EMQ’s With wecandividebyzero
Hi everyone! Welcome to another EMQs interview, this time with wecandividebyzero. Huge thanks to their animal impersonator Tristan, for taking part.
What is your name, what do you play, and can you tell us a little bit about the history of the band?
Hi, my name is Tristan, I imitate wounded animal noises for wecandividebyzero. We are a four-piece modern metal band from Gibraltar, which makes us one of the very few metal bands ever to hail from the Rock. Sam and Alex handle the guitars, and Chris is on drums.
The band started back in 2009, then life did what life does for a while, and we properly reignited the project in 2020. Since then, it’s been full-on: we record ourselves and also primarily self-produce. We gig on both sides of the border into the EU, with plenty of Spanish shows. Our very first Portuguese show will be the night after the new single drops on the 24th of October 2026!
Our debut album was released in September 2025 and has recently passed 100,000 streams on Spotify, along with our single releases. For a band from a town of 34,000 people still feels satisfyingly ridiculous.
How did you come up with your band name?
There is no real meaning behind it and it came from old internet memes. “Chuck Norris can divide by zero” was peak internet comedy around the time the band first formed, and we figured that if he could do it, so could we. It was also the era of bands with long names. Bands such as iwrestledabearonce, Alexisonfire, and Tony Danza’s Tapdance Extravaganza.
Is the meme horrendously dated now? Yes. Are we keeping the name anyway? Yes. We’ve made our peace with it. And honestly, being impossible to confuse with any other band on Spotify has turned out to be a feature.
What Country / Region are you from and what is the Metal / Rock scene like there?
Gibraltar, the giant British rock at the bottom of Spain. The scene here is modest in the most literal sense: a population of 34,000, essentially one or two venues that could cater for metal, and everyone here knows everyone else. Usually because they’re in two other bands together. It’s less a scene and more a group chat with amps, but we hope that we can help make a change.
The flip side is that Spain is a ten-minute walk away, so the Andalucían circuit became our extended local scene. We’ve taken our music to Sevilla, Málaga and Jerez. We just co-headlined at home with our Spanish friends, Mind Traveller (who were fresh from their National Wacken Metal Battle Grand Finals). For a band from a place this size, having our album pass 100,000 streams and a growing circuit across two borders is the part that still feels unreal.
What is your latest release? (Album, EP, Single, Video)
Our new single “Sun Seeker” is out on 23rd October 2026. It recounts the myth of Icarus from two perspectives: the son burning to reach the sky. And Daedalus, his father, who built his wings and watched him fall.
Musically, it swings between big melodic choruses and dense, heavy riffing, and the last minute is where it all comes crashing down. If Architects or ERRA are your thing, you’ll know roughly where we sit.
The official video lands on 5th November 2026. The video was shot on a green screen, which we can now confirm is a technology invented to test the limits of band friendships. We ended up deep in the edit ourselves, so we’re unreasonably proud of the result and have several new opinions about chroma keying.
Who have been your greatest influences?
There’s a lot of classic metalcore in our DNA: Killswitch Engage, Trivium, and the aforementioned iwrestledabearonce will always have a place in our style. Beyond that, everyone pulls from a different corner. Alex leans into the proggier side of the genre, Sam is one of those guitarists who’ll cite a Norwegian death metal band from the 50s as a major influence and dare you to check, and Chris is deep in his deathcore era at the moment, Lorna Shore and Whitechapel to name a couple.
Where it all meets is heaviness and melody in equal measure, and lyrics rooted in real-world situations without getting Serj Tankian political. We aim to write music that lets each listener take something different from it.
What first got you into music?
Each of us would answer this differently. My story is probably the same as half the industry’s: a couple of friends wanted to start a band, and I got the last pick, so I ended up on bass. I was also the only one in the school choir at the time, which somehow guaranteed me the lead singer spot as well. That teen rock band came to absolutely nothing, but it paved the way to where I am today.
The others got here by their own routes: Chris blames The Offspring, which tracks for a drummer, even if the man now listens to Lorna Shore before breakfast. Sam’s journey runs from his parents’ music on long car trips, to picking up a guitar because of Rammstein, which explains a lot about his right hand. Alex didn’t really have a hobby as a kid, so his dad pushed a guitar at him and it stuck, raised on a diet of Guns N’ Roses, Poison and Nirvana. Mine just happens to involve a school choir.
