Music Interviews
Matt Walst Interview: Three Days Grace ‘Alienation’ Album & Tour
Interview: Three Days Grace co-lead singer Matt Walst spoke to The Natural Aristocrat® about their latest album “Alienation”, his most memorable fan interaction, the 2025 live tour set list, and a forensic breakdown of his vocal style.
Full Transcript & Audio Below.
This transcript has been reorganized for easy reading from the original audio recording.
Table of Contents
Three Days Grace. Art by Nir Regev – The Natural Aristocrat®
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT (NIR REGEV): How do you decide who sings which parts live now on some of the older songs? Is it a natural process or preplanned ahead of time?
MATT WALST: We split up verses in choruses on the older songs and the same with my era. I sing a lot of harmonies on the older songs like on “Time of Dying” and “Never Too Late”.
Adam will back me up on “Painkiller”. We got into rehearsals and it kind of just came together. I knew I’d be singing harmonies on a few songs, so I got those down and I was actually playing a lot more guitar at first.
But, you know, we wanted people to know that we have two singers now and not just a new rhythm guitarist.
Matt Walst and Adam Gontier of Three Days Grace. Art by Nir Regev – The Natural Aristocrat®
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Have you ever been playing a song live that didn’t have the streaming numbers of other songs, but it had a huge fan reaction that caught you by surprise?
MATT WALST: Yeah, I think that song is “Riot”. Like I’m sure it’s got a lot of streams, but it was never a number one or anything and every time we play it, the mosh pit goes crazy! It’s so fun to watch.
“Riot” and “Time of Dying” off One-X. It was never put to radio time. That’s a fan favorite too!
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: What’s the most challenging song to perform live?
MATT WALST: Oh, that’s a tough question! “I Am Machine” was always a tough one. It kind of sits on a note at the top of the range where after a while your voice kind of starts to wear out a little bit.
For me anyways, it was always a tough one to do, but now switching back and forth with Adam it’s pretty awesome. So that one. Also, “Never Too Late” is a pretty high one.
Like now I sing a high harmony in the chorus and bridge sometimes. Once I get to the bridge I have to use falsetto on the top of the top note but I get around it and it sounds pretty good!
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: I noticed “The High Road” from Transit of Venus hasn’t had like a single live play at concerts in 2025 unlike “Chalk Outline”. I was wondering if “The High Road” is just out of the set list or is it going to make an appearance in an upcoming show like at the Prudential Center ?
MATT WALST: Yeah, we used to play that one. It’s a great song, I’m sure (we will) down the road. Like I’d like to, I think we might do it acoustic at some point and both of us sing it & play it acoustic. We’ve played that song acoustic a few times in the past.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: What’s the most memorable fan interaction you’ve ever had?
MATT WALST: We’ve had a lot of great, great fans over the years. We have a fan from Florida, her name’s Suzanne, and she’s been to I think upwards of 50 odd shows. It’s a lot! She’s a big fan of ours and she even traveled to Poland to watch us. She’s a big supporter.
I’ve got some gifts over the years. I got a gift in Russia that was like a doll that looked exactly like me! It was like a spitting image. Pretty freaky, but so well done.
The hoodie I’m wearing today actually was given to me by a fan out of Russia. She got it made in Italy. It’s a custom hoodie. So yeah, we’ve definitely had lots of great fans and great fan interactions!
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: What night on the 2025 tour until now felt most celebratory as a band post-reunion? Where everything came together and felt in-sync.
MATT WALST: The past shows have been insane! Like some of these festivals that we’ve done, especially the last one we did, it’s called Inkcarceration was crazy. Like the crowd was absolutely insane! Stepping off of that stage we were all super pleased with the performance.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: I know Adam’s been playing “Rooster” since 2008. I was wondering if you guys would ever consider adding “Black Gives Way to Blue” from Alice in Chains to the live sets. I think it would really fit you guys.
MATT WALST: Yeah! We’re big fans of the grunge era. We love STP, Alison in Chains, Nirvana. I think we’re gonna do some more acoustic stuff down the road. I think on our European tour. We might break down a couple of songs and play them acoustic.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Speaking of Nirvana, I know you’re a big fan. Is that why you went blonde?
MATT WALST: (laughs) No, I was blonde in My Darkest Days and like, dude, I’ve had every hair color possible throughout my life!
But I’ve gone through blue & red and all sorts of hair colors in high school. So yeah, it’s good to switch it up and have fun with it. (laughs)
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Is the opening to “Mayday” meant to be a spiritual callback to “Animal I Have Become”?
