PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Melrose Avenue may be capturing BookTok’s attention before commanding circle pits, but their momentum within the metalcore scene is undeniable.
Armed with infectious pop melodies and crushing breakdowns, the Aussie foursome — Vlado Saric, Shawn Mayer, Jed McIntosh and Mitchell Black — are in the midst of their first U.S. headline tour, performing to nearly sold-out crowds across the country…and all before they’ve even released a full-length album.
With a slate of new singles like “Bad Guy” and “Taste,” Melrose Avenue is leaning into their darker, edgier side, paying homage to the BookTok community that fiercely embraced them from the start. At the same time, the band exists in multiple worlds — one moment navigating the chaos of a BookTok festival meet and greet, the next sharing the bill with the likes of Guns N’ Roses and Linkin Park at Download.
Through the long nights and relentless touring schedule, Melrose Avenue certainly hasn’t lost their sense of humor. If anything, it only fuels the band’s chemistry and makes them even more appealing. Whether they’re bantering about romantasy octopus books or debating the most attractive animated fish, the camaraderie is evident from the moment you meet them.
Before their April 24 set in Philadelphia at Undergrounds Arts, PopHorror caught up with Melrose Avenue backstage to talk about their sonic evolution over the past year, how they’re continuing to embrace BookTok through their music and blood-soaked photoshoots, and what it means to headline the states so early in their career.
PopHorror: First off, how have you been enjoying Philly today? Have you had cheesesteaks or Wawa yet?
Jed McIntosh: I’ve had a cheesesteak, it was great. It was very — how do I explain this? I know it was a good place because you could tell it was just a local joint. It wasn’t fancy looking and it was quite cheap. Me and Fletcher [Horne], our tour manager/sound engineer, just went, “Give us the most classic Philly cheesesteak you can.”
Shawn Mayer: I haven’t had one yet, but I’m looking forward to having one post-show tonight!
Vlado Saric: I think maybe after the show would probably be smart, just so I don’t get tummy aches.
Mitchell Black: I agree. I’ve had Wawa, but I haven’t had a chilli…Philly cheesesteak. I keep saying chilli! Is Sweet Chilli Philly from here?
Jed McIntosh: No…
Mitchell Black: That’s an Australian thing. They stole it! The cream cheese [Philadelphia Sweet Chilli Pourover].
Vlado Saric: I do like the Sweet Chilli Philly! [laughs]
PopHorror: Well, I’m glad some of you got to experience Philly cheesesteaks! So you guys have been going pretty much daily on the road for the past two weeks. How has the U.S. tour been so far?
Vlado Saric: It has been a lot of fun. It has literally been back to back to back shows. That’s why it’s always funny when people ask us, “Oh, how was it in this area?” But we don’t really get to see much. We get to see a lot of green rooms, a lot of stages.
Shawn Mayer: A lot of gas stations.
Vlado Saric: A lot of gas stations! A lot of snacks. Most of our food right now is just snacks. But it’s been so much fun though.
PopHorror: Any favorite cities so far?
Vlado Saric: New York, actually. Last night was so much fun. Our fans, we have a lot of people that just like to watch, and we don’t have really a lot of moshes in the crowd. I don’t even know why, I just don’t think we have a lot of really mosh music. But last night, we had people crowd surfing while we were doing an acoustic song, which was hilarious. But yeah, I reckon New York has been the best one on the run. And the venue was very cool as well.
PopHorror: If people were to mosh at a Melrose Avenue show, which song should they do it to?
Jed McIntosh: “Body Bag,” “Bad Guy” and the new song we have, “Cemetery Friend,” which isn’t out, but you’ll hear if you come to one of our shows.
PopHorror: Melrose Avenue has been around for a couple of years now and, already, you’ve evolved a lot from your earlier songs. I feel like “Fool and the Beggar,” “Suffering” leaned more toward the pop, while this new batch of songs has darker, edgier, heavier vibes. What went on behind the scenes to shape where you’re at now musically?
Jed McIntosh: I think we’ve noticed a lot of interest in the BookTok community, for one. “Taste” was a real reflection of that, no pun intended of our other song “Reflections.” Diving into that dark, metal-pop world, we just realized a lot of people were into that sort of darkness, that fantasy world, which we are as well. So we lean into what we know people want, especially if we want it as well. But we love blending genres, we love crossing into new territory. I think we’re yet to find our sound and we may never sit on one certain sound. I think every song represents a different chapter of where we are and who we are. It’s something that we love exploring and yeah, next year may be a different sound than the year after that.