If you could collaborate with a current band or musician, who would it be?
I think all four of us would probably land on Meshuggah, which is rare, because we can’t normally agree on where to get food before or after a show. Part of it is the obvious: they basically invented the rhythmic language half of modern metal is written in, ours included. But mostly I just want to watch Thomas Haake count. Whether we’d survive the collaboration is another question. There’s a strong chance we’d spend the first week just asking them what time signature everything is in and the second week being told it’s all actually in 4/4.
If you could play any festival in the world, which would you choose and why?
Logically, the next step for us is the Iberian circuit; there are incredible Spanish festivals like Resurrection Fest or Z! Live, the stages bands on our side of the map aspire to graduate to. That’s the level we’re actively pushing for.
But if we’re allowed to be greedy: Download or Wacken. And there’s history there, because both have had Gibraltarian musicians on their stages before, through bands like Breed 77, Ted Maul and The Five Hundred.
For a rock the size of ours, that’s a surprisingly decent export record, and we’d quite like to add to it. We’ve seen the holy land from the crowd at festivals like RADAR and Euroblast. One day we’d like to see it from the other side of the barrier.
What’s the weirdest gift you have ever received from a fan?
Honestly, we’re yet to crack the fan gift economy. The complete list of everything we’ve ever been given at shows is the occasional beer and the odd shot of Jäger pushed across the bar after a set, which, in fairness, is the correct currency for a metal band. With two exceptions at opposite ends of the spectrum. Alex was once handed half a can of Red Stripe by a fan who, to be fair, may simply not have wanted the rest of it. That’s the floor. The ceiling: at a small festival in Jerez, the promoter presented us with a bottle of sherry with our name, the date and the festival written on it. A personalised commemorative sherry. In Jerez. It felt like being knighted by the local economy, and it remains the most official thing that has ever happened to this band. So, the record is held by a man who wasn’t technically a fan, and the bar for actual fans is now: beat the sherry.
If you had one message for your fans, what would it be?
Thank you for being early. Genuinely. Every band says their fans matter, but when you’re from a scene this small, every single one of our fans is significant, and we notice you. If you want to do one thing for us, it’s this: when “Sun Seeker” drops on 23rd October, don’t just stream it, save it, playlist it, send it to the one friend who you think would like it. That stuff moves mountains for a band of our size.
And come say hi at a show. We’ll be the ones by the merch table. We have some incredible fans around the world, across the continents, hopefully we’ll meet them all!
If you could bring one rock star back from the dead, who would it be?
We’d each pull a different name out of the hat. Mine is Chester Bennington, no hesitation. He’s the reason half the vocalists my age learned you could sing like it’s a melody and scream like it’s an emergency in the same song, and I’ve been chasing that balance ever since. Chris would 100% say Ozzy Osbourne, and as a man named Osborne, he maintains they’re separated by one letter and presumably a clerical error. Sam and Alex would probably nominate a guitarist, argue about which one, and we’d run out of séance time before they agreed.
What do you enjoy the most about being a musician? And what do you hate?
The enjoyment part is easy. Writing something in a rehearsal room and then hearing a crowd react to it is a drug with no known substitute, and we say that as people with everyday jobs who know exactly what the alternative feels like. There’s also the specific chaos of being in a band with your mates for this long: the group chat alone justifies the whole enterprise.
The hate is everything around the music. The admin-to-riffs ratio is genuinely upsetting. Nobody warns you that releasing one single means becoming a part-time press officer, logistics manager, metadata specialist and amateur lawyer. And then, after all that, you still need to carry the gear. Whoever decided bands must haul their own equipment up and down venue staircases at 1am, has never met a drummer’s car boot. We didn’t choose the lug life.
If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?
The lottery-ticket economics of discovery. As an independent band you can now do everything right, and I mean everything: record it yourself, build the press kit, pitch the playlists weeks ahead, run the socials like a second job, and the difference between being heard by ten thousand people or two hundred still comes down to whether an algorithm or an anonymous editor was feeling it that week. The tools to make music have been democratised brilliantly. The tools to be found are still a slot machine. I’d change the industry so that effort correlated with outcome even slightly more than it currently does. Failing that, I’d settle for every venue having ground-floor load-in.
