Perth’s Electric Eye Heavy Fest returns in 2025, reaffirming its place as one of Western Australia’s premier celebrations of heavy music. Taking over Freo.Social on Saturday October 4 2025, the festival delivers a powerhouse lineup of extreme metal, uniting some of the most formidable names in the scene.
We caught up with Melbourne’s relentless blackened death metal grind trio, WEREWOLVES, making their highly anticipated WA debut. Sam Bean (vocals/bass) talked to us about what they are most looking forward to heading west as well as what the band has planned for the rest of the year and beyond.
Sean: This festival marks your first show in WA What does it mean to you as a band to finally bring your live act to WA audiences?
Sam: It’s the closest we’ve come to playing an overseas show! We’re really happy to do this, if only to shut everyone up who gets on our case whenever we play a show anywhere else. “What about Perth?” OK, we’re finally doing it, and I don’t want to hear any nonsense from people going “oh, I was washing my hair” or “I couldn’t get the night off work”. This is it. It’s fucking happening. Be there.
Sean: You’ve put out albums almost every year since forming, with Die for Us in 2024 and The Ugliest of All dropping in 2025. How has such a relentless creative pace shaped your sound and approach to writing?
Sam: Anything you do regularly, you get better at. At least that’s what we hope. What we can’t figure out is how everyone else takes four years or more to put out albums. And they change studios and producers each time! Screw that. It’d be like having to re-learn from scratch how to record.
Seriously, we’ve picked up a lot of tricks and hacks for being productive. The main one is just not getting stuck, if something’s not working, move straight on and come back to it later. This stops us overthinking anything we do. It’s the thoughtlessness that counts.
Sean: Featuring members from The Berzerker, Abramelin, and Psycroptic, you carry a strong pedigree in Australian extreme metal. How do your shared histories influence the creative chemistry in Werewolves?
Sam: We’re at that point where we’ve had plenty of years to work out in our own time what we do well and what we suck at, so that really cuts down on the missteps. No-one’s needing to force bouzouki interludes or keyboard solos into songs to satisfy some itch we haven’t already scratched over the last few decades. We’ve known each other for years and we’re at a stage where we can be pretty honest, so the in-house quality control is spot-on. You’ve got three people with all the skills and experience you could ask for, wanting to do nothing more than wreck shit. That’s it in a nutshell.
Sean: With Die for Us and now The Ugliest of All fresh out, are there tracks you’re particularly keen to play live in Fremantle? Any fan favourites or personal standouts?
Sam: We’ll be wheeling out the same setlist we’ve been doing the last few years. Everyone else in the country has had to put up with it, now it’s your turn. I wouldn’t put it past Matt and Dave to try sneak a new track onto the setlist the week before performance though, haha. I find that ‘Crushgasm’ usually goes down pretty well, that song is designed for crowds who want to batter each other.
Sean: Though this is your first WA appearance, what’s your impression of the WA metal scene – either from afar or now as you prepare to perform there?
Sam: One of our favourite bands is The Furor! We’ve played in WA before in our other bands. It’s always a pleasure, there’s always been fucktons of stuff going on your way. Some of my favourite bands growing up were Infected and Dumptruck…think they changed their name to Downer? Just wish we could chop out a big chunk of the Nullarbor, get you all closer to us.
Sean: Post‑Electric Eye, what’s next for Werewolves – additional touring, new music, or evolving the project in new directions?
Sam: Would it surprise you to hear that we’re busy? We’ll be telling any asshole with ears about our new album ‘The Ugliest of All’ while recording album number 7 with guaranteed zero evolution. We’ve also scored the support for ABBATH DOOM OCCULTA in January so we’ll be taking a moment to prepare for that, work out a good set so we don’t get blown off the stage. We’ve also done our follow-up recording for FAUSTIAN. It’s getting mixed right now, so we’ll have the finished hot evil product in our hands soon after Perth and will be working out what the fuck to do with it.
Sean: You can invite 3 musicians dead or alive to join you for dinner. Who would you invite?
Sam: Devin Townsend, because the guy’s a bon vivant and good fun. Mick Kenney from Anaal Nathrakh, always struck me as an interesting dude. Jesse Pintado, cause it would be good to hang out one more time.
Sean: If you could be credited with writing any song ever written, what song would you choose?
Sam: For me, it’d be some earlier Morbid Angel…’Rapture’ probably. I should really choose something that would net me more publishing, right? Matt and Dave would go for Marduk. ‘Christ Raping Black Metal’ I imagine.
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