SUICIDE SILENCE Members Discuss Forthcoming Album In New Interview

Metal Insider recently conducted an interview with Mitch Lucker and Mark Heylmun of California deathcore masters SUICIDE SILENCE. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Insider: SUICIDE SILENCE's third album, "The Black Crown", comes out July 12. What was the band's goal going into the recording? Did you feel any pressure to top the success of your previous albums?

Mitch: 100%, yeah. This is our third record, and it needed to be the best! It needed to blow the other two away. So it was probably the most stressful, I'd say, creation of a record we've ever done.

Mark: And I thought I was stressed out when we were writing "No Time To Bleed", but this was most definitely more stressful.

Mitch: It was very stressful, but I think it gave everyone a fire under their ass to just work that much harder and that much more badass.

Mark: And we need that. We need that fire, and we need the fucking deadline and all that shit. It makes us work harder. I think the record is freaking sweet and we just wanted it to be badass. That's all we knew, and it's kind of hard to go "Hey this record needs to be badass!" and just go write it. So having that stress definitely helped us out.

Metal Insider: The band is often noted as one of the big standouts out of the current deathcore genre. Do you feel that you've transcended the genre, or maybe even feel limited by the title?

Mitch: I think that with this record, it kicks us out of being pigeonholed into anything. When you hear this record, it's like, "Oh, that's SUICIDE SILENCE!" Just like when you put in a SLIPKNOT record, when you put in a KORN record, or put in a fucking PANTERA record. Within the first couple of seconds of the song, you know what band that is. And this record is that record for us. You hear the voice, you hear the guitar tone, you hear the ravage music and you'll know immediately. And that's what we're trying to do.

Mark: I kind of look at it as the way a movie maker would make a movie. Say he makes a sci-fi movie all the time and he doesn't necessarily get thrown into the mainstream movie industry, but then he makes "The Matrix", a sci-fi movie but everyone can understand it and like it. Sure we get lumped into that deathcore crap, but if anything we were one of the original people who were doing it. So we were doing whatever you want to call deathcore before anyone could call it anything. So being lumped into something like that, I mean we can't really be mad about it. It's just something some people started to call what we do, and this record kind of just blends the fucking deathcore and everything else. It makes it so, even know what deathcore is, you're listening to it and you're just like, "Wow this is a new metal band."

Mitch: It's just straight-up heavy metal! Heavy metal has always been around and it always will be. So us being a heavy metal band, it's just like, "Yo, this is us! Welcome to it!"

Mark: Yeah, we really perfected our craft of what we want to sound lie with just taking what we did on the first two records and making it fucking more badass, honing in on what we know we're good at and we know what our fans like and what we like to play.

Mitch: We found out what we're good at and what we know after all of these years of playing what exactly what makes people want to rip their eyes out or go completely insane at the live show. We made this record for people to go completely insane to and scream their lungs out.

Metal Insider: Which process would you say is the most stressful: touring or recording?

Mark: I think the touring is pretty fucking fun. And it's stressful in the sense that it gets like "Groundhog Day" and it just starts becoming redundant, but that's when you have to find different ways to basically kill time or keep yourself occupied and stay productive. Recording is fun as well, but writing a record is very stressful, especially when there's deadlines. With us, so far we've just been on this steady incline where we don't want to fall back. We don't want to sell less records than we did on the last cycle, and we want to step up and be growing and just be a better band. I think that in general, putting out a record is more stressful because it's going to determine what you're going to be doing.

Mitch: It determines whether when you go on tour if people are going to show up or not. When you're making that record, it's like, "Well this is going to effect the next two years." But it is extremely stressful record wise.

Metal Insider: Do you feel that the current state of the music industry and economy have added onto that stress? Has it added even more pressure for you personally?

Mark: I think it sucks! I think it really sucks. Just the fact that there's this generation, this is kind of off the subject, but I realized that by the end of the year, everyone that was born in 1990 will be allowed in bars and 21, which is really weird to me. So in that same kind of area, a lot of those kids were buying their first CD in 2000, or maybe in 1998 if they started early. Usually at 10 or 11 you're buying your first record. And around that time was when digital downloading was just getting super big. So for the most part, people that were born after 1990 may have never even purchased music before. So it's getting to that point where record labels are trying to think of the most insane ways to get people to buy music, and some kids just don't want to. They don't look at it like the way we would look at it where this is our work and we've put so much emotion, effort and physical work in doing this and money just to put something out. And then for people to just go download music and not think anything of it and just look at it as "That's just the way it is. Why should I go buy it if it's right here for free," it's just fucked up. When you look at bands like MUDVAYNE, KORN, or bands that were huge, or even just look at us, if there was no music to download, do you know how many records we would have sold? It's insane to think about, and I don't even like to think about it, but I think we're just lucky to be able to sell what we sell and to do what we do and have the success that we have. It sucks, and there will be a definite change in the music industry in the next five years, if not sooner.

Read the entire interview from Metal Insider.