Name one of your all-time favourite albums?
This question nearly ended the band. We made the mistake of asking the group chat, and I can report there is no consensus; there will never be consensus, and at one point the tour was briefly cancelled. So to keep the peace we’re going with the only record all four of us have ever fully agreed on: wecandividebyzero’s debut album, wecandividebyzero. Flawless. Ten out of ten. No notes. Completely unbiased.
What’s best? Vinyl, Cassettes, CDs or Downloads?
We’re lucky enough to have our album out on download, CD and vinyl, so we can answer this with actual field data: physical wins, and it isn’t close. We’ve sold more vinyl and CDs than downloads, and streaming pays in exposure and pocket lint. The merch table is where a band our size actually survives. CDs are what people grab to take the night home, but vinyl is the one they hold differently. There’s a reason nobody has ever lovingly framed a download.
What’s the best gig that you have played to date?
There have been a few contenders. Úbeda and Granada were both great nights, and our recent hometown co-headline with Mind Traveller is fresh in the memory. But the pick is probably Málaga, supporting The Five Hundred. Great crowd, proper production, and proof that the circuit down here can throw up nights that feel bigger than the postcode. Plus, it’s always useful to watch a band further down the road than you and take notes.
If you weren’t a musician, what else would you be doing?
The boring twist is that we already know, because none of us has quit the day job yet. I work in product for an online company, Sam is three quarters of his way to retirement, and Chris and Alex are both secondary school music teachers, which means if they weren’t musicians they’d be… music teachers. All this whilst running the band business!
Which five people would you invite to a dinner party?
Speaking on behalf of the band without consulting them, which is how all our best decisions get made: Chester Bennington, because the entire band owes him something and the man deserves a quiet dinner. Chuck Norris, obviously, as the reason for our name. Brahmagupta, the 7th-century mathematician who declared that zero divided by zero equals zero, so he and Chuck can settle the band name question once and for all, to the death if necessary. Thomas Haake, to drum the fight into something in 23/16. And our old friend the Jerez promoter, because a man who brings personalised sherry to dinner is a man you invite to everything. Chris will be upset Ozzy didn’t make the cut. Chris can host his own dinner party.
What’s next for the band?
A busy few months. “Sun Seeker” is out on 23rd October 2026, and the night after we play our first ever Portuguese show in Castelo Branco. The official video follows on 5th November 2026. Beyond that, there are live announcements coming that we’re not allowed to talk about yet. Which is the most music-industry sentence I’ve ever typed, and we’re already deep into finalising the new material for the second full length. The plan is simple: keep the output coming and keep crossing borders.
What Social Media / Website links do you use to get your music out to people? Please include any links
You can find us everywhere and mostly anywhere (wecandividebyzero OnlyFans coming soon), check us out and drop a follow. Who knows, maybe we can share that shot of Jäger at a bar someday.
Website: https://www.wecandividebyzero.com/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/40DCyA2pg6mD33O5YQEhN7
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wecandividebyzero/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wecandividebyzero
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wecandividebyzero
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wecandividebyzero
Pre-save “Sun Seeker”: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/wecandividebyzero/sun-seeker
There’s a long-standing food-based debate here in the UK. And we’d like your help. So… A Jaffa cake – is it a cake or a biscuit? Discuss!
We’ve discussed this as a band and we’re prepared to die on the following hill: it’s a cake. Not out of sentiment, out of evidence. There was a genuine UK court case about this, McVitie’s versus the taxman, and the deciding test was beautiful: cakes go hard when stale, biscuits go soft. The Jaffa goes hard. Just like wecandividebyzero. Case closed, legally binding, the state agrees. Are we cake?
But as a band named after dividing by zero, we’d also like to formally propose a third option: the Jaffa cake is undefined. It exists outside the cake-biscuit number line entirely, much like our genre, our scene, and our career trajectory. Brahmagupta would have had opinions. He’s welcome to raise them at the dinner party.
Thank you for your time. Is there anything else that you would like to add?
Just a thank you to Ever Metal for having us. If we’ve made you curious, “Sun Seeker” is out 23rd October 2026, and the pre-save link is above. And if we ever share a venue, the Jäger offer stands. Remember: beat the sherry.
Disclaimer: This interview is solely the property of Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this interview unless you have the express permission of said party. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
