Alexisonfire went into Toronto’s Revolution Recording with no finished songs for their sixth album. Dallas Green had been putting together drum loops, electronic sketches and little instrumental ideas without melodies, and the five musicians started playing around with them. They spent sixteen months working this way, eventually taking the recordings to producer Kevin Ratterman at Sonic Ranch in Texas. The result, “Bleed It“, is due on March 19, 2027 through Dine Alone Records, with considerably more electronic and industrial influence than the Canadian post-hardcore band have used on previous albums.
Wade MacNeil had a pretty simple reaction to where they ended up.
“We made the record we didn’t set out to make, which ended up being the best conceivable thing we could have done.”
Back in December 2012, Wade was telling interviewer Matt Schichter that Alexisonfire were coming to the end of their time together. They were playing their farewell tour after announcing their split in 2011, and everybody had other things going on. Dallas was busy with City and Colour, Wade had become the singer of Gallows, and the band had agreed to finish things with one last run of shows.
Matt recorded the conversation in Toronto for episode 450 of his interview series. It’s just under fifteen minutes long, and Wade sounds genuinely happy. The shows had been going better than he’d expected, the musicians were enjoying each other’s company again, and the whole experience had given them a chance to finish their ten years together properly.
Fourteen years later, with a new album announced on November 12, 2026, his answers are quite something to revisit.
Alexisonfire’s breakup had been difficult. Dallas had wanted to leave for some time, struggling to keep two demanding musical careers going simultaneously. He was making records and touring with City and Colour while still recording and travelling with Alexisonfire. By his own account, the workload had become impossible to manage.
Wade’s decision to leave for Gallows made the remaining members’ situation even harder. George Pettit, Chris Steele and Jordan Hastings had considered continuing with a replacement for Dallas. Finding replacements for both guitarists and vocalists would have meant changing too much about the band.
When George announced the split in August 2011, he was candid about the circumstances: “Was the break up amicable? Not really. Was it necessary? Probably.”
He still considered the other musicians family.
By the time Wade spoke to Matt in December 2012, much of that tension had eased. Everybody had spent time away, worked on other projects and started getting back in touch. When they finally rehearsed for the farewell tour, they discovered that playing together again came pretty naturally.
Wade had barely any time to prepare. He’d just finished a Gallows tour date in California, flown home, rehearsed with Alexisonfire the following day and then headed out again. He had been performing without a guitar in Gallows, so returning to his old playing role felt a little strange at first.
“Yeah, everything just clicked. I mean, we’ve been playing these songs for like 10 years, so that helped. We remembered them.”
There had been enough time apart for the musicians to enjoy being Alexisonfire again. Wade talked about approaching the old songs with renewed energy and being pleased that the tour had brought everybody together under better circumstances.
“I’m happy to be able to end things on a positive note.”
The farewell run had taken them to London, Brazil, Australia and several Canadian cities. Brazil was a big one for Wade. Alexisonfire had been offered shows there for years, but their touring plans had never lined up. They finally made it to São Paulo in December 2012, knowing that the visit would probably be their only chance to play for Brazilian fans.
Wade considered it one of the highlights of his career. Some of the people at the show had been following the band since their earliest records, and the fact that Alexisonfire had travelled so far only as they were preparing to stop made the experience stranger.
There had been another encounter much further from home that helped convince him to do the farewell tour in the first place.
While travelling in Thailand, Wade had come across a young local fan wearing an Alexisonfire shirt. The kid recognised him and started talking excitedly about the band and what their records meant to him. Wade hadn’t expected to have that conversation on the other side of the world.
Similar things were happening to the other musicians. They kept running into people who had grown up with Alexisonfire, and those encounters gradually got everybody talking again. The idea of performing some final shows had already come up when they announced the breakup. Now they had a reason to make it happen.
“We owed it to ourselves and we owed it to our fans to give it a proper send-off, you know.”
They were taking the shows seriously. Alexisonfire were playing around 23 songs a night, with sets running close to two hours. They’d never normally played for that long. London and Montreal each had two dates, while Toronto had four, so the band kept changing the setlists and bringing back songs that had been absent from their gigs for years.
Wade had a couple of favourites he couldn’t imagine leaving out. “This Could Be Anywhere in the World” was one. The other was “Accidents”, from 2004’s “Watch Out!” He remembered writing it and already thinking about what would happen when they started playing it live.
He was right about that one. The song had become one of their biggest live moments, and he still loved playing it.
“It’s still my favorite song to play.”
As the tour moved through Canada, the band had another decision to make. Toronto could have accommodated more farewell shows, but they needed somewhere to finish. They chose Hamilton, just down the road from St. Catharines, where Alexisonfire had started.
