THE AGONIST vocalist Alissa White-Gluz has posted the following message for the band's fans and the metal community in general following the release of their new album, Prisoners:

"Here's a little insider info just to clarify, since a lot of people don't understand how the industry now works. We would feel bad divulging this kind of info and shattering the dream, but a lot of metal musicians seem to be doing it nowadays so I think we're ok to do so as well.

Why are we asking you to buy the album? We don't see money from album sales. We have never seen a single royalty penny. But, if your band is known to sell a lot of albums, especially in the first week of release, you get more offers for tours, therefore making it more possible to play to more fans.

Ticket Money:

As an opener, we do not see any money from ticket sales or have any control over ticket price. As a headliner we rarely see any money from ticket sales as well.

YouTube:

If you think we are making money off of YouTube plays, check out who's channel our videos are on (Hint: It ain't our channel!;)) Again, we've never seen a penny from YouTube plays.

Merch/CD Sales: To get our albums shipped out to us we need to pay about $10. We sell them for $15. Venue takes about 15% usually, manager takes 10%. Therefore, we are left with about $1.25 profit per CD. T-shirts, they cost about $10 to create and ship, we sell them for $20; again you can do the math. So we have a few dollars profit per item sold, but about $200 - $300 in gas per show, plus the expense of work visas (about $4000 for the USA), vehicle and trailer leasing, and all the other expenses that go into touring.

We sleep in the van, don't eat, don't get to bathe. We hire no crew. We get maybe $20 or $30 a day to get food or save up to pay rent. We invested years of our lives into this and some had to take time off work to record this album. And this is not just our band. We can safely say that this applies to every opening metal act we have ever toured with.

Sorry to shatter the rockstar fantasy but the truth is, we all work 9-5 as soon as we get home from tour, if our jobs are gracious enough to allow us to leave and return. Otherwise we scramble to find even the most menial jobs just to cover our bills in between tours.

So - taking our project without paying for it is STEALING. But, if you repay us by spreading the word about the band, getting your friends to come out to our shows, buying our merch, giving us a place to stay or some other form of support, you've paid us back. Nobody wants to go to work and not get their salary, but bands do it ALL THE TIME. So, have some respect for the work they do and support in whatever way you can.

Hope that clarified everything! Enjoy Prisoners!"

In the clip below, Alissa offers an overview of Prisoners, which is out now. She gives a brief rundown of the tracks on the record and offers some insight on the amount of work that went into making it:

International iTunes links to purchase Prisoners can be found at this location.

With regards to the artwork for Prisoners, front-woman Alissa comments: “We wanted to really include a chaotic visual to reflect the chaotic sound of the band, but we also wanted to show that the lyrics on this album are a lot more introverted... The human face was left non-descript on purpose - it doesn't belong to any particular person, but we could call him the Lonely Solipsist.”

Check out the artwork at the bottom of the page. The tracklisting for Prisoners is as follows:

'You're Coming With Me'

'The Escape'

'Predator & Prayer'

'Anxious Darwinians'

'Panophobia'

'Ideomotor'

'Lonely Solipsist'

'Dead Ocean'

'The Mass Of The Earth'

'Everybody Wants You (Dead)'

'Revenge Of The Dadaists'