.
I see newer anime now, and they just have breakdowns in the music. It’s honestly heavier now than it was back then, which is kind of nuts. We’re definitely in an era of breakdowns breaking into the mainstream. It’s amazing how many people come to heavy music shows wearing anime stuff. Anime is an alternative in its own world, especially in the Western world, because it’s really popular here, more than you’d expect. It made me love Japanese culture and explore Japan as a whole, seeing how it can be a source for so many incredible stories.
It made me feel like I was branching out in a very specific way, especially because when I first got into anime, there was no way I could tell anyone I liked it. I couldn’t go to school and talk about anime to elementary school kids; they didn’t know what that was. When I did find friends who were into that stuff, it felt like my own underground alternative area because I felt different for it. If you liked anime and metal in school, you were probably getting made fun of. So, when you have that underground scene conceptually, you start to mold other parts of your life around that. You found that thing that separates you from others. That applies to heavy music as well, because it’s not commercially accepted in many ways; not everyone listens to it like pop or country music. When you find it and truly love it, of course, you want to make that a huge part of yourself.
**Q: For our demographic, Hot Topic was the meeting place for both scenes in a way, too.**
**Evans:** Yes! Going to Hot Topic, going to FYE, even Spencer’s and having a little fun for a second, just taking it in, even though I knew I probably shouldn’t be in there.
**Q: Is there anything on your watchlist you’re trying to catch up on?**
**Evans:** It’s crazy to even say this because I feel like the average anime consumer has already caught up with it, but I have not started ‘JUJUTSU KAISEN’ at all. I’ve had a million people tell me how awesome it is, and I definitely need to get into it. I haven’t watched a new anime in quite some time. The last thing I watched was ‘Chainsaw Man.’ ‘Chainsaw Man’s great. It took forever for the movie to come out, and I don’t want to read the manga if I can help it. I prefer to wait because I love experiencing the anime form versus the manga. I don’t feel as much payoff getting to that specific thing if I read it. I almost like the anticipation of ending a season and thinking, ‘Okay, now I have to wait for the next thing!’
Wait, no. ‘Chainsaw Man’ wasn’t the last thing I watched. I definitely got to the end of ‘Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba,’ and I still need to see the movie. That was another one where I didn’t read the manga at all. I’ve just been surprised every single time they drop something, which is sick. I feel like ‘Demon Slayer’ is dropped at perfect intervals. I remember when ‘Attack on Titan’ was first rolling out, and they got to Season 2 with only 12 episodes versus the first season’s 25, and not knowing when that third season was coming out. I thought, ‘Bro, I cannot keep doing this.’ That was the only time I went and read the manga because the gap between Season 1 and Season 2 was so long, I didn’t know if it was ever coming back.
As for newer anime, to be real, I watch a lot of really chill shows. I’ve been going through ‘Kaguya-sama: Love is War.’ It’s so dumb, but in the best way. Sometimes it gets emotional or cute, but it doesn’t require too much brain power or focus. I’m just now starting Season 2. The concept of it made me think, ‘There’s no way this lasts longer than one season, I’m just going to watch it because it’s funny.’ And then there’s so much more! I love slice-of-life anime. Whenever I literally just want to chill on my couch and do nothing, I just put it on.
**Q: This just makes me think of how much I love being in Japan. It’s the coolest place I’ve ever experienced.**
**Evans:** It’s so cool. If you go, go for at least two weeks, I’m telling you. If you go there for five or six days, you’re going to feel like you’ve done nothing. I’m not even kidding. Don’t do that. When I got there, I was originally only supposed to be there for five days. I went with Inclination, playing guitar, and they were going to leave, but I straight up rescheduled my flight and stayed by myself. At that point, I thought, ‘I can’t go.’ So, I ended up staying for, I think, 10 or 11 days. I slept in a capsule hotel by myself and had the best time.
**Q: I always ask this question, but if there was a character from any anime you’ve watched that could join Orthodox, who would it be and what would they do?**
**Evans:** Oh my god, okay. Tough question. Immediately, I thought of the Wind Hashira from ‘Demon Slayer,’ Sanemi Shinazugawa. I’m like, if he joined my band, number one, he’s scary as hell. He would mess some people up in the pit. I don’t know if I love his attitude, but I love his entire aesthetic. I think he looks so cool. He’s a monster. He would probably write some lunatic music. Not only that, but he would just completely scare everyone. The whole point of Orthodox is straight up just scaring people. His ass would freak everybody out. He’s making you stage dive. He’s picking you up and he’s throwing you.
**Q: My last question is, what would you say to Crunchyroll readers who haven’t listened to Orthodox before?**
**Evans:** If you like crazy guitar stuff, you should check out the band. If you like horror anime, you should check out the band. If you like music that has many peaks and valleys, you should check out the band. A lot of the influence I’ve received over the years through anime definitely reflects in the music that we write. I would implore you to check it out just to see if you can find those details in the music while you’re listening to it.
Image by Ryan Johnson
Image by Darius Fitzgerald