| Deathcore didn’t invent itself. The crushing combination of classic death metal ferocity with hardcore-punk spirit was created in garages and grimy venues. It was celebrated on message boards, in comment sections, and in sweaty, anarchic spaces where hardcore kids and death metal obsessives gathered. As the burgeoning subgenre formed, teenage metalheads dared one another to get heavier. SUICIDE SILENCE made their logo synonymous with the most volatile and definitive stomp of the postmodern sound. Since their first rumblings in California’s Inland Empire in the early 21st Century, the band’s fusion of sonic violence, punk confrontation, and unapologetic nü-metal bounce put a fresh face on extreme metal. SUICIDE SILENCE remains stubbornly communal. They have always written best with bodies in a room, amps cranked, and friendly arguments evolving into arrangements. That collective instinct gives Graceless its strange comfort amid the chaos. It is vicious, ugly, physical, immediate, and fully inhabited by a band that survived every argument about what it was supposed to be. As guitarist Chris Garza puts it, the goal was to “just get out of the way and serve that band logo. When we choose to do that, great things follow. We’re back to doing it exactly as we did it when we were kids: just playing heavy shit and doing it from the heart.” Deathcore was once a word thrown at them as a limit. Today, it’s a flag planted in the dirt. Twenty-four years after their first noise from SoCal, SUICIDE SILENCE stands in rare company: survivors who never mistook endurance for safety, craftsmen more than capable of making instinct sound like impact. Graceless is the circle closing, hard, with newly sharpened teeth, hungry for future conquest. |
