Suicide Silence Guitarists Digs in on Defending Band’s Latest Album

Suicide Silence’s self-titled album will be debated in metal circles for as long as metal exists alongside Celtic Frost’s Cold Lake, Morbid Angel’s Whatever the Name Was of That Clusterfuck Electronic Album Whose Names Starts with an ‘I,‘ Opeth’s modern-day King Crimson/Yes worship and so on and so forth. That we’re still here talking about it a year and a half later shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s just the beginning!

MS Mansion Monkey Abe — the old fella I told you about earlier who works the mail room — was VERY excited when the following tidbit came in from Heavy New York, who recently spoke with Suicide Silence guitarist Chris Garza (not Fake Mark Heylmun) about the band’s very controversial 2017 release. Abe loves that record! Abe likes it when bands take chances. I’m like Abe. Are you like Abe?

Here’s what Garza had to say about whether the band had planned to incorporate clean vocals into the record before the recording process began [transcribed by Blabbermouth]:

“Absolutely. I mean, every record we kind of like, we want to not evolve, but take risks and chances. After The Black Crown, we were going to take some fucking…basically, what we did on the record, after The Black Crown, but after what happened with Mitch, that put things to a halt. Things were already going to happen, but with You Can’t Stop Me, there’s no room to do anything. We barely were able to just be a band again, so to go on with Eddie and without Mitch and go in general and experiment, it was impossible. Let’s see if we can be a band first.

“Once we accomplished that, it was like, ‘Okay. Now let’s see what we can really do.’ Basically, it was like, ‘What if we die? What would be our last record? What would we do? What do we want to try?’ It’s about learning. Bands are afraid to fucking fail because that’s how you learn. But, I’m very thankful and blessed to be in a real band. We’re all in this and we love music and we love our fans and we want to give them something fresh. We know they’re in it for the long haul, as we are.

“It takes, as throughout my career and demos and all that stuff, I learned that in order to get a certain sound for a record, sometimes it takes a couple of records to get to the record that you’re trying to do. I had that in mind. I don’t care, I didn’t care about record sales or all that bullshit that everyone is like obsessing about. It’s, like, ‘What’s this going to do for us in five years from now? Ten years from now? Thirty years from now?’ What’s our eighth record going to sound like if we try this on our fifth?”

Garza goes on to talk about how awesome it was working with legendary producer Ross Robinson, how the record’s experimental direction has paid dividends for the band in ways that can’t be measured financially and the band’s tenth anniversary tour celebrating The Cleansing last year. In other words: he’s not sorry! I’m glad to see the band continue to defend the chance they took rather than apologizing with their tails between their legs. We’ll have to see how that manifests on their next album.

You can read some more highlights from the interview at Blabbermouth and watch the whole thing below via Heavy New York.