“My mum thinks – she’s wondering when I’m going to buy her a house, because she thinks I’m like Mick Jagger and it’s like, ‘I don’t know if you know, but it’s heavy metal and we barely scrape by.’ So, some day I’ll buy her that house, but right now she’s just going to have to wait,” says Buz McGrath, one of two guitarists from Massachusetts hardcore outfit Unearth.

“She doesn’t really pay attention to the music; she just wants to see her little Buzzy playing guitar,” he laughs. “And she’s so proud that I’m doing something cool. When a magazine comes out, she’s scouring the book store and bringing it up to the counter and is like, “This is my son in this magazine!” And the guy is like, “Yeah who cares?”

If record sales mean anything anymore, the answer is 100,000, give or take. Unearth’s latest album “The March” [Metal Blade, 2008] has sold at least that many copies since its release last fall, peaking on the Billboard charts at number three in the independent band rankings.

“It’s chugging along,” McGrath humbly admits. “But people don’t buy a lot of records these days. We’re in the ticket and t-shirt business.”

Unearth are about to embark on a North American-wide tour with Metal Blade label mates Lazarus A.D., and thrash legends Testament. The tour kicks off May 2 in Seattle, Wash., and McGrath is looking forward to getting this show on the road.

“Those guys were kind of heroes when we were growing up as kids,” McGrath states, clearly jazzed about the series of shows that brings them to both Edmonton and Calgary. “I looked up to bands like that, and it’s cool to be able to go out and tour with them now. And you know hopefully they’ll bring a different audience, which is good. We’ll reach out to more of the more seasoned metal fans that are out there.”

You had the opportunity to tour with Slayer a while back as well, so you’ve had a lot of great support on the circuit so far.

We did Slayer a couple of years ago and that was awesome. Slayer fans are notoriously [laughs] – they’re there to Slayer, but we fared pretty well and I think we got a lot of new people to roll with us through that tour.

How have your regular fans been reacting to the material when your play it live?

We haven’t been out much with it yet, but everywhere we’ve been, people have been singing the words a lot louder than some of our other stuff, so I think the Unearth fans really appreciate it. And we must be getting a few more people into the net here and there. Maybe a few who didn’t like Unearth before this record heard a little thing here and there that grabbed their attention, which is always good.

You’re no strangers to the tour circuit, not to mention a heap of festival experience. What is your favourite thing about working in a touring band?

You get to wear the same clothes every day and no one complains about it, which is cool. And just getting to go to new places and meet new people. I know it sounds like the textbook answer, but at the end of the day, it’s really fun just to get out there and be in front of people in a different part of the world and having people know your band and know the songs.

Do you ever make a point of getting out and seeing some of the sights along the tour route?

We try to. Sometimes we get lazy and just sit around the hotel room, but we’ve done Europe several times, and the first couple of times we kind of just hung out at the clubs and did whatever. Recently, we’ve been getting out and doing more things, which is healthy, because if you sit cooped up all day you start to say, “Oh, I hate Europe, and it sucks,” but you know what? Go out and do stuff. See stuff. You’ll have a much better time. Now, instead of being tired, you’re tired but you saw something cool.

What goes into preparing yourself for a tour, both physically and mentally?

Ideally, you’d see me on the treadmill playing guitar at the same time and thinking about shows and listening to the music, but normal life goes by. And then, the day we leave, I throw a bunch of stuff into a bag and head out.

How do you keep your guitar chops up on tour: practice, writing, etc.?

I put a guitar in my hand about an hour before we play. There’s a lot of down time too where I’ll set up a guitar with a little processor and some headphones and do some exercises. And not really exercises, but just keep my hands moving so I don’t get too stale, because playing the same thing over and over again at night is good, but it’s the same song. I like to get my hands doing something different than what the Unearth set is. It also gives me some alone time on tour. It’s just me in my own brain, which I think is a healthy thing to do.

You guys are very active on stage. How do you keep control of what you’re playing while still keeping up a visually active performance?

I think that’s something that came with time. We’re still not the tightest live band there is, but I think we try to – well, for one, we’re kind of entertaining ourselves with some of the antics, running around and making a nice visual. And we couldn’t always do that and play at the same time, it’s just something that we learned, that we got better at. As time went on, we could be a bit more active on stage and still be able to play the songs, so that’s the kind of thing, for us, that just came with experience.

And does that include a bit of mid-shred stage diving?

Probably. That’s something that if the mood catches me right, you’ll see me swimming around out there.

You, guitarist Ken Susi and bassist John Maggard do this triangular move where you play on each others fret boards – that’s a bit of a throwback.

That’s a move borrowed from the great Judas Priest. A lot of our moves are inspired by some of the older ’80s metal bands. If you look at some of those videos, some of those guys have got some over-the-top stage antics, so we draw inspiration from stuff like that.

How long did it take to get the triangle down?

It wasn’t really hard, because the riff that we’re playing is kind of a messy sounding part anyways, so it’s something you can do pretty easily, and that wasn’t something we needed to practice. It will be cool if we could choreograph stuff and practice it beforehand, but I don’t know – I think that would be a little too fruity, and we would never do that. We just come up with the idea and say, “We’ll try it on stage and either we’re going to eat shit, or it’s going to be awesome!”