MATT WALST: Yeah, totally! Dude, we put it down really to just to be a little nostalgic when it comes on. It’s actually kind of a mix between “Animal I Have Become” and a song I did in my old band, My Darkest Days. It’s kind of like the “Move Your Body” riff too if you go listen to the song. The My Darkest Days riff is a little similar.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: What track on Alienation gave you the most visual scene in your head when you were writing it?
MATT WALST: Probably the song called “Don’t Wanna Go Home Tonight”. It reminds me that I grew up in a small town of 1,300 people. The song reminds me of being young, being at a field party and just not really caring about tomorrow or what I’m gonna be when I grow up or anything like that. Like paying bills! All that stuff when you grow up.
There’s a lyric in that song about when you get older the chaos goes away. But the song just reminds me of being a kid again.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Do you guys write lyrics separately first now and then combine it or is it a completely collaborative process? How does it work?
MATT WALST: It’s all collaborative man! The whole band comes together to write the lyrics. Neil (Sanderson) is a very good lyric writer, so is my brother Brad (Walst).
They’re just very good at staying in the topic of what we’re talking about. They get pretty straight to the point. We’re never really vague about things.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: When I hear the lyrics to “Kill Me Fast”, it seems to me they’re more about the band itself. Maybe it’s just my interpretation of the song. Do the lyrics come from a personal place for you guys or is it more pure storytelling?
MATT WALST: I think we’ve all been in relationships in the past that have been a little toxic and have gone on a little longer than they should have. Well, a few of us anyways. And that song is just kind of about pulling off the bandaid and just ending it. Not letting it carry on beyond a certain point.
You know, it’s like answering the question, ‘If we’re gonna do this, let’s do this. If not let’s end it, and end it fast because it’s just gonna get worse.’
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: With Adam back, is there any past song that you would like to go back and redo with Alienation approach? Like a new take on it?
MATT WALST: Not so much. I think it’d be cool to maybe do five songs where it’s the older songs either from my era or from his era and do the vocals on that.
Like the song “I Am Machine”, Adam sings the second verse and second chorus, and then we sing the last chorus together. I think that’d be a great song to redo and put out there as a dual vocal.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: There there’s been rock bands with the dual front man approach before like System of A Down did with the Mesmerize & Hypnotize albums and of course Alice in Chains. Is your approach going forward from Alienation going to be more of a split vocal take or more of harmonization, like Alice in Chains? What do you feel?
MATT WALST: I don’t know honestly. I don’t know down the road, but I feel like this album we switch it up and I’ll sing the harmony and Adam takes the lead or we switch up the chorus.
I feel like having the dual vocals really adds a dynamic to the song. It keeps it kind of more interesting because it’s different vocals coming in.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: The original self-titled Three Days Grace debut album was mostly in Drop D tuning but slowly the band switched over to Drop C as their dominate tuning with One-X and Transit of Venus. This continued in your era with Human, Outside, and Explosions. Is that a reflection of the evolving vocal ranges or keeping a modern rock sound?
MATT WALST: Yeah, we try to switch it up though. Like we try not to stay in the same Drop C tuning and try to experiment in different ones, because if your whole set is in Drop C, everything just starts to sound the same.
So we do experiment in getting out of that. In Drop D, everything is a little higher, but it also has a lot of energy, but yeah. Yeah, we try, we try to switch it up.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: There’s an acoustic rendition of “Painkiller” at The Sound Garden in Baltimore you played in 2018 I’ve always enjoyed on YouTube. Might there be a live rarities album down the road with it released? Is that maybe in the pipeline?
MATT WALST: Yeah, that’d be great, man! Like we just did iHeartRadio and I think we did eight eight tracks and put it out there with a video. We’ve actually talked about doing some live stuff and putting it out there.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Who came up with the whole Alienation marketing campaign to have fans be able to stream the album early based on their location and distance from other Three Days Grace fans? It’s very old school.
MATT WALST: Yeah! I got in yesterday and our online guy Miles and our management actually put that together. It’s a pretty good idea. And I saw this morning that somebody had 80% so it would have no fuzz at all. So the more people you get to listen in your area, the better quality the stream gets.
Adam Gontier and Matt Walst of Three Days Grace. Art by Nir Regev – The Natural Aristocrat®
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: When you’re writing lyrics to a song, do you ever feel if there’s too many rewrites it’s time to just scrap the whole song? Or do you just keep working on it until it’s perfect?
