Following the prolific release of their self-titled album and their biggest headline shows to date in 2024, MAKE THEM SUFFER announced a massive 2025 regional Australian tour earlier this year which is set to bring their insatiable live show on an 18-date run this June and July, joined by special guests JUSTICE FOR THE DAMNED and THE GLOOM IN THE CORNER.
Evolving from early deathcore leanings into more melodic territory via their 2012 debut full length Neverbloom, MAKE THEM SUFFER‘s eternal pursuit for innovation and creative exploration has propelled the group from local Perth favourites into stalwart heavy fixtures on the world stage. Fusing elements of melodic death metal, heavy metalcore, symphonic elements and beyond into their dynamic trademark sound over the years, 2024 saw the MAKE THEM SUFFER enter their most galvanised era to date, with their self-titled fifth album balancing lashings of melodic light and blistering shade, while also cementing the five-piece as one of the most influential and inventive acts in the scene.
We caught up with frontman Sean Harmanis while sitting in his hotel room during their UK leg of their recent European tour to talk about the regional shows, song writing and find out what Sean has been listening to of late…
RP Sean: Sean, how are you?
Sean MTS: Very good thank you Sean.
RP Sean: Well a pair of Sean’s, what can possibly go wrong? [laughs]
Sean MTS: And the same spelling as well.
RP Sean: How are things going because are you in the UK at the moment?
Sean MTS: Yeah we’re just in Southampton at the moment. We just finished the first bit of our Western European leg, I guess you could say. Now we’re about to start things off here in the UK with our first show today. That’s going to be here in Southampton so yeah looking forward to it.
RP Sean: I’ve just been watching some footage taken from Austria, merely a week ago. What an incredible show that looks to have been. So well received too. I just don’t know how you do it. How you pull those vocals out night after night. Its incredible.
Sean MTS: I just been doing it long enough now, at this point 15 years or something so yeah plenty of practice.
RP Sean: You’ve got the rest of the UK dates to finish off and then you head home for an incredible run of regional shows. You are literally getting to every corner of the country with these, which is great. We get to get you back home in WA for the last two shows Prince of Wales in Bunbury and Freo.Social. How does it feel to get out there and back to the grassroots places around the country to perform?
Sean MTS: It’s both nostalgic and sentimental for us, I think because firstly we haven’t done a regional tour in about six years so it’s cool to be getting back out there and doing this kind of thing again but you know moreover when we very first started touring back in 2011, basically back then every Australian tour, at least for bands of our genre, was essentially a regional tour. You’d play Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, you’d play all the capital cities but in-between all those shows you would add all the regional dates as well.
So because there were so few markets to play and the shows were much smaller you kind of had to squeeze as much gigging into an Australian tour as you could, particularly the fact that coming from the west coast you’ve got to get more bang for your buck in that sense as well because we have extra flights to pay for and everything. We have a lot of memories from those early days of roughing it, carrying our gear in shopping trolleys and pushing it through Rockhampton and that sort of thing so it’s going to be super nostalgic and sentimental for us to play a lot of these markets we haven’t played in a very long time. So yeah, we’re thrilled, we’re super excited for it.
RP Sean: I’m here in Perth myself so it’s great when one of our own homegrown bands has made such an impact on the Australian scene. It’s great when we get to celebrate you coming home for the closing shows of the tour, which you will be doing. The self-titled album was so well received, released late last year but how does it feel to start picking sets from five albums now? It must make it more challenging.
Sean MTS: Yeah it’s a difficult process for sure. I suppose one thing that has made a little bit easier is we were kind of like, well this is a new album, it’s been out for six months and these tours kind of are in promoting the new album so I guess we kind of get a bit of a license there to play more newer songs than we might on just another kind of generic tour so the set, it does have a lot of new stuff in. But at the same time I think we’ve got at least at a minimum one song from every album and it’s really important to us that we do always play stuff, at least on headliner shows like these that we are going to play stuff for the older fans as well. And, you know, we’re quite a diverse band in that every one of our albums is pretty different, like thematically, melodically, everything.
