In a recent interview with Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba, the reasoning behind the band's departure from Epic Records was discussed. Skiba had this to say on the topic:
Everyone who signed us to Epic, all of the people we trusted there, were let go. And that's not to say the people running it now aren't cool, we just don't know them and we don't like to work generally with people we don't know. We had a bunch of material and wanted to do a record sooner than later, so we called them and asked them if we could leave and they said, ‘Yeah, that's cool.' They've always been great to us and we appreciate that.
The band has since planned to self-release their new album, which was also mentioned:
With the way that everything is being done, with people like Trent Reznor and Radiohead, it was very inspiring to us that when you're doing things on your own you can do whatever you want. Not that we're going to give records away but this time we're starting a label, we want to build it up first and have the freedom to release exclusive things whenever we want. That's something we've always been able to do until we were on Epic, so it's nice that we're able to do that again.
Source: Billboard