MATT WALST: That’s a good question! Yeah, we have had those moments where we’ve tried to rewrite a song so many times that it just starts to get even worse and worse.
So a lot of the times we’ll just revert back to the first idea. I think with “I Am Machine”, we had the demo, it was what it is now, but we spent weeks and weeks and weeks trying to rewrite the lyrics to that song with our producer at the time.
And we ended up reverting to the demo vocal and the lyrics of that. Just going back to the Alienation album, on “The Power”, we tried to rewrite a few times, a lot of lyrics and parts and again, we just reverted back to original idea.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: When layering your vocals, do you prefer a clean second take or do you leave in the grit on shadow doubles to make it feel rawer?
MATT WALST: Yeah, when we work on the records, we do all sorts of takes and put them with each other. I’ll put a grittier one and cleaner one for sure.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: What, what kind of influence does your producer Howard Benson have on your vocal takes?
MATT WALST: He is really good at making you annunciate and just not be too mumbley. I put a lot of vibrato on at the end of a lot of stuff and sometimes I don’t even notice that I do it. Howard will be like, “Okay, straighten that out!”
So I’ll sing it straight instead of like putting some vibrato on it. But also, Howard is great at harmonies. He thinks of harmonies that usually you wouldn’t hear on its own and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be weird.’
It sounds a little foreign or something and it ends up working out really well. He’ll think of things that we don’t really think of as for harmonies and then it comes together and it sounds great.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: In “So Called Life”, the chorus has that huge, layered punch. Was that achieved with triple-stacked vocals
MATT WALST: There’s always the double of course, but yeah, I think Howard will sometimes put four altogether.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Have you ever written a lyric where one particular line felt like it wrote the rest of the song?
MATT WALST: Yeah, on “I Am Machine” we started off with the chorus and then we wrote around that about feeling. It’s about when you’re just going through the motions and wish that you could’ve been desensitized almost. And then we wrote around that chorus.
Three Days Grace aerial view. Art by Nir Regev – The Natural Aristocrat®
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: What song gives you the most adrenaline to play live?
MATT WALST: Right now? My favorite song to play is probably “Time of Dying”. It’s so much fun to play on rhythm guitar and sing those harmonies and stuff.
Also, “I Hate Everything About You”. When we play that, it’s just like everybody’s singing it back to us and they know the song. They almost sing louder than Adam and I do. So it’s like crazy to hear! We let the crowd take the last chorus for a bit and it is just so loud.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: I know there’s certain songs, bands have said that are emotionally challenging to get through. “One More Light” for Chester Bennington,. I was wondering if there’s live songs like that for you?
MATT WALST: Yeah, that’d probably be “The Mountain” for me. When I sing “The Mountain”, there’s some days that I might be going through something mentally… It reminds me to keep going and get through it. I think “The Mountain” does that for me sometimes. It really applies to my life and what’s going on.
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Do you prefer smaller, intimate shows or massive arenas?
MATT WALST: I like playing festivals, especially the one I mentioned before, the last one, Inkcarceration. That crowd was so insane!
I think we were the second last band of the weekend, but they were still so on fire and there was crowd surfing and mosh pits.
But at the same time, yeah I love playing little sweaty clubs too. We played in Scotland a few years back and that place was just like a riot. People were going crazy!
So they have both have their benefits. Like in a smaller club you can actually kind of hear the PA sometimes, which is pretty cool.
Whereas at a festival, you don’t really hear the PA, you’re using your in-ear monitors and that’s what you’re going off of. But yeah, they both have their ups, you know?
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: My last question is a difficult one. In your opinion, what song will age the best in five years from the Alienation album?
MATT WALST: Oohhh…. What song will age the best? I think “Kill Me Fast” is gonna be around for a bit. I think people can really gravitate to that and it’s a kind of a relationship song like “I Hate Everything About You” is a relationship song. I feel like that one people may come back to and really be able to apply their selves.’Cause yeah, Relationships!
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: I like “Apologies”. I think it’s gonna be underrated. Or maybe it won’t be underrated. It’ll be rated just right.
MATT WALST: Yeah, I like that one too! (smiles)
THE NATURAL ARISTOCRAT: Thanks Matt!
MATT WALST: Thank you!
Editor’s Note: This interview is also available on YouTube. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe to our channel! Three Days Grace album Alienation will release tomorrow August 22, 2025.
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