There’s definitely a unique formula that a band establishes pretty early on, which always seems to line up with success and longevity. A lot of the time, the success of this particular formula is often measured by fan based dedication, especially as your guitars get louder, the vocals get grittier and the sound gets a whole let heavier.
Metal fans, or any subset of the genre for that matter, consistently prove to be both the most dedicated, but also the most resistant to change, and a new direction for a staple favourite can often be disastrous. But… in the case of Suicide Silence, sticking to a formula for guaranteed success, just didn’t form part of the agenda. With the release of their self-titled record and fifth studio album, I took the time to chat with guitarist Mark Heylmun about bullet trains, Deathcore and why this record may be the band’s most important yet.
Congrats on the new album! You’re now up to fifth studio album, where did this particular record begin?
Honestly, this record has been in the works since we started conceptualising about the future of our band. We knew we wanted to do a self-titled record, we knew we wanted to work with Ross Robinson, we just didn’t exactly know it was going to line up on our fifth record. It was kind of just fitting to a lot of the steps we’ve been taking. It’s hard to explain, but this one has really been in the works since day one. We always knew we were going to make a record that would freak people out, and stray from what people expect of us. It’s been a long time coming.
Did you have any major influences to push you in that bit of a different direction?
Really, I think that the biggest inspiration was trying to let go of resistance and fear and just letting go of trying to stick to the formula we all knew was comfortable. But the biggest influence overall would be running away from safety, running away from what feels safest to do and sticking on the side of finding what is really difficult and actually facing it.
We knew we would release something and a bunch of people would react with resistance. We knew people would be hesitant to understand it and we kind of had to embrace that, whilst we were writing. As far as individual music influences go, we were really just feeding off each other. It was really about just diving in individually as musicians, seeing who could come up with the most out there thing that we would all love to play.
I’ve been watching some of your interview clips, where you’re basically letting everyone know that this record is set to test not only the band but everyone else around you as well, especially your fans.
Well when you kind of think about it, there’s like a million… or like a million and a half… actually wait… I don’t know how many bands there are in real life… There’s like a fuck load of bands. For the most part, I’m not going to say everybody, there are some sick bands doing this soul searching thing where they are 100% writing music and they’re not thinking about the outside perspective of it once it’s released but… for the most part, any band or anything on the radio, those people wrote that for you to hear. They made that music with you in mind. They’re thinking “I hope these people like this”, and that’s something we’ve done a lot. We wrote music thinking, “We know people are going to dig this,” or “When this happens live, this is going to be sick”. But with this record, as strange as it is, and as hard as it is for people to understand, we weren’t writing it with the listener in mind. We were writing it with our fucking hearts and what felt good to jam.
It’s like when you’re passing by a car accident you can’t help but look at it. You probably don’t want to see what you’re going to see, but you see it and learn from it and see what’s happening and exactly how it affects you. That’s the mentality we had when we were making this record. We knew we wanted shock, and wanted to turn people’s heads, and have people looking at it and be unable to look away. That’s exactly why there’s so much ‘tee-hee’ and memes going on, because people can’t help but talk about it. It’s exactly how we planned. (Laughs)
There’s a particular metaphor of the bullet train that keeps getting used to describe this album, where did that particular idea come from and how does it relate to the sentiment of the record?
We wrote a song called “Conformity” which is on the record, and it was the first song that we wrote. When we started jamming we kind of knew that it was literally the biggest left turn we could possibly make and that if people heard it they probably wouldn’t understand or like it right away. It’s just like you probably don’t want to see or hear about a train crash but you know, on the same side of it, you’re going to read the article about it, or you’re going to find out how many people died, as fucked up as that it. We knew people were going to hear about something that we did and they couldn’t resist checking it out.
We’re proud of what we’ve done and we’re proud of the path we’ve chosen. In no way is it us being over Deathcore or heavy music, or whatever, we’re just trying to play heavy music in a new way that’s fresh to us and that’s definitely going to be fresh to people expecting a typical Suicide Silence record.
Is that why you kept this particular album as a self-titled record?
Yeah pretty much. In the grand scheme of everything that we’re going to do, we’re a little over a decade in and we’re all just barely in our early thirties and we’re going to make Suicide Silence last forever. It’s what we do, it’s all we care about. When it comes to our creative outlets, this is the one that influences us, to influence anything else that we do. So this is the turning point for Suicide Silence. It’s what you’re going to see from us for the rest of our careers. This is what you get.
You briefly mentioned Deathcore, it’s such an incredible mesh of a whole bunch of different genres, what is it about it that you love so much?
Well really, I’m always conflicted with Deathcore. Only because I feel like Deathcore was kind of put out into the world of subgenres long after we had already been playing what people now call Deathcore. So what we were doing early on, didn’t start getting called Deathcore until I’d already been in the band for three years or so, maybe a little longer. Deathcore kind of grew around us and a couple of other bands, like Whitechapel, Carnifex and Despised Icon, but then other bands got thrown into the mix that weren’t exactly Deathcore.
The thing I like the most about Deathcore is it’s just an extension of death metal and death metal has always been something that’s influenced me because it’s probably the most widely accepted genre of music for changing its sound and exploring different ideas. You can be Opeth and you can be Amorphis you can be Cannibal Corpse, you can be so many different kinds of death metal and still be called death metal. It’s all just a strange category of music and I’ve always been a little confused about it all. (Laughs) When it came to writing this record and sticking to any kind of Deathcore thing, I feel like no matter what we do, we have what people consider to be a Deathcore tone or feeling to it. Like it or not, we had a hand in making Deathcore a thing.
I guess finally, what’s the one thing that you’d love for fans to take away from this album?
I genuinely want to inspire people to let go of outside validation. I want people to get out of the mindset of the social media world where people think, “If I post something someone is going to make fun of me,” or “I’m going to say something or say it wrong”. I want people to start thinking, “I’m going to do something that I want to do and people aren’t going to like it and that’s totally cool”. I aspire to inspire people to be themselves, that’s what everybody kind of wanted out of this record. Don’t worry about being yourself because that’s who you are and if anyone is going to fucking knock you for being yourself then they obviously have a problem with themselves.
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