There wasn’t a suitable venue in St. Catharines for a final concert of that size. Hamilton made sense for more personal reasons. George lived there, Wade was born there, and the band had spent years playing shows in the city and its surrounding communities.
It also brought them back towards the southern Ontario towns where they’d been playing when Alexisonfire were just getting started, long before the platinum records and much bigger international tours.
“Hamilton is where George lives. It’s where I was born. We’ve played countless shows there.”
On December 30, 2012, Alexisonfire played their final concert at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, in front of around 10,000 people. The show was recorded and eventually became “Live at Copps”, released in February 2016. The recording includes the full farewell performance, and Dine Alone Records has made the concert available to watch online.
Back when Matt was asking Wade about those recordings, the band hadn’t decided exactly what they would do with all the footage. They’d been filming the Toronto dates and capturing live audio wherever possible. The intention was to preserve those last shows while everybody still had the chance.
They were also working on an archival vinyl collection that would bring together their earlier records, demos and other recordings. One of its most interesting additions had come together almost by accident.
During an Australian tour, Wade and Dallas had performed an acoustic version of “The Northern” for a radio appearance. They tried giving the song a bluesier arrangement, which worked well enough that they kept playing it at other radio sessions.
Alexisonfire had never accumulated much in the way of unreleased songs. Their routine had been straightforward: write a record, record it, tour and start again. There weren’t boxes of forgotten studio recordings to pull out for a retrospective collection.
So Wade and Dallas went into the studio intending to record their acoustic version of “The Northern”. Once they started playing, more ideas followed. They ended up putting together seven additional arrangements of Alexisonfire songs, working quickly and drawing on the years they’d spent writing together.
“Both of us have been writing songs together for a very long time. It just happened really naturally and really easily.”
Six arrangements appeared on the “Death Letter” EP in December 2012. The expanded eight-track collection followed as part of the Alexisonfire vinyl box set in December 2013. The collection also included the band’s four studio albums, earlier EPs, demos and a photo book curated by Dustin Rabin, with images from the final Canadian shows.
Wade and Dallas had been working together long enough to know that their different approaches to songwriting could be useful. They frequently arrived with pieces they’d written independently, only to discover that a chorus, melody or guitar part could fit surprisingly well with something the other person had been developing.
They sometimes struggled to agree on where a song should go. Wade knew they heard music differently, and he considered that a big part of what made their collaboration work.
“I think when Dallas and I write together, we both have a tendency to do very different things in music, and when we combine those two, I think that’s when something special happens.”
Writing with Laurent “Lags” Barnard in Gallows was a different experience. The two musicians shared many of the same tastes in music, art and culture. Their ideas tended to line up much earlier in the process, and they worked from that common ground. Wade enjoyed both approaches, although by the end of 2012 Gallows had become his main musical commitment.
The band had released their self-titled album that September and were preparing to tour it. Wade was enjoying being their singer, and there were plenty of places left for them to play.
Black Lungs, his other project, had to wait.
Wade revealed that he’d already finished recording a second Black Lungs album. It had been ready around the time he was invited to join Gallows, and he had originally intended to tour behind it. Once Gallows took over his schedule, he decided to leave the recordings unreleased until he could give them the attention they needed.
For the foreseeable future, that was where his musical life would be.
When Matt brought the conversation back to Alexisonfire, he wondered whether the positive atmosphere on the farewell tour might convince the musicians to keep playing together. They were clearly enjoying themselves, and the concerts had reminded them how much the band meant to people.
Wade was still convinced that finishing was the right decision. Everybody was busy with other work, and he wanted them to have the freedom to pursue it. He was glad that the final shows had repaired some of the relationships within Alexisonfire.
“We’re all proud of what we did, and there’s no animosity between any of us. We want it to be a nice ending to ten years we’re really proud of.”
Less than three years later, they were playing together again.
Alexisonfire returned for a handful of festival dates in 2015, including Reading and Leeds in the UK and Riot Fest in Toronto. During their Riot Fest set on September 19, Wade thanked the crowd for sticking with the band and told them Alexisonfire were officially back. He even promised they wouldn’t leave again.
That announcement caused some confusion. A few days later, the band clarified their position. They were enjoying playing together and had become close again, but there were no immediate plans for another album or a regular touring schedule. Their other projects and personal lives still came first.
It took another four years before Alexisonfire released new songs. “Familiar Drugs” arrived in February 2019, followed by “Complicit” in May and “Season of the Flood” in January 2020. They continued playing occasional shows, eventually making another full-length, “Otherness”, which came out on June 24, 2022.
The album arrived thirteen years after “Old Crows / Young Cardinals”. The musicians had done a lot of growing up during that time, and the relationships between them had changed.
In a lengthy 2022 conversation with Exclaim!, George admitted that the band had needed time apart to work out their own lives. They’d spent much of their youth travelling in vans together, with little chance to figure out who they were outside Alexisonfire.
