Greek thrashers Suicidal Angels return with a brand new album “Years Of Aggression” which while the title suggests a summary of the band’s career, musically actually does the name justice. This is a band that is at the top of their game and with a back catalogue featuring some of the best modern thrash metal you will ever find, it’s no surprise some of us metalheads are big fans of this band. They may fly under the radar for some not in tune with the underground but we hope to change that by chatting to founding member and frontman Nick Melissourgos about the new album as well as their recent show with Slayer, how Suicidal Angels recorded their brilliant 2007 debut album and much more.
Andrew: So obviously you have the new album coming out very soon, “Years Of Aggression”. The album title sounds like a summarisation of maybe the whole band’s career, where did the title come from?
Nick: Actually the album title has 2 meanings more or less. It describes the history of the band so far and also has to do with what we are living now. It seems like the world doesn’t learn from the mistakes from the past and we’re just heading to something really weird and that was also the inspiration for me for the album title.
Andrew: Obviously there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world, politically speaking and all that. How much of that was an inspiration for the album overall and the songs individually, do you sing about a lot of what is going on in the world today?
Nick: The lyrics of the album, it’s not a concept album, I’m glad to say that but the songs have it’s own story, whatever you want to call that. It is either personal experiences like stuff that I experienced or I heard from people saying a weird story or it also has to do with poems and books I was reading. For example the song “Order Of Death”, it’s a poem like a conversation between death and somebody who is almost dying and is saying it’s not my time yet. It also has to do wth problems that we face everyday, that we see every day and experience every day and it also has to do with, like I said before, personal experiences and personal thoughts on how I see some stuff or the way I’m thinking on it.
Andrew: Yeah I suppose you’ve always kind of written about that stuff on every album right, or is this something a little different for you?
Nick: It’s more or less the same but it’s under another umbrella, under another perspective. It’s something else, something different. There are so much stuff out there that you can be influenced and inspired by to write lyrics that it’s never ending.
Andrew: Yeah definitely!
Nick: I’m going to give you an example just so you understand what I’m saying. On the album “Divide And Conquer”, there is a song at the very end which is like 9 minutes, it’s a long one and I had written down the lyrics of course but I wasn’t satisfied that much. So I was just walking around in my neighborhood in Athens and I just come across a friend that I haven’t seen since high school and he was really deep into drugs since back then and here he was nicely dressed, he wasn’t skinny and stuff and I’m like, ‘Oh dude what happened to you?’ And he asked me, ‘Do you have the time to go have a beer and talk?’ I said, ‘Of course I have the time to go for a beer’, and he just described to me the whole procedure about how he gdetoxed on his own without going to any hospital. He woud just lock himself in the house for a week and he was detoxing with the help of his girlfriend and I just took that down and I erased all the lyrics that I had written down and I made the song his story exactly how he described it. There are a lot of stuff that inspire me for writing down lyrics.
Andrew: Yeah and that’s a very inspiring story and with all the negative stuff that is happening in the world, it’s stories like that, that really give people like ourselves a lot of hope.
Nick: Whole motivation and everything.
Andrew: Musically speaking, this album I’ve had a preview of it and it’s got the Suicidal Angels hook and signature sound. It’s great stuff as always, very thrashy and very heavy. Was there anything that you really wanted to achieve with this album musically speaking at all?
Nick: We’re not creating music to create music, if the songs don’t make us headbang in the studio, if they don’t satisy us in the rehearsal place, how are we supposed to make you headbang? So the whole procedure is like, we’re making music when the music is ready, when the riff is ready, when the riffs are proper or when the lyrics are proper, when everything is proper. We’re not following a pattern or something, of course there are some patterns in writing songs but we don’t just follow up exactly that thing, we just let the music flow.
Andrew: Is that process on this album, has that been the case for every album or is it something you have evolved into over the years?
Nick: No the process is the same. I am bringing in the main idea, I am recording some demos at home and stuff like that or sometimes jamming at some place and come up with some ideas and we start cooking it. But most of the time I have some demos ready and then we enter the studio and we just fool around with the whole thing, ‘Lets play that here, that there, let’s do that there’. It’s just like cookng and then near the end when the song is ready, I’m working on the lyrics and then we start practicing it again and again over and over and if after 2 or 3 months of rehearsing it and practicing it, if it’s still satisfying us, we keep it. Otherwise after 2 or 3 months of practicing it, we feel it doesn’t give us a hard on if you want to say, we just don’t keep it. We have thrown away many songs in the past.
Andrew: So taking these songs on the road and touring with them, obviously with more albums that’s come along over the years, is that process of coming up with a setlist for each tour becoming more difficult?