What’s the craziest move you’ve ever tried to pull on stage?

I jumped over our bass player’s head while spinning the guitar around my body. So, in mid-air, over his head, I threw the guitar with the strap around the world on me. But as I came down, the guitar wanted to go up, so when I landed, it was pretty much around my face. But I pulled it off, which was very cool.

Nice – and do you ever improvise musically?

Sometimes if there’s a lead section that I’m very comfortable with, I take a few liberties and change things here and there; but, for the most part, live it’s such an intense experience that my hands feel like rocks up there, so I don’t really stray too far from what I normally do on stage.

How come your hands are heavy – you still get nervous up there?

Every once in a while I maybe get nervous on stage, like at a big festival or something, but it’s very few and far between. I guess I get more nervous that something isn’t going to work, or some type of catastrophe is going to occur. I don’t really get nervous about actually playing in front of people, I just worry – or I worry that people are going to leave or something.

How much from “The March” are you going to play live?

I think our set is 45 minutes, so I think we’re going to do four of the newer songs, probably two off “The Oncoming Storm” [Metal Blade, 2004], and two off “III: In the Eyes of Fire” [Metal Blade, 2006]. We’re probably going to do nine songs, so there will probably be one more, but I don’t know which one it will be. But probably at least half of it will be the new material, because it’s been going over so well and it has a good live vibe to it. We go with what works.

What goes into planning an Unearth set list?

There’s a little bit of an evolution, and there’s our base songs that we always do, our staples, and then we rotate things in and out around them. There’s always a lot of last minute arguing: someone gets offended because they want to play this song and we’re like, “No, you can’t because of this and that,” and there are some bummed-out faces over the set. There’s a lot of pissing and moaning because everyone has their songs that they like and they feel work for whatever reason, so it’s hard for us to ever agree on anything, but somehow we do.

This is your fourth time in western Canada. What are some of the pros and cons of touring in Western Canada?

A con is that the drives are huge. The pro side is that if you make those drives in the day, they’re some of the most beautiful drives you can do on the continent. And the shows are always going to be awesome, whether Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton. All those places have great scenes ,and people appreciate heavy metal music out there. That’s definitely one for the pro column.

Do you think a band – at any level in their music career – has to do a lot of driving if they want to make a living at it?

I think it’s definitely important for the more extreme bands, because you’re not going to get played on the radio. It’s one of your only outlets to get your music to the people. You’ve got your MySpace and your YouTube and all that, which is cool, but you’ve got to get out there; you’ve got to have people smell what you’re cooking, if I can quote The Rock [laughs] and just see what you’re about and see the visual along with the music. It’s kind of what we’ve built our band on: touring and having people see what we’re about and bringing it to the next level on stage.

What do you expect from your audience when you perform?

We get disappointed if we don’t see a lot of activity. We feel like are we doing something wrong if people aren’t going bananas, which they usually do, but if you get a slow night and a slow crowd, it’s like, “What’s happened?” We feed off their energy, and if they’re slowing down, then we’re slowing down, and we like to see the big mosh pits and people up front singing along.

What can the audience expect from you at an Unearth show?

A party. We try to emit a good time, whether you drink or not. We’re up there partying, chugging beers, which adds to a kind of frat party-esque atmosphere and that’s how we roll: huge riffs and people having a good time.

How would you say the band’s sound has evolved since your full-length debut, 2001′s “The Sting of Conscience?”

We still have kind of the hardcore fight breakdown parts, but I think our stuff is way more metal than when we started out. It’s been a natural evolution. This is where we are today. We got older, our tastes matured, and dipped into the metal side of things.

What is it about the hardcore sound and style that – as much as you experiment in your writing – that element is always still present on some level?

I think it just became such a big part of our sound that it’s always going to be there a little. The hardcore element of it isn’t so much the music anymore, but our lifestyles. The way we go about things, the way we treat people and the way we do our business has that hardcore ethic to it, but as far as the music goes, I think that really became a signature of the Unearth sound, so we kind of still hold onto that.

What’s the most difficult thing you’ve tried to accomplish on guitar with Unearth?

Not repeating yourself musically. Trying to come up with something that, after four albums, you haven’t done before, like getting your hands to do something that they haven’t done, trying to come up with notes a bit more surprising, to make people say, “Hey, wow, is this Unearth, cause this sounds interesting?”

Do you write above your skill level?

A lot of the music, I’ll write it and I won’t be able to play it for a while. It will be something that I know what it’s going to be, but it takes me a lot of practice to get to it. There’s still stuff that we play live that I should be able to play better, but I’m not there yet.

And how do you think you’ll get there?

I think I’ll just get it good enough to fool people, and then move on to the next thing.

Speaking of the next thing, I know you’re only just about to set off with Testament, but what are the plans for when the tour wraps?

We’re going to be off for a good portion of the summer, and then I think we’re going back to Europe in September. I haven’t had a summer off in a while, so that will be good.