Rody Walker has a lot of jobs. By my count there are at least five: Juno-winning singer of Protest the Hero, Instagram fitness influencer, delinquent Twitch streamer, long-suffering Toronto Maple Leafs fan and Little League baseball coach. So which one is he here to promote? “My Little League baseball coach career,” he says. “Rangers went undefeated last year, regular season and playoffs.”
I coach Little League too, and my season did not go like that, though everybody had fun. “I think that’s why we won though, because we were just having fun the whole time in spite of everyone else who tried to bring us down,” Walker says. “And I learned an important lesson, that even in house league, people are absolutely bonkers, dude. They’re absolutely bananas. The ire that we received from parents and other coaches and the league itself was absolutely unfettered. The thing I learned is that the umps are like 16 years old, and if you’re just nice to them, and maybe in a cool band, they might give you some calls.”
The cool band started in Whitby, Ontario, in 1999. In July it released Within, its sixth album, the first in six years and the first the band fully owns. The Canadian tour behind it runs from Moncton to Victoria and stops at Montreal’s Fairmount Theatre on 18 November, the same room where Montreal Rocks reviewed them in June 2022. I covered their most recent Montreal show, at the Beanfield Theatre in October 2024. On the road, Walker is joined by guitarists Tim MacMillar and Ben Davis, bassist Henry Selva and drummer Matt Kidby.
Twenty-seven years in, a band is supposed to be phoning it in on nostalgia tours, not putting out a record that even Reddit seems to love. “Well, I really appreciate that,” Walker says. “Honestly, there is a lot of nostalgia baiting on it. I believe there is a reference to a song earlier in our career on every song on this record. Even going back to like early 2000s, maybe ’99 itself.”
I noticed the growls and screams of the early albums are back on Within, too. “I never have a plan,” he says. “The plan back in the day used to be like, oh, I got to be different than the last record. I have to outdo the last record in some magnificent way. Now the plan is just like, man, sit down and write what comes out. And that’s what I did for this record. And yeah, at times there’s growling, at times there’s screaming. I stopped doing it for a while because I don’t know how to do it. Like, I just scream, right? And it hurts.”
The night the crowd sang
The album closes with The Mariner, and I had heard there was a story behind the crowd noise in its final moments. “It was really shoehorned in there in the end,” Walker says. “The song is mostly about my aging vocal and stuff like that. But it speaks specifically about a Toronto show where, right before the show happened, I had no voice whatsoever. I could barely speak. I went to do my warm-up and no notes were coming out. It’s not unusual for me to have no speaking voice on tour, but usually when I go to perform the songs or do my warm-up it just figures itself out. And that night it just didn’t. I walked out and I sang the very first line and just nothing came out, and I just had to walk away.
“But the crowd, as we entered the breakdown of the song From the Sky, they took over and they sang everything the whole night, and people were really enthused. And I found it very inspiring. So it was a really terrible night for me that was also rejuvenating in some way, to be sitting in the back room being like, I’m done, dude, I can’t do this anymore, I don’t have the endurance, to all of a sudden just be completely re-inspired by a room of people that really gave a shit.
“So we have the recording of that whole night. And the interesting thing about it is, my microphone was just left where I set it, and we didn’t have any room mics or anything like that. So all of the crowd singing was recorded through my vocal line. And at the very end, you kind of hear it wave in and come out, and that is recorded through my vocal line. That’s the crowd singing from that evening. And that is the whole essence of the song.”
The first single from Within was Mouthpiece. To my ears the band’s political songs have never run left or right so much as up and down, and the rest of the world seems to be catching up: I now have left-wing friends quoting Tucker Carlson. “Well, I would say if your left-wing friends are quoting that freaking dink, they might not be that left-wing,” Walker says. “And I should say that, politically speaking, my beliefs do fall on the left. However, I think it’s important to recognize what is happening here. We are intentionally being divided. And the further that we are divided, the easier we are to manipulate.”
There is a ram on the cover of Within, and I wondered whether it was a nod to the cover of Fortress, the 2008 album that went gold in Canada. “It’s all a coincidence,” Walker says. “I mean, it’s not like not a coincidence, because with everything since pretty much Fortress on, we’ve just been like, animals, dude, animals. We just want colourful shit and we want animals. And that’s why you see it on a lot of our record covers from Fortress forward. So it is sort of a reference, because it’s just in the fibre of our beings, where we want super colourful records with animals on the covers of them.”
I have never seen a band that seemed to enjoy making music videos as much as this one. Lately, though, it has mostly been visualizers. “We’re talking about it,” Walker says. “We want to do more videos for this record. And we have all these fun ideas that would be cool to make. I don’t know, it’s harder now for some reason. It’s harder to get together. It’s harder to make the plan. It’s harder for us to get government grants, because we’ve just been an absolute fucking weight on the tax-paying citizens of Canada. But we’re not done yet. I’m very proud of the music video that came out of this, filmed in Newfoundland by Troy and the boys. But we do want to make something that’s a little more fun, because we always enjoyed that back in the day.”