Vlado Saric: Evolving like Pokémon.
Shawn Mayer: The final evolution hasn’t been found yet.
PopHorror: As you mentioned, you’re still embracing the BookTok community and even did a festival recently — Kink & Ink. How was that?
Vlado Saric: Some of us were uncomfortable… [laughs] I wasn’t! I enjoyed it. We did a meet and greet and let’s just say the questions were very weird. We got into some weird fantasies people were talking about, some weird books people read involving tentacles and balls, and a lot of penises.
Jed McIntosh: It really widened our eyes to what people are into. I mean, it was great. It was fun. But yeah, it went exactly how you could imagine it would go.
Vlado Saric: The questions you thought we got were the questions we got. It was fun though.
Shawn Mayer: Sammi looks mortified.
PopHorror: No, no!
Vlado Saric: Are you a part of the BookTok community?
PopHorror: I’ve read some of them! Like Lights Out, ACOTAR, but they’re just normal human love stories. Where did tentacles come into the conversation?
Jed McIntosh: It’s this octopus with eight tentacles that are technically…you know. So you’ve got, obviously, eight of that said thing. So I don’t know if people are into sea creatures and they’re like, “Finally, here’s a sexy octopus that we’ve been dreaming after our entire lives.”
Vlado Saric: To be fair, people have always had crushes on animated characters. Have you noticed? Like, you remember in Finding Nemo, the fish with the scar? I remember watching a TikTok and the girl’s like, “Oh, yeah, he’s so hot.” And I’m like, “That’s an animated fish! What do you mean?!” But to be fair, remember Shark Tale?
Jed McIntosh: Oh, yeah, that chick, she was hot.
Shawn Mayer: Angelina Jolie’s character?
Jed McIntosh: Woo, she was banging, that little fish. But for the record, I’m not attracted to fish! I just said there’s some good looking fish out there. Anyway, next question…
PopHorror: Vlado, you recently did a photoshoot on Instagram that the fans quite enjoyed, with fake blood and vampire vibes. What’s the story behind that shoot? How did it come to be?
Vlado Saric: Literally from BookTok. People were like, “Oh, you should do this vampire thing.” I’m like, “You know what?” I wanted to do a photoshoot and really delve into that community a bit more. Also, I’ve always just wanted to do photoshoots in general. I’ve always, since I was younger, wanted to be a model, but that never came to be. I was like, “I’ll do it myself.”
Jed McIntosh: He’s giving the people what they want! Let’s be honest, supply and demand.
PopHorror: Anyone else doing a bloody photoshoot anytime soon, or you’re just leaving it all to Vlado?
Jed McIntosh: No, it’s all him. He carries that torch for the rest of us. I don’t know, maybe one day we’ll do something, me and Shawn.
Vlado Saric: Oh, together?! Get a bit of baby oil?
Jed McIntosh: Maybe we’ll do a Doritos commercial or something. I’ll be the salsa, you can be the chip. But no, I think Vlado does that very well. In that fantasy world, people see him as this character. He’s also human, but he’s a character as well and he leans into it quite well. So I think it works for him and it works for us.
Vlado Saric: And they’re fun to do, to be fair. We did a bunch of different ideas as well. It’s not just the vampire one — we did, like, four different big photoshoots. We just went a bit creative with it to see what people would like.
PopHorror: Any horror movies that inspired it?
Vlado Saric: I love “Vampire Diaries.”
Jed McIntosh: So do I! Damon or Stefan?
Vlado Saric: Oh, Damon, 100%. Fucking Damon’s the one. Come on, Damon or Stefan?
PopHorror: I’ve actually never seen it!
Vlado Saric: Are you fucking serious?! Sorry, sorry. I won’t ruin it for you, but you have to watch it.
Jed McIntosh: It’s the best series in the world.
Vlado Saric: Yeah, I loved the whole vampire thing after I watched that. And even Supernatural, I loved that growing up as well. Anything to do with supernatural shit.
PopHorror: Switching gears, I have to ask — you posted a while ago that Ronnie Radke randomly mentioned you guys on his livestream. As a longtime Falling In Reverse listener, I need to know the story behind that.
Jed McIntosh: We were rehearsing for our Australian tour and it popped up on Vlado’s phone. He had his in-ears in so we couldn’t hear the audio, but we saw that our band was mentioned in his livestream. So we’re like, “Oh, my gosh, he knows who we are!” So then we pause the whole rehearsal, take our in-ears out, and then the audio was him going, “Melrose Avenue? I don’t know who that is.”
