SUICIDE SILENCE Guitarist: 'We Will Outlast The Deathcore Genre'

Jon Wiederhorn of Guitar World recently conducted an interview with guitarists Mark Heylmun and Chris Garza of California deathcore masters SUICIDE SILENCE. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Guitar World: When did you start working on songs for [the new SUICIDE SILENCE album] "The Black Crown"?

Mark Heylmun: For me, it really started in December 2009 when we were on tour with MEGADETH. That's when I started really thinking about riffs and how I was picturing the record. Even though it wasn't even started, I thought about how it would be when it was finished and what we were gonna do to start writing. I suggested to the guys that we go up to a cabin and rent it for a couple weeks and be away from everything and get all of our idea on the table whether they're good or bad and see where everyone's head is at. And that happened between December of 2009 and February 2010

Chris Garza: We were all pretty fresh. I didn't have any riffs. We would just jam all day. A lot of it turned out to not even make the record, we were just jamming to get the juices flowing.

Mark Heylmun: Yeah, at the time I didn't have even 30 seconds or a minute of actual music. It was more the idea of how the songs would be and how the structures would be and how we were gonna grow from the last record. I had some riffs I thought were cool. We wrote a couple songs but none of 'em made the final product. It was more of a thing to get back in the groove of writing, since we hadn't written anything together in a year and a half. And it was also the first time we were writing with our new bass player [Dan Kenny]. So we just went in and jammed to see what came out spontaneously which is the way we wrote the first two records.

Guitar World: Were there different influences at play this time?

Mark Heylmun: Well, we weren't afraid to show where we have come from so you can see the influence of KORN, and things like SUFFOCATION, MORBID ANGEL and PANTERA. And even the lead playing that I do, there are slight little slivers that come through that are kind of like OPETH just things we would have been more afraid to do previously.

Guitar World: Were you guys all getting along during the writing and recording of "The Black Crown"?

Mark Heylmun: We always get along to an extent. Whether or not we're extremely mad at each other we can still be rational and talk to each other about it. But I don't think any of us really like to be mad at each other. We don't like to let it get out of hand like it sometimes does.

Guitar World: So, can we still call SUICIDE SILENCE a deathcore band?

Mark Heylmun: It doesn't matter to me anymore what people call us. It kind of was weird at first just cause it doesn't sound cool and where we come from isn't just straight death metal and hardcore. We will outlast the deathcore genre just as KORN and DEFTONES and SLIPKNOT have outlasted the nu-metal genre.

Read the entire interview from Guitar World.