Glassjaw Singer Calls Former Label 'Trash,' But Signed Anyway

Glassjaw vocalist Daryl Palumbo recently said his esoteric Long Island post-hardcore act signed with Roadrunner Records back in the early 2000s despite their view that the label was "trash." He also asserted that Glassjaw "never became a nu-metal band" because of their alliance with the company.

Palumbo made these statements during a Wednesday (Jan. 5) interview on The First Ever Podcast, hosted by Touche Amore’s Jeremy Bolm. With much punk history under each performer’s belt, the conversation naturally dove into Glassjaw's Roadrunner relationship, a deal that resulted in the band's debut, 2000's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence.

Palumbo said, "Honestly, Roadrunner was just such trash, it was trash. It did make like really outrageously dope metal records in the formative years of like death metal and my formative years — records I listened to very much to this day, many fucking records. You know, like Malevolent Creation and everything; from Malevolent to fucking Obituary." [via ThePRP]

He continued, "But then a time came when it couldn't have been any more [than] know the total polar opposite of that. So it was like, we should not go anywhere near Roadrunner. We've worked so hard for so long to remain to where … we wanted to be tasteful. We wanted to always kind of be tasteful — funny saying that in retrospect — but we always wanted to be tasteful, and we always wanted to be a little, like, thinking man's sort of hardcore. And then to like even just get close to Roadrunner was like, 'Oh man, this is ridiculous.'"

Palumbo added, however, that "hindsight is always 20/20, whatever. I don't have to look back at it now. But we still did our thing, we didn't make a fucking … we never became a nu-metal band. We didn't become a weirdo band with dreads and shit. We're a hardcore band. It was a hardcore record."

Glassjaw ended up on Roadrunner via their association with producer Ross Robinson, an early guiding force for Slipknot, Korn and several others. Palumbo suggested their quest to "get the [band] in front of people" led to the deal, despite the idea that Roadrunner seemed more focused on nu-metal at the time.

The Glassjaw vocalist remarked, "We knew that a lot of that metal on Roadrunner was fucking clown ass shit, but I'm an idiot to say that, because maybe you wouldn't have heard it. And there was a lot of people that heard it sort of through this reverse engineering sort of thing."

Ultimately injecting some humility to the conversation, the singer quipped, "You know, who the fuck am I? I mean, what did I do after fucking Roadrunner? [Laughs] … I mean, what am I really saying? Don't listen to me. Sign to Roadrunner. You shouldn't be listening to me."

Glassjaw, who without Roadrunner released the subsequent albums Worship and Tribute in 2002 and Material Control in 2017, will tour in the U.S. later this year. Listen to Palumbo's interview below.