SUICIDE SILENCE Guitarist Says He Knew Some Fans Wouldn’t Like Their Self-Titled Album

In a new interview with “Mike James Rock Show” at this year’s Download festival, SUICIDE SILENCE guitarist Mark Heylmun says he knew some fans wouldn’t like their controversial Self-Titled Album. A few excerpts follow (as transcribed by Blabbermouth.net).

On SUICIDE SILENCE‘s controversial new self-titled album, which saw the band take a noticeable change in direction from their traditional deathcore sound:

Mark: “It’s easy when there was a pre-destined [idea of how the album will sound], like, we know people will talk s**t. 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 s**t. We needed to do something different or what the f**k else are we doing? It’s easier to keep churning out s**t 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 s**t to change and when it did, it pissed me off. At the same time, you need to f**king grow. You need to or what the f**k are you doing? Why are you in a band?”

On the band’s need to progress:

Mark: “We have to. We knew it. We wanted to go further when Eddie [Hermida, vocals] joined the band. In all reality, we wanted to go f**king super-deep if Mitch [Lucker, vocals] wouldn’t have passed [in 2012]. There was so many things we had said and footsteps we had pre-thrown out there that we were going to step into and follow. We had plans for every record until our tenth record. Like, we really talked about that s**t. Losing Mitch and all that, it’s, like, we kind of had to take a new road, a new way to go about it. Doing [2014’s] ‘You Can’t Stop Me’, we felt, ‘Well, we wrote a ‘maintenance record.’ We wrote a record that’s not exactly what we would have done if we weren’t in that situation.’ We wrote a record that makes people stoked that SUICIDE SILENCE is still a band; let’s make some heavy s**t. Post that record, it didn’t satisfy us as much as we would have liked it to. So, let’s go do some f**king weird s**t. Let’s jam together, let’s f**king see what comes out naturally and where we are going as individuals, as a band, like, where are we going?”

On whether SUICIDE SILENCE will continue with their current direction on their next album:

Mark: “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 f**king 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 s**t, but at the same time, we are having a good time with the f**king melodrama and writing really chill songs.”

On whether he thinks SUICIDE SILENCE‘s fanbase will allow the band to progress:

Mark: “It’s all a journey, dude. We could have changed our name and wrote a record and tried to f**king… I don’t know. I think the general consensus is that there’s a view on bands that it’s,, like, ‘Oh, every band is trying to become f**king famous and become huge and get on the radio and do all of this stuff.’ When a band like SUICIDE SILENCE starts clean singing, you don’t get an open ear as much. You just get, ‘Oh, what the f**k are these guys trying to do?’ They don’t listen to it and think about like, maybe this is ‘real.’ Maybe this isn’t an attempt at being something they’re not.”

On trying to maintain the band’s relevance in the face of fan backlash:

Mark: “What better time to make a f**king crazy shift then when we’re 15 years deep as a band? We’re going to have another 15 years ahead of us and it’s, like, I forgot who said it, but it was like ‘McDonald’s comes out with a new burger, they don’t take the Big Mac off the menu.’ We have all our old s**t, it’s all there. It’s cool if you want to f**king hate us because we did something you don’t approve of, but then who the f**k is the idiot at that point?”