Wade also talked about the way they’d treated each other in the early years. Making fun of one another had been their usual way of showing affection. It took time for them to become comfortable being more openly supportive, talking about difficult things and taking each other’s ideas seriously.
That became part of the recording process for “Otherness”. The musicians started hanging out at Dallas’s house, watching films, eating pizza and playing music together. They began writing without much pressure. They also worked more closely on lyrics, which had previously been something the individual singers tended to keep to themselves.
Chris Steele even wrote lyrics for “Blue Spade” and “Reverse the Curse”. George and Dallas found themselves singing together in ways they hadn’t tried before, and the members were bringing a much wider collection of musical ideas into the room.
Looking back at the breakup in that 2022 interview, Wade acknowledged how difficult it had been. He also wondered whether the years away might have been what made it possible for them to record “Otherness” and continue making more albums afterwards.
That was already quite a change from the farewell interview Matt had recorded a decade earlier.
Now they’ve taken the songwriting process even further. “Bleed It” began with those instrumental sketches Dallas was bringing into Revolution Recording, giving all five musicians a chance to shape songs together from their earliest stages. They continued developing the recordings with Kevin Ratterman at Sonic Ranch, near the Mexican border in Texas.
Dallas has spoken about treating the five musicians as equal contributors to the writing, including the way they approached lyrics. George credits Kevin with helping turn their demos into finished songs without losing the different ideas the band had brought into the studio.
Wade considers the resulting record a natural continuation of “Otherness”. Alexisonfire have always been interested in taking their music in different directions, and he believes their years together have made them better at getting those ideas to work within the same band.
The first public taste arrived on November 12 with “Push the River“, the lead single from “Bleed It”. There are still the familiar Alexisonfire ingredients: heavy guitars, George’s screamed vocals and the different singing styles of Wade and Dallas. The new track also carries an electronic rhythm underneath the guitars, giving it a slightly different movement from the band’s older material.
The song deals with the restless mind, the constant movement of thoughts and the search for some peace amid the ordinary difficulties of living and loving. Its accompanying video was directed by Vanessa Heins, who has photographed Alexisonfire for years and also took the promotional images for the new album.
George has been talking about some of the record’s more difficult lyrical subjects, including the brutality people encounter in the world and the uncertainty of being alive. He has also been thinking about love as something worth holding onto amid all that. The band’s new approach to songwriting gave the musicians more room to work through those ideas together.
The fourteen-song album also contains “Dogs of Chernobyl”, which Alexisonfire debuted live during their twentieth-anniversary celebrations for “Crisis” in August. Two sold-out Toronto shows at RBC Amphitheatre drew more than 32,000 ticket holders, with the band revisiting the 2006 album that had taken them to number one in Canada.
It’s been a busy year elsewhere, too. Alexisonfire performed “Crisis” in full at Outbreak Festival, shared arena bills with Billy Talent and played another Vans Warped Tour date in Orlando on November 14. Their South American shows begin on November 17 in Buenos Aires, with dates in Brazil and Chile following, before they head to Australia’s Good Things Festival in December.
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Earlier this month, on November 3, the band also announced a 2027 US co-headlining tour with Poison the Well. Touché Amoré will open the seventeen-date run, which begins in Dallas on March 25 and ends in Boston on April 17. The tour includes Los Angeles on April 2 and Brooklyn on April 14, and one dollar from each ticket will go towards efforts to help people experiencing homelessness through PLUS1.
On November 10, Alexisonfire had started teasing the words “Bleed It” and the March release date on social media. A preview of “Push the River” followed the next day. When the official announcement arrived on November 12, it confirmed the new album and opened the way for physical pre-orders on November 13.
“Bleed It” will be available on CD, cassette and double vinyl, including several limited colour variants. The official pre-order page includes the band’s own store, Dine Alone Records and retailer exclusives from Equal Vision Records and Banquet Records.
There’s one detail from Wade’s old conversation with Matt that’s still playing out at the shows. He couldn’t imagine an Alexisonfire set without “Accidents”. On November 14, 2026, the band opened their Vans Warped Tour performance in Orlando with that very song.
Matt Schichter’s complete December 2012 interview with Wade MacNeil is available to hear in his archive, together with the transcript. The original recording runs for 14 minutes and 59 seconds and documents a band preparing to say goodbye after ten years together. “Death Letter” had just been released, the final Hamilton show was still ahead, and Wade was already planning a future filled with Gallows and other projects.
Alexisonfire’s next studio album, “Bleed It”, is scheduled for March 19, 2027 through Dine Alone Records. It will be their second full-length since the reunion, made by the same five musicians who thought they’d played their last shows together in December 2012.
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