There are some fans of ours that will only like ‘Worlds Apart’, for example, maybe. So it’s important that we include one or two songs from ‘Worlds Apart’ for those fans as I know those songs are very important to those people. So, yeah, it’s about finding the right balance. You know, ‘Widower’ is a song from ‘Neverbloom’ and as I mentioned before, you know, I think a lot of the people coming to some of these shows will have memories of us playing that song in 2012, 2013. So keeping that in the set list, it’s going to be important and more a sentimental kind of thing.
RP Sean: You’ve been quite a consistent band with the five album releases since 2012. How does the writing process go when you’re out on the road, doing such a extensive run of shows, especially Europe, here and the UK? Where do you fit time in and is it a natural process for you guys?
Sean MTS: It’s been different every time to be honest. These days the majority of the writing is between Nick (McLernon) and myself, well I’ll do a lot of the song arranging and then a lot of the lyrics & vocals and then Nick will write a lot of the guitar parts and a lot of the electronic elements that are in our music as well. So we do a lot of sending files back and forth and that sort of thing. Nick currently lives in Melbourne and I’m in Perth, so there’s a lot of communication online that happens with that. Sometimes we have done stuff in the past, like a lot of the songs off ‘Worlds Apart’, which is our third studio album, for example, was written once Jaya had first joined the band. Jaya lives down south near Yallingup, so he had a property there with a little like granny flat shed on his block and Nick and I booked basically just like a week off or whatever and just stayed in the shed for a week and wrote. So we have done stuff like that in the past and it’s really fun to write in that way, you know, kind of confined space, isolate yourself a little bit and be creative in a space like that. So every time is a different.
You know, we’ve written songs on tour but it’s quite stressful to do that and I think the result of one song that we wrote on tour was our song ‘Hollowed Heart’ and it’s a very like manic, pulsing song and I think that kind of captivates the energy of writing a song on tour in a lot of ways. So yeah, this time around, after our regional tour, I think we’re kind of taking two to three months off touring to do some writing so we’re just going to be writing from home and I suppose doing it online in that period of time, just sending songs back and forth between Nick and myself and seeing what we come up with.
RP Sean: Well, before I lose you as we’ve only got a couple of minutes left Sean, I’d love to ask you a couple of general questions just to wrap up with and start with my restaurant question. If you could invite three musicians dead or alive to join you for a bit of dinner one evening who would you have sat with you?
Sean MTS: Oh wow, that’s a cool question. I think I would Ozzie Osbourne because he’s hilarious. I’m very upset that I’m unable to make the last show they’re doing. That’s going to be absolutely insane. Let’s see, you know I can imagine Thom Yorke from Radiohead being like an interesting guy to pick the brain off and asking him his opinions and just getting to know the guy I think would be pretty interesting. If you’re talking about who would be entertaining, I can’t think of anyone that would be more entertaining than Lars Ulrich from Metallica. I just think he’s just like such an enigma of a person and, you know, Some Kind of Monster the DVD, is one of my favourite music documentaries, I think, of all time and just seeing his behaviour on that and seeing how his brain works and when he talks about his favourite artists and that sort of stuff and the painting, his painting collection and everything. Like, I just love that. I think, yeah, Lars would be a super interesting person to have a dinner with for sure.
RP Sean: Fantastic. Great guests. What was the last album you listened to?
Sean MTS: The last album I listened to… I can’t actually tell you the name of the album but it’s the most recent album from a band called Heriot, I think they’re from the UK they’re a band that I just have them on repeat and I’ve been absolutely hammering them so yeah loving Heriot.
RP Sean: The very final question before you go Sean, if you could be credited with writing any song ever written what song would you choose?
Sean MTS: ‘Sultans of Swing’ by Dire Straits just never kind of gets old, so maybe something like that you know. It’s just the first one that came to mind.
RP Sean: Sean, I really appreciate your time and we wish you all the best for the rest of the UK shows and around Europe before you head home. We’ll see you in June around the country and hopefully I’ll catch you on July 6 because that’s my birthday weekend.
Sean MTS: Oh lovely, happy birthday for then and hopefully see you there. It’s gonna be great.
RP Sean: Thanks Sean.
Sean MTS: No worries, thanks Sean.
