BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE Frontman: 'We've Opened A Lot Of Doors For The World Of Metal'

Peter Hodgson of the I Heart Guitar blog recently conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Matt Tuck of Welsh metallers BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

I Heart Guitar: The response to the album has been insane. How are you finding the reaction out there?

Tuck: Well, 95% of the things I've heard off the press across the planet has been extremely positive, which is great. And we love it, we think it's a great record — which is all we're really ultimately concerned about — but for it to be received so well after having mixed reviews on the last record, it's a really good sign. People are freaking out! So it's like, okay, we've done something pretty cool here, by the looks of it. So we're very proud. It's been very well received around the planet. Not very many people can pick holes in it this time around. I'm the biggest critic of myself — I know when something's not right and could have been better, and I just can't pick a flaw in it right now. People are freaking out. We've had really great reviews — we're happy boys.

I Heart Guitar: How do you balance being your toughest critic with those 95% positive reviews? Do you pay much attention to that other 5%?

Tuck: Not really. The only opportunity we do get to peruse reviews is usually for the U.K. press. When an album drops, we're usually at home, about to go on tour somewhere, so we don't really get to see actual physical reviews from anywhere else on the planet. We just hear about them from our management and the record labels who obviously actively pay attention and collection them and catalog it all. It does matter. It's nice to hear something positive and it sucks to hear something that's not. But at the end of the day, we've got to a stage in our career now where we're very comfortable with our abilities and who we are, and as long as we're happy, nothing else really [matters].

I Heart Guitar: Your songwriting is heavy yet accessible. Is that something you work to achieve, or does it just happen?

Tuck: That's just how it is, that's just what we do. People really struggled to deal with that when we first started. They were like, "You can't do that!" and we were like, "Well, we are!" We're not trying to be a big-selling global rock outfit. That was never the point. We're just four friends writing music, and this is how it comes out. So to make that into a formula, I don't know. It's just something we've done very naturally.

I Heart Guitar: In a time when you can hear metal riffs on ads for breakfast cereal, it seems like metal's just become part of the fabric of the global consciousness.

Tuck: Yeah! I'm very proud of the fact that we've opened a lot of doors for the world of metal, you know what I mean? There are some people that like the band or whatever, and there are some people that fucking totally hate us because of what we do, but at the same time, what we're doing for the genre as a whole is a good thing. We're bringing it to a whole mass of people who wouldn't have given a shit before we came along, and that sounds maybe a little bit arrogant, I know, but it's a fact! We've opened the door for this genre to become more of a mainstream, everyday life music. And that's cool as fuck. We could be as heavy as we want, but we want to be more than that. We want to write songs that will stand the test of time.

Read the entire interview from the I Heart Guitar blog.