Eddie Hermida from Suicide Silence Discusses the Future of Deathcore, Says Something Kinda Mean About Thy Art is Murder
In a new interview with Clrvynt, Suicide Silence/All Shall Perish vocalist Eddie Hermida was asked about the future of deathcore, and this is what he said:
“If bands keep doing what we’re doing, it can still remain as a powerhouse. Fact is, the reason people don’t believe in deathcore is it sounds dumbed-down and cheesy, and not challenging to play. A lot of the death metal elitists make fun of it, and anyone who doesn’t listen to all screamed vocals isn’t going to listen to it. So, you’re kind of stuck playing to these fans who are either deathcore fans or death metal elitists. Or just metal elitists in general, the patch-wearing fucking weirdos. [Laughs] You start playing to these crowds, and they’re never going to accept the virtuosity of dumbing down your music; they’re never going to understand it. If it’s not played at 230 bpm, people are gonna think it’s wack. That right there goes to show how simple-minded and afraid of change people in our scene are. If bands starts challenging themselves and pushing what they can do as musicians, and goes out there and write some really good tunes, I think deathcore has a future. If bands succumb to what Thy Art Is Murder just did, like, ‘Oh yeah we’re gonna save deathcore,’ and they write the same song they wrote on their last record, it’s going to die. That’s just it. If bands start to grow, deathcore will grow; if bands make the music they’ve always made, it’s going to die.”
First: no one in the Thy Art is Murder camp should be too cranky about Hermida’s quote. He barely said anything about them. I, personally, say worse things about Thy Art is Murder even ten to fifteen minutes. Thy Art is Murder’s music is so terrible to get through it I fantasize about the time I had food poisoning and was simultaneously vomiting and shitting for an entire day. There. That’s much more insulting than what Hermida said.
Second: Hermida’s overall assessment of deathcore’s future seems both right and wrong to me.
To be perfectly clear, I like Suicide Silence’s new album, and I think a lot of the criticisms against it are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of what the album is and what the band was trying to accomplish. (I’ll elaborate in my review of the record, which is embargoed until next week.) And I think, if nothing else, it took massive, MASSIVE balls to make this release, which does anything but play it safe.
That being said… there are no shortage of bands in the world who have made a career playing the same shit over and over and over and over and over and… I mean, when I think “artistic development,” Slayer is not the first band to come to mind. And yet, they are inarguably one of the most revered and successful metal bands of all time, and thrash didn’t die as a result of their unwillingness to evolve. Nor, for that matter, has thrash’s popularity continued as a result of Metallica’s willingness to sound like whatever the fuck Load and St. Anger were.
The truth, there’s no clear correlation between any given subgenre’s longevity and creative progression. In fact, at least up ’til this point in metal history, no subgenre has ever died completely — against all odds, even eighth-rate glam and nu-metal bands like Enuff Z’Nuff and Orgy still have something resembling careers. You can’t even blame their ability to keep going purely on sentimentality, because new glam and nu-metal bands are being formed even as I type this. It could be another hundred years before anyone is able to look back and figure out why some subgenres thrived and others died… assuming that any have actually died by then.
So, to sum it all up: Thy Art is Murder are a horrible fucking band whose music is the aural equivalent of diaper rash. We can at least all agree on that, right?
