SUICIDE SILENCE Frontman: 'We're Here Because We Love Playing Music, And That's It'

Scott Sugarman of Rock Edition recently conducted an interview with guitarist Mark Heylmun and vocalist Mitch Lucker of California deathcore masters SUICIDE SILENCE. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Rock Edition: Let's talk about "The Black Crown" a bit. Did you guys approach the writing and recording process differently than with "No Time To Bleed"?

Mark: Yeah, we did. First, it started off as just conversation and talking about what we wanted to do. It wasn't really even writing; it was just talking and getting on the same page. That turned into a month-long trip to a cabin in the mountains in the snow that we lived in together. [We] set up a little studio and jammed and got all of our ideas and basically got onto the right page with each other and got the mojo of writing together. From there, it was just like we knew what we wanted to do, and then whenever we had free time together off tour, we would write. We're not really a band that writes on tour a lot. We might write a riff or two while we're on tour, but we don't really write songs while we're on the road. Every time we could, while we were home, it was just me and our other guitar player, [Chris] Garza. We would just get together and write a ton of riffs, and we would just have literally, before we sat back down with Alex or with Dan or Mitch we just had at least three hours of just riffs and parts. Not even songs, just little doodads here and there that we could use as songs. Once we got together, it all came together really fast.

Rock Edition: So you just transferred all those guitar parts over to the rest of the band?

Mark: Yeah. It wasn't like we had a bunch of riffs and we just pieced it together. We didn't just go this riff, this riff into this riff into this riff into that riff. A lot of the stuff would be kind of similar because it was like, "Oh, we obviously wrote this stuff, these few riffs, in the same day." They sounded like they would be in the same song. We would take two or three riffs and then we even, at one point, took a bunch of riffs and said, "These all sound like intros." We labeled them as intros, and we labeled other things like, "This sounds like a good chorus, or this sounds like a verse or this sounds like a bridge." We were just labeling things as what we thought they might be good as. It was definitely a lot different than the writing process for "The Cleansing" and "No Time to Bleed". Another reason why we went to the cabin was because we got a new bass player [Dan Kenny], and we had never written with him. We wanted to get a good sit down with all of us together so he could see how we work, and we could see how he worked with us. It was all different. We even were talking about it, like, "How the fuck did we even write the first two records?" We couldn't even remember. We didn't even know how it happened, just because this was so much different. [laughs]

Rock Edition: You guys have also said that this is going to be your last release from Century Media.

Mitch: No, it's not our last release from Century Media; it's just that contractually, this is the last record we're signed up for. It doesn't mean we're leaving, necessarily, because they're an amazing label, and they've done amazing things for us, and we fucking love them. It doesn't mean it's our last record with them at all.

Rock Edition: So have you started to think about what you're going to do once that contract is fulfilled?

Mitch: Yeah, we've been looking around, seeing what's up. Other people have looked into us, seeing what's up with us. We're just going to keep our fucking eyes open and see where it goes. Especially with this just being our third full-length record coming out, who knows what it can do? It can do terrible; it can do good. So we've just got our fingers crossed, and we always look up. We never try to think about what's going to happen. We're always just, "Let's go. Let's do it. Let's run up this fucking hill as fast as we can."

Mark: Especially since who knows what's going on with the industry nowadays. A lot of bands, I think, don't even need a label, and I think a lot of times, a bigger band will be done with their contract and I'm talking about bands that are bigger than us and they'll go to another label and then realize that it was just a bad idea to sign another contract because then they're just stuck in whatever they have to do within the contract. I think that KILLSWITCH [ENGAGE] is a good example of that, and that's kind of why you don't hear about them anymore. I think it kind of tore them apart.

Rock Edition: Do you think you would ever try to go the do-it-yourself way of distribution?

Mitch: Being a young band, I think that would be a hard thing to do, but at the same time, the industry's not what it used to be. Everything's completely different. It's almost like you have to keep your fingers crossed and just jump in to some things because you don't know what the outcome's going to be. You don't know if this label's going to work out for you, or if your own label's going to work out for you. You gotta do it, do it because you love it, and hope it works out. That's basically it. We're here not because we're on this label or that label; we're here because we're a fucking band and we like to jam. That's it. Think about when you're a little kid and you've got a garage band. How fun is that? We're here because we love playing music, and that's it.

Read the entire interview from Rock Edition.