Agony & Irony

Agony & Irony is the sixth studio album by Alkaline Trio, released on July 1, 2008 on Epic Records. Regarding this album, vocalist and guitarist Matt Skiba stated that the band set out to record an “anthemic hard rock record.”

Behind the title

there’s a theme of duality on the record, it’s sort of a spin on ‘ebony and ivory’ which of course represents black and white. The songs on the new album sort of represent a struggle between good and evil, light and dark, and despair and hope. We felt Agony and Irony was appropriate, I mean we fancy ourselves as being pretty clever, and we felt a play on words was also fitting for the new record. It’s also a lyric from ‘Flagpole Sitta’ by Harvey Danger, so we thought we earn double points for that.

Influence
Regarding the record’s sound and influences, Skiba states that he was “listening to a lot of Pat Benatar, Def Leppard and a lot of the 80’s MTV music that I grew up with. So that was a big influence in the writing process, bands like The Cars”.