Become The Hunter was a weird time in the world of Suicide Silence. The band was coming off their much-disliked 2017 self-titled album, guitarist Mark Heylmun was on hiatus from the band, and drummer Alex Lopez was credited on the album despite it being performed by Ernie Iniguez.
In an interview with Metal Injection, guitarist and founding Suicide Silence member Chris Garza explains why he really doesn't like Become The Hunter. It all started with a change in practice space, which Garza wasn't a fan of.
"That was the first and only batch of songs that weren't written in a garage. For those of you that don't know, everything before Become The Hunter and after has been written in the same garage. Pre-Mitch shit dude. Suicide Silence was born in my parents' garage, and we wrote our demos there, and The Cleansing, and Black Crown, 'YOLO' – you name it. We're back there now."
Garza then went on to detail the band's lineup issues at the time, the crediting issue, and the fact that he felt Become The Hunter was released just to have a new Suicide Silence record out.
"There was some shit going on. I love Alex, we still talk, but he wanted to get this spot next to his house because drummers and bass players are always fucking late. So in my head I'm like 'if we go to him then he won't be late.' Of course I knew that wasn't the case. He was still late, but he was going through… we were writing, things weren't clicking. Mark took that sabbatical for a year. It all happened at once – we got this spot, I don't like it. We were at a weird spot in our career. We're trying to write music after the self-titled. There were things I couldn't predict affected some band members way differently than me.
"Mark went out for a year. Alex had some personal issues, I don't even know what he was going through. And we just got Ernie. From a time factor, it's like 'damn. We're taking a long time to write music and it's bullshit.' Through necessity, we had to get the music out. It's not the best way to put music out, but there's deadlines and we had to put something out.
"Ernie's from the same area for those of you that don't know, Ernie's from the Orange County area. He's Latino, he's from the scene. It was kind of like another version of Alex – a dude that's been around for a while that's played shows around the area. He wasn't just some rando. We wrote the rest of those songs with Ernie. There were some we started with Alex and Ernie came in and finished them – it's weirdly credited. I don't even know.
"It was hard for that record because everything prior to that was split evenly, which a lot of bands will say 'don't do that.' But for us, we've been that way. If you wrote the song or not, you were credited as an equal member. We're used to that for fucking five or six records and demos, and then we come to this other part of our career [and it's like] 'we have to split this how many ways?' I don't even know how some of those songs turned out, to be honest. I haven't looked at those credits. It was a tough time.
"It goes back to what we were talking about earlier – you're trying to move forward and other people are going through their lives. Someone's turning 30 and having a quarter life crisis, everyone's trying to grow up… I honestly don't like that record at all."
Check out the full interview below.
