Suicide Silence Guitarist Talks About the Band’s Next Record
The Mike James Rock Show conducted an interview with guitarist Mark Heylmun of Suicide Silence at the Download festival in the UK earlier this month, and Heylmun had some interesting things to say about the controversial direction of their self-titled album, released this past February. Blabbermouth has transcribed a few particularly newsworthy excerpts of the interview.
I especially like this section, in which Heylman explains why the band decided to veer so far from their proven path this time around. The tl;dr version is this: because they were bored! It’s fucking mind-numbing and not challenging in the slightest to write the same album that the fans expect over and over, which is a refrain we’ve heard from bands (except Slayer) over and over. Says he:
“It’s easy when there was a pre-destined [idea of how the album will sound], like, we know people will talk shit. We know people might not like this. We know all of it. We already knew, so we kind of prepped ourselves for it. We needed to, at this point in our lives, in our careers, as people, as humans, as kids who started off playing heavy music, we needed to try some shit. We needed to do something different or what the fuck else are we doing? It’s easier to keep churning out shit that people expect you to put out. That’s the way I feel with our fans; no offense to them. I love them and understand it. I was a fan of so much as a young kid and I didn’t want shit to change and when it did, it pissed me off. At the same time, you need to fucking grow. You need to or what the fuck are you doing? Why are you in a band?”
Heylmun also spoke about whether or not Suicide Silence will continue in the same musical vein on their next album (which is, of course, still in the distant future):
“We’re really thinking about it. We’re always thinking about it. I think that one, we’re still going to go into it with the ‘mystery,’ because I think the mystery is a lot of what of the goodness of the music fucking sick, is like you don’t know what’s going to come out and when it does, you’re, like, ‘There it is.’ On the other end, we went into this last record, full mystery, like, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen.’ Now we have a bag of tricks that we learned from while writing this record and we’re going to utilize what we did with this last one and just meld everything that we’ve done in the past and get gnarly. I know that we probably are going to end up having some super-, super-heavy shit, but at the same time, we are having a good time with the fucking melodrama and writing really chill songs.”
While it’s good to hear that Suicide Silence are still defending the new album and they’re proud of the material they wrote, I have a hard time believing that we won’t be hearing a whole lot about how the next record is “really heavy” and “a return to form” in the press cycle leading up to its release. But, at the very least, it seems like Heylmun is maintaining an open mind about keeping some of these newfangled musical elements (not just clean singing) in the picture… and who knows, maybe they’ll surprise us and give a complete middle finger to their longtime fans with Suicide Silence Part II.
We much liked Suicide Silence, by the way, controversy be damned; read our official review here. Also don’t miss a video we shot with the band in which they responded to mean things MetalSucks commenters had said about them.
You can check out the full interview below.
