EXPECT IT: July via Century Media

Suicide Silence recently recorded their third album, The Black Crown, with producer Steve Evetts, and they’re currently mixing it with noted heavyweight Zeuss. Crown has been in the works since early 2010, however, when the Riverside, California, deathcore band spent several weeks snowed into a cabin in the Big Bear mountains and had “nothing left to do all day and all night but jam,” says vocalist Mitch Lucker. “We didn’t do any pre-production at that time,” he explains. “We were just composing riffs and cool shit and just putting it into the computer. There were tracks that were, like, four or five hours long of us just jamming.”

Lucker estimates that “80, 90 percent of the riffs” on Crown came from these sessions. However, fans shouldn’t necessarily expect the riff/blastbeat/breakdown overload of the band’s first two albums; in fact, he says Crown is Suicide Silence’s most mature record. “These are actually songs that are written and structured better than anything we’ve ever structured or composed before,” Lucker says. “We wrote this record to make people go fucking insane at shows. Because we play 300 shows a year basically…you realize what works at shows to make people lose their mind and completely just want to destroy something or just lose it. This record is that.

“People know we’re good musicians,” he adds later. “We don’t need to play as fast as we can or as crazy we can all the time. It’s better to give breathers and breaks. And this record has way more groove and way more bounciness, way more catchiness. We focused a lot on that.”



Suicide Silence are also focusing on live instrumentation and staying away from sampled sounds on Crown. That’s where Steve Evetts—and what Lucker calls his “amazing” ear for tone—comes in. “Having Steve there to make sure everything’s perfectly played is almost better than having a computer tell you, ‘Oh, this is perfect, oh, this is perfect,’” he says. “It’s better to have a human do it so there’s actual real emotion, a real feeling in the music. [There are] natural tempo inclines and declines, not just perfection. Music isn’t perfect and it shouldn’t be. We want to be a band, not a bunch of kids that rely on computers and machines to make our music for us.”

Such musical variance matches the lyrical depth of Crown. According to Lucker, the album is “way more personal. It’s more my head on paper, just my head cracked open and poured on to paper. Having the writing be more emotional, I guess, had some of the music get really dark. But it’s still heavy as fuck—the darkness that we incorporated into this record is some of the heaviest shit we’ve ever written.”

The progression is fitting, considering that Suicide Silence are going to spend the summer on a side stage of the Mayhem Festival with All Shall Perish and Straight Line Stitch. “This record’s going to surprise people,” Lucker concludes. “It’s either gonna make you so angry you’re gong to punch something because it’s that heavy, or your jaw’s going to be dropped.” alt