Suicidal Tendencies frontman Mike Muir recently spoke to Australia’s Loud magazine about the progress of their long-anticipated new album, touring, his thoughts on the Internet’s effect on the music industry, the current status of his funk metal project Infectious Grooves and much more. Mike was asked if he thinks the band’s new record will finally see the light of day this year, he replied (rather long windedly):
“That’s an interesting question and at this time, you know, if you would have probably put it in terms of five or ten years ago or something we’d say we’d have two, two-and-a-half records that are done that we’re eventually going to put out. The thing is now I don’t know what actual form that we will put them out in and stuff. It’s hard for me to answer questions, ’cause everything’s kind of convoluted; it eventually gets to the point that it makes sense to some people and to the people that it does make sense to, it scares them. But you know, music is something that we’ve always said is not something to try to “fit in” in life, and my dad always said people who try to fit in are the ones who can’t stand out. Every record we did, we didn’t try to say, “Oh, this is what’s going on, let’s do it.” A lot of times we took a lot of criticism or whatever, because we didn’t do what other people were doing. (But) that wasn’t really our concern and that’s not why we started music. I really basically didn’t like what other people were doing, so I wasn’t going to mimic it, I was just going to do what I liked. I thought that I was maybe strange or different and so there probably wouldn’t be too many people