Owning the record outright has its own cost. “That started sort of the difficult thing of being independent for us,” he says. “The great thing is we don’t have anyone breathing down the back of our necks to do stuff. But with that, we don’t have anyone being like, hey, I got this government grant, where’s the idea, let’s go shoot it. So instead we have to do that. And we get in this sort of state where we’re going, I don’t know, man, I got things to do. So we have ideas for some music videos, but whether they come to fruition or not, we’ll see.”
Before we spoke I asked the internet for questions, and one came up over and over: is Within part one of two? Fans have already given the second album a name and a concept. “At this point,” Walker says, “I will say no comment.” I didn’t push it, but no comment is kind of a comment.
Dinosaurs, steak sauce and Bat Boy
On his Instagram, Walker once posted a song he had made with his son, the boy screaming about dinosaurs. “I think he might’ve been six at the time,” he says. “He doesn’t care at all about that anymore. He was so stoked when we did that. And then a couple of years go by and he’s like, that’s stupid, Dad, I don’t care about that at all. He doesn’t want to listen to heavy tunes. He doesn’t want to listen to fast tunes. To quote my friend Cam, he’d rather listen to the sound of a window slightly cracked and the wind blowing in than the music that I want to put on.”
My own nine-year-old has gone the other way. I gave him a Protest the Hero crash course before the interview, and he has not stopped imitating the part of Bloodmeat where Walker’s voice mimics the riff. I have already had a note from his teacher asking why he is making machine gun noises in class. “That’s hilarious,” Walker says. “That’s a great note to get from the teacher, I guess, because there are so many worse things you could get.”
A lot of fans also wanted his opinion of A1 sauce, which made no sense to me. “So that’s coming from Chicago,” Walker says. “We played a show years ago at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago and someone just threw A1 sauce on the stage for some reason. And I was like, where did this come from? And then I opened it and I drank it. I had sort of a sip of it and it immediately gave me horrible heartburn. So yeah, that’s where that’s coming from. My opinion on A1 steak sauce is, if you got to use steak sauce, you probably don’t have a very well prepared steak.”
The internet also wanted his position on flat earth. “I think conspiracy theories used to be a lot of fun and now they’re not as fun,” he says. “And that kind of includes flat earth. They always find a way to bring it back to white supremacy somehow. So I’m sure that links up somehow. And I hate it. I just wish that we could go back to the Weekly World News and find out where Bat Boy is.”
Leafs, Bruins and a joke in Finnish
The Leafs drafted Gavin McKenna first overall in June. On a scale of one to ten, how unrealistic are Walker’s expectations of him? “I don’t think they’re that unrealistic,” he says. “I expect him to hoist the Stanley Cup this year. I like where the Leafs are at. I’m having fun watching it. I will be disappointed if they don’t make the playoffs, but I do think they’re kind of a playoff bubble team right now. I’m enjoying watching Gavin McKenna’s development. I think he’s going to be incredible. Right now I think he’s really good and fun to watch.”
At this point I had to admit that I am a Bruins fan in Montreal. It goes back to my grandparents and the Irish immigrants here, and there are more of us than you would think. “The Leafs for a long time were like, oh, Leafs and Bruins, those are the rivals,” Walker says. “And I’m going, nah, man, Montreal and Bruins have such a bigger history, a longer history of Stanley Cup battles and stuff like that. I think the rivalry is much deeper in Montreal and Boston than it is in Toronto and Boston.”
I pointed out that Boston likes stealing Toronto’s players, Tuukka Rask among them, and that sent him somewhere else. “Tuukka Rask is apparently really cool,” Walker says. “He’s like a metalhead. He goes to August Burns Red concerts. Which reminds me of the last time we were going through Finland. We were just on a layover and we had to go into Finland and show our passports, and the guy, a very austere-looking bald man, was taking my passport. He was like, what do you do? Why are you going to all these places? And I was like, oh, we’re in a progressive metal band, and he sort of smirked. And I was like, you like that? And he went, you’re in Finland. Everybody likes that.
“But I don’t think we are the kind of progressive metal that Finland loves. I recall a story where I was playing in Finland one time and this man said, I’m going to introduce you. We were playing at this festival. And he walked out on stage and he said a whole bunch of stuff. And then he said our band name and the whole audience laughed. I don’t know what he said, because he was speaking in a different language, but he was making fun of us and the audience loved it. That was like 10 years ago. I still don’t know.”
Watch the full interview below:
Photos – Sandra Lee Layden
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