In the process of getting ready for the trip to Australia, Massachusetts punk band the Unseen have just arrived home from a trip from Canada and a few dates with Rancid in America. Between times they’ve been writing another album; does this band ever stop?

“We don’t usually write when we’re on tour,” assures frontman Mark Unseen. Instead, they save that for when at home between tours, practising and practising, and then when on tour usually use time during soundcheck to practice them. “It’s kind of tough, because we never really get a rest from the band,” he says of life as the Unseen. “I think some people get to the point with their bands where they’ll go out and do stuff and then they’ll take time off, but we never get that break because when we’re not on the road we’re at home practising, writing new songs. We tour a lot because we like it, and because financially we have to – we don’t make enough money to sit at home and do nothing and be able to pay our bills.”

He agrees that it’s tough yet rewarding to be an independent band doing it all on their lonesome. At least it’s better than doing manual labour jobs – having done construction, and landscaping, Mark realises that being in a band might result in being away from home a lot longer but it’s a lot less work physically, instead resulting in more mental pressure. “The last few years it’s gotten a little bit easier for us because we’ve started to make a little bit of money; we’re not rich by any means, but we’re at the point now where we come home from tour with some money,” he explains. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, because it is expensive to be in a band.”

The Unseen have been staunchly independent, and have never given serious thought of moving on to a bigger, brassier label, such as likeminded bands like Rancid and Anti-Flag have done in recent years to expand their fanbase. “If you go and do something like that it really might not pay off,” Mark warns. “You might get a lump sum of money up front which might help you for a year, but that money is going to run out and when that money runs out what do you do? You’re back to square one. Moving from Fat to RCA doesn’t mean they’re [Anti-Flag] going to become a big band over night; they still have to work hard. I think maybe ten years ago it was easier for [record companies] to plan and to make stars, now thanks to the internet nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

Mark also formed own label, ADD Records, not to give the Unseen the capacity to self-release their own material, but instead to be more involved in the punk and hardcore scenes, and to help out other bands much as Anti-Flag helped the Unseen early on in their career. “Punk and hardcore is like a community,” Mark claims, “and to this day there’s bands that help us out. If there’s a band that I hear that I think’s really good and they can’t find a label then maybe I can help them. It’s just something I like to do.”

A band who strangely helped the Unseen several years ago was Good Charlotte. They have been spruiking the Unseen’s wares for some time now, really building to a climax several years ago when Benji gave them a plug whilst performing on the Grammy’s. “My dad doesn’t know shit about punk but he was watching the Grammy’s with my sister who was 15 at the time, and he phoned me up and said ‘there’s a band playing and they’ve got an Unseen sticker on their guitar’, and you could see it clear as day as they kept doing close-ups on the guitar,” Mark states. “I don’t think it really did anything for us, but it was funny to see somebody at that level who knew who we were.”

Boston has a strong history of punk and hardcore from the early 1980s, and Mark explains that it continued to develop and expand until around 1990-91, before “…it was taken over by bad metal for the most part. We got into it around 1993, and then we formed the band. When we started there wasn’t any punk bands playing, and then bands started popping up right after we did. Punk just started to build again, and since then a lot of great bands have come out of Boston like the Dropkick Murphys.”

Having been pretty much on tour non-stop for the last two years, Mark is now somewhat removed from the scene. “Back when we started to put out records it was weird because local punk bands were drawing 500 kids like nothing, and the show would be sold out and there’d be hundreds of kids outside. It seems like the shows were bigger back then, and like live music was bigger back then than it is now. Kids don’t seem to go to live shows as much anymore.”

What brought that about?

“I think the internet has a big part to do with that,” he proffers. “It made everything so much more accessible, and when you make everything so much easier to get into it gives kids so much more to get into, so maybe if there were 30 kids who might have got into punk rock before the internet there might only be 15 from a certain town now, because they’re also able to get into whatever – techno, nu-metal, goth, industrial. Everything is so much easier to get to because it’s right at your fingertips. You see something that you think is cool and you can go right to it and look at the culture that it’s involved with. I think the internet is a blessing but also bad at the same time. Trying to be a band, whether it’s punk or metal or hip-hop or whatever, it’s so much harder now because it seems like anybody can start a band, write a song, make a page, go out on tour, and there’s so much more going on now than there was ten years ago. You have to work harder because everyone is trying to do it.”

The Unseen are touring Australia soon. September dates:
Wednesday 6 - HQ, Perth (All Ages)
Wednesday 6 - Rosemount, Perth
Thursday 7 - Enigma, Adelaide
Friday 8 - Arthouse, Melbourne
Saturday 9 - Arthouse, Melbourne
Sunday 10 - Arthouse, Melbourne (Under 18s)
Wenesday 13 - Basement, Brisbane
Thursday 14 - Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast
Saturday 16 - Annandale, Sydney
Sunday 17 - Annandale, Sydney (All Ages)