Vlado Saric: No, even better, he went, “Melrose Avenue? The street? I don’t know who the fuck that is.” [laughs] I’m like, “Fuck! Never mind boys, let’s continue rehearsing.” But apparently our songs have played twice on his streaming thing. Shout out to the fans that requested our songs. So he does now know who we are.
Jed McIntosh: We love Ronnie Radke. Falling In Reverse, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life. Luke Holland on drums, for me, one of the best drummers in the world.
Shawn Mayer: And they’ve got Marc Okubo on guitar now, and he’s bringing a lot to the table, too.
Vlado Saric: But we haven’t made direct contact with Ronnie yet. We posted it and there’s the whole thing, if you mention him, he will get summoned.
PopHorror: Like Beetlejuice.
Vlado Saric: We haven’t summoned him yet. But we’ll find a way to get a DM or something from Ronnie Radke. We’ll figure it out.
PopHorror: After this tour, what’s next for Melrose Avenue as far as the music? Shawn, I know you go out to LA often to write — are those sessions influencing the next era at all?
Shawn Mayer: As soon as we finish the tour, we’re going to get into writing and get a lot more songs built up, build a catalog, start preparing to release a bunch more — maybe even an album. Who knows?
Vlado Saric: And we have so many tours. Have you seen our schedule?!
Shawn Mayer: We have a good two or three weeks between the European tour and then two months when we get back home. So we’ll see what happens.
Jed McIntosh: We finish this, go to Europe. We’re doing festivals for the first time in Europe, which will be great. Before that, these boys will write. In terms of the BookTok thing, we may be writing our own novel that features us as the characters. So that’s in the works. And then writing the album — that is the big thing that we are figuring out at this stage. We’ve got a few songs that we want to do with features that are in the works as well, which is going to be a new season for us.
Vlado Saric: I keep forgetting we haven’t released an album yet. We’re so early as a band, it’s fucking weird that we’re doing all this already. It’s crazy. Mitch was talking about how he saw Bring Me The Horizon. He was like, “Oh, my God, it was so early. They’d already dropped their first album.” I was like, “Bro, we haven’t even dropped that album yet.”
Mitchell Black: I saw them in, like, 2008 in this venue in Perth and there was 300 people there. It was wild.
Vlado Saric: We’re in that stage right now. We’re that early. Fucking hell.
Mitchell Black: They opened for I Killed The Prom Queen. I was like, “Oh, this is interesting.”
Shawn Mayer: It’s so cool to be able to play to the crowds that we play to across America so early in our career as a headline band as well.
PopHorror: How does this compare to last year, when you supported Ice Nine Kills and had a handful of headline shows sprinkled in?
Jed McIntosh: It’s pros and cons to everything, but it’s been great because people are actually here for our songs. When you do a support, you don’t know if the crowd knows who you are or knows your songs. But after we did the support, that brought a lot more people to know who we are. Having a headline show is great because you know that they are there for you. They sing the lyrics back when Vlado puts the mic out there. You get a bit more space as a headline band, and it gives us a lot of time to actually have some personal connections with our fans with the meet and greets and everything like that.
Shawn Mayer: From a year ago, I feel like we are a much more well-rounded unit, so much more well-rehearsed and we have more songs that we’ve put out. I feel like we’ve come leaps and bounds in the last year, so we’ll just keep going.
PopHorror: Have the accommodations improved on tour since last year? I know Vlado was sleeping on the van floor and fans were bringing blankets and pillows.
Vlado Saric: The good thing now is we’re staying in hotels. Some of them have been a bit dodgy…
Jed McIntosh: We share a bed most of the time, but we cannot complain. Compared to the RV, it’s been a whole lot better.
Vlado Saric: I did like the floor, weirdly enough. I woke up, my back was straight as because it’s a flat floor.
Jed McIntosh: Well you can always choose it, there’s a floor wherever you go.
Vlado Saric: I know — that’s why I like the couch. To be fair, anywhere where the TV is so I can watch SpongeBob. Don’t ask. I just like falling asleep to SpongeBob, it makes my dreams better.
Jed McIntosh: That’s another fantasy of his.
Vlado Saric: I want to do a SpongeBob photoshoot.
Thanks for speaking with us, Vlado, Shawn, Jed and Mitchell! Keep up with the band at MelroseOnly.com.
Watch the full interview below!
Vlado picture by Adrianne Armida.
