THE RED CHORD Frontman On Music For Next Album

MetalSucks conducted an interview with THE RED CHORD frontman Guy Kozowyk at the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival stop at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York. Excerpts from the chat follow.

MetalSucks: What's on the horizon for you guys when you wrap the tour up?

Kozowyk: We finish the tour up on the 20th of August. We have a month off where we're going to start dabbling in writing and things like that. We'll go overseas for the Hell on Earth Tour with WALLS OF JERICHO, ANIMOSITY, and, I think, ALL SHALL PERISH is on a leg of it. EVERGREEN TERRACE and CATARACT and a couple of other bands are on it. Then we're going to be writing for the remainder of the year unless we got some weird Japan/Australia offer or something like that. Otherwise, we might get back on tour at the beginning of next year, but it's really up in the air as to when exactly we'll be off and writing.

MetalSucks: So the goal is to get a new album out next year?

Kozowyk: Yeah, probably sometime in mid-next year we'd like to have a record out. We've started dabbling in writing and stuff. We haven't been actively having writing sessions and practices. We've just been kind of writing on our own and throwing ideas around.

MetalSucks: So do you have a conscious vision for the direction you guys want to move in?

Kozowyk: No, it'll probably be a little bit more of a strange adventure [than our last album] I'd say, but at the heart of it I don't know if we're really looking to shed the death metal cross. It'll have a little bit of everything. I don't know if it's a guideline as much as it is a backbone and basis for the stuff we've always done. I don't think it's going to change drastically, even though I think it'll be a very different record than the last few.

MetalSucks: You just get that impression from the early dablings you've done so far?

Kozowyk: At the end of the day it's like, I'm a vocalist and one of the two original guys [still in the band], and vocally I don't know if a band . . . I've always tried to sound different from record to record. I've had people be like "Oh, whatever happened to your first vocalist?" And I'm kind of like, "Oh, that's me." I think it's easy for death metal bands to fall into the DEICIDE pattern where every record, the vocalist kind of sounds the same. There's nothing wrong with consistency, and it's great that one band can be brutal in the beginning and be brutal now. I've just tried to diversify it to the point where I'm still doing brutal vocals but there is some sort of difference from record to record. I don't think you'll get me singing clean or something like that. If I was going to do that, I'd probably do it in a different band as opposed to THE RED CHORD. With that being said, I don't know if we could suddenly become that mellow of a band or whatever. Even if the music slowed down, we'd still be heavy and have the essence of it. Again, the music might speed up, it might slow down, but overall, it's heavy music. Heavy music has expanded a lot over the years. There are so many different sects of it now. It can be stoner metal, it could be doom, black metal, death metal, and so we kind of encompass all of that as well as hardcore and even some punk and grind. There's a lot of different ways we could go. I kind of love that we've always thrown in that minute-long song on our records. I would like to see a few more of those. But I also like the fact that the last track on the recent record ["Prey for Eyes"], "Seminar", is just so slow and heavy and atmospheric, and I love that we're throwing in more of that. Those big, drawn-out atmospheric parts on songs like "Prey for Eyes" and "Seminar"... you might see more of that. We get a lot of requests for it. People are catching onto it. There's a little of everything. I kind of feel like over the years the riffs themselves have become a lot more emotional. I think there are times where I think we're writing better leads and becoming better guitar players. The riffs themselves are telling a story and have more of a vibe as opposed to in the beginning, when [the riffs were] mechanical on the first record. People might have liked it for that reason, but it was really all over the place. There wasn't much theory to it. It was more like "Alright, let's do it."

MetalSucks: Okay, so very last question. It's a ridiculous question but I've got to ask... My girlfriend swears that on "Send the Death Storm", you're saying "Save the Death Star." Pretending for a second that she was right, why would you want to save the Death Star?

Kozowyk: When you think about it, you could potentially colonize the Death Star. As the world gets more overpopulated, you could make it a retirement home or something like that. Like, when people get to a certain age, You say "Alright, you're 68, I don't know if there really is much of a purpose for you here anymore. You're retired or whatever. Maybe you should just go and hang out on the Death Star for the rest of your days." It could be that, or something for, like, upstart internet companies and things like that. It could be cheap real estate, like people going to Alaska or companies buying up land in the Mid-West. You might just go "Alright, we're kind of sick of Kansas anyway, we might as well go to outer space and hang out on the Death Star."

To read the rest of this interview, visit www.metalsucks.net.