In March 2009, Blackguard frontman Paul “Ablaze” Zinay was gearing up for what he hoped would be a successful run of live dates in support of the band’s official debut, Profugus Mortis. Two years on and the band is still on the road, criss-crossing North America yet again, further cementing their reputation as one of hardest working bands on the touring circuit. Or, depending on who you talk to, one of the most annoying. The band won’t be disappearing any time soon, however, due to the in-you-face birth of a new album. In fact, they’ve added Europe to their list as the territory to be conquered next. Zinay and his bandmates have learned the hard way what it really means to sing for your supper, and while he feels blessed to be able to pursue his dream of being a professional musician, there are some lingering questions in the back of his mind about the sense of paying rent for a fixed address.

“When I first took a look at our schedule and realized we were squeezing Europe in between two North American tours, I figured out I’d be home for about a week-and-a-half in a four month period. Take into consideration we were only home for a month after being on the road for three months straight, I’m never home anymore.”

Zinay admits there have been moments when he would have been quite happy to ditch a tour for a flight back to Montreal. A classic case of “Careful what you wish for.”

“I’ve thought about that quite a few times, actually. It happens once every couple of tours where I’ll have a small internal breakdown, where all I want to do is go home. That happened on the Nevermore tour. So, I think I have a couple more until the next breakdown (laughs).”

Also symptomatic of the constant roadwork is a growing number of disgruntled metalheads that would like to see Blackguard not come through town for a change. They’re one of the few small bands in recent memory with long term visibility, having secured some high profile tours over the last 24 months, and while Zinay understands the discontent he’s not about to apologize for having a career.

“Whenever a new tour gets announced and we’re on it, people take their potshots at us online, sure. I was on the BW&BK; site a couple months ago, actually – the Epica tour had been announced, followed by the Symphony X tour – and people were so pissed. It was like, ‘What the fuck are they doing on this tour again?’ I responded and said, ‘You know what? We’re going to tour until you hate us even more! We have three more that aren’t even announced yet!’ (laughs).”

It’s something of a miracle Blackguard found the time to do any writing for a new album, let alone record it, and cough up top quality songwriting at that. Entitled Firefight, the album surpasses Profugus Mortis on every level.

“There really wasn’t a lot of downtime where we could sit down and write,” Zinay reveals. “The writing for some of these songs happened after the Hypocrisy tour (June 2010); we nailed down four songs – ‘Firefight’, ‘Cruel Hands’, ‘The Path’ and ‘Fear Of All Flesh’ - for a demo at that point. Those were the first songs that Victory Records heard when we were negotiating with them. We worked on the rest of the songs after that, but they were pretty much done on the road. Kim (Gosselin / guitars) brought a lot of his recording equipment with him – laptop, soundcards – so we built the songs as we were going. There was no time to stop. We had tour obligations and there was a date looming for when we had to have the record done. When we got back from the Epica tour there was a little mad rush for me to finish up some of the lyrics. I was back home December 20th, and January 2nd I was in the studio recording my vocals.”

There was one noteworthy casualty between Profugus Mortis and Firefight, with keyboardist Jonathan Lefrancois-Leduc opting to leave the band following the Hypocrisy. A potentially lethal blow to Blackguard’s future given Leduc was one of the principle songwriters in the band.

“Exactly,” Zinay agrees. “What actually happened is we almost had a full record done and Jo was a large part of the writing, but when we were finished we really didn’t like the direction the music was going. We realized a little too late that it wasn’t the record we needed to put out. We didn’t think it was up to scratch and ended up scrapping a full record’s worth of material. That’s when Jo decided to step aside. He’d kind of had enough touring and felt it was time to go, and Kim took up the mantle and principle songwriter. Firefight was born from the ashes of a record that will probably never see the light of day (laughs).”

Zinay elaborates: “It was mostly because of the touring, and it’s unfortunate because I think Jo felt that things weren’t progressing the way he’d hoped they would. People were getting stressed out on the road; that Hypocrisy tour was probably the worst thing for us. We were at a very low point in terms of morale, there were a lot of administrative changes going on with management and labels, so there was a time when things didn’t look all that good. Jo decided to leave and from there we were able to pick things back up. We were able to write a solid record, we’re still doing this, so thing are definitely on the up.”

Things have definitely changed as well. Blackguard’s original folk metal sound – established when they were known as Profugus Mortis and given a thrash infusion on their debut – has been transformed into something a lot less genre specific. Narrowing things down, call the present day Blackguard a Megadeth-meets-Epica love child.

“That’s Kim’s writing for you,” laughs Zinay. “He’s heavily influenced by Megadeth, he’s a big Marty Friedman fan. We’re still using a lot of the elements that we’ve always had in our music, it’s just a question of to what degree we’re using those elements. As you said, we’ve dialed down the folk aspects of the music, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that Joe isn’t in the band anymore. The identity of the band isn’t necessarily the folk aspect of the sound. It’s more than that, and we’re really utilizing all the elements that distinguish us and using them in a new way.”

Zinay takes the Epica comparisons as a compliment, and well he should. Their former tourmates have made a name for themselves over the last decade as masters of symphonic metal, so it stands to reason some of that experience bled into the Blackguard camp after two extensive road trips.

“(Laughs). With all the touring that we’ve done with Epica over the last year, I’m sure it’s rubbed off on us in some way. We love those guys to death, we watched them play every night, and it was a fucking treat. Those guys know how to do symphonic metal really well, they have talent for miles, so yeah, I think there was something that stuck with us when we were doing Firefight.”

Truth be told, Blackguard’s spin on the use of symphonics is a welcome change from the sheer density of the last couple Epica productions, or recent orchestral poundings by Dimmu Borgir.

“That’s something that Kim was very cautious about when it came to the orchestration,” says Zinay, “because he composed it all for the record. What he wanted to do was have it so that it wasn’t at the forefront of the songs, whereas on the last album they keyboards and symphonics were up front all the time. The songs on Firefight became that much more powerful because the orchestration makes that much more of a statement when they’re in the forefront. We were trying to be tasteful with it and utilize it the best we can.”

In closing, Zinay comments on the band’s highly anticipated European tour, preparing for his little-band-that-grew get a little larger. With a grain of salt under his tongue.

“It’s a headlining tour, but I’m using that term very loosely. I like to say we’re playing last. ‘Headlining’ has the connotation that we’re this big band, but we’re going there by ourselves and doing what we’ve gotta do, and hoping that people will show up (laughs).”