Nick: Oh yeah absolutely, it’s becoming more and more difficult because there are some songs that are already in the setlist that will never be out of the setlist. So every time we are making a new album, we will already have at least minimum 10-12 songs that you carry from the past so it’s a bit tricky, what the fuck are we going to do with a new album now. How many songs are we going to play? 4, 5, the whole album? How much time are we going to play? 2 hours? No it’s impossible!
Andrew: [laughs] It must be very difficult and I have been hearing that you guys are on tour now right?
Nick: We just played last Saturday with Slayer on the final show in Athens
Read the review of “Years Of Aggression” here
Andrew: Oh wow how was that?
Nick: I’m still there!
Andrew: [laughs]
Nick: Seriously I’m still there, it was an incredible concert. The vibe of the crowd, also the arena we played in was incredible, The production was totally perfect, it was quite an experience. I would even say that it was the same level of experience as when we played in 2010 at Sonisphere in Athens opening for the Big 4. It was an experience that was totally unforgetable, I mean also the fact that I personally know Gary Holt, we’re friends, it made it even more special for me. He was even broadcasting live on instagram while we were playing, he was sitting in his corner where his guitar rig is and was just broadcasting live 20 minutes of our set. It was incredible!
Andrew: That must be a great feeling to have that. Did you get a chance to speak to Gary or any of the other guys in Slayer about the fact that they are now calling it quits?
Nick: This is something personal and I don’t want to be involved in personal decisions if I’m not asked to. Yeah it’s a bit of a pity that it’s going to…I mean like all of us, like when Tom Araya was saying goodbye, the whole stadium was like almost crying.
Andrew: I imagine they must have been a big influence on you, were they one of the reasons you started a band in the first place?
Nick: Absolutely, absolutely. They are the reason why I started playing thrash metal and to be more specific, the album “Show No Mercy”.
Andrew: Ah yes the old Slayer stuff! So how did you get into the music? How did you discover Slayer and thrash metal in general?
Nick: The fact is I started listening to thrash metal when I was 13-14, something like that and a friend of mine gave me a cassette, an original one of course like re-recorded over and over a thousand times with the Iron Maiden album “Live After Death” and that was a fucking shock. I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’, and gradually I was discovering bands from Blind Guardian, Helloween, Metallica also and Judas Priest and stuff but I wanted something heavier. When I went to high school there was an older friend of mine and I told him that I would like something heavier, he was listening to heavier stuff, he was listening to a lot of black metal and all this shit and he just brought me over this CD with this cover with the golden swords and the pentagram and am like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ He says, ‘This is called Slayer and the album is called Show No Mercy, just take a listen to it and if you like it then I’ll bring you something else’. Then I ended up keeping this CD for 6 months, he was like, ‘Are you going to bring it back at some point?’ ‘Maybe, maybe not!’
Andrew: It’s a great story, I’m always fascinated by how people get into music. I discovered Suicidal Angels about 11 or 12 years ago when “Eternal Domination” came out around that time, that album is very unique from my perspective. It had a unique sound, it was very brutal and very aggressive and you guys switched it up and changed into a different form of thrash metal afterwards. Was there something in particular that made you change a little bit after that album?
Nick: I would say the only thing that changed was just the production and the vocals. We recorded the next albums in a professional studio because the first one was kind of like semi-professional and it’s even all recorded on tapes, not the big ones but the small ones.
Andrew: Oh right ok!
Nick: And then the mixing and the mastering, digitally but the recording was originally on tapes.
Andrew: OK and obviously you have a had a few more albums after that and “Dead Again” for me seemed to be the one album that really kind of got you alittle more outside of the underground. At what point during your career so far did you think that success was starting to become a much bigger thing for you guys?
Nick: I don’t see success all around. We’re not changing these things, we’re playing music because it’s satisfying our souls, it’s feeding our souls and our music feeds other people’s souls and that’s a really amazing feeling to share with. The more people you can touch with your music, for me is better. This whole thing with the music is a huge – I wouldn’t say exactly like a family but we can find common ground in music but we can’t find common ground with the same chick [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah that’s very true. It is a wonderful thing with music, particularly in metal that no matter where you are in the world, it all connects us all together.
Nick: Yeah I will give you a small example. The other day when we were playing with Slayer, when we were on the stage there were around 4 and a half thousand people in the venue. When things started and I was just catching up on my breathe and just going out and from the stage, I could see people that I was drinking beers with and going out with them and done a lot of bullshit together and the longer you connect from these people and from other people of course that you don’t know at all, that’s the most amazing feeling I would say that I have ever experienced.
Andrew: Yeah definitely it’s fantastic and I love what you guys do and hope there’s many more years. Congratulations on the new album, it sounds fantastic as you always do. I really appreciate your time and maybe one day in the future we will get to see you in Australia some time.
Nick: Hopefully, we would absolutely love to do that! I know it’s kind of far away from where we are in Europe, it’s far away and a long trip and it involves a lot of expenses and stuff but one step at a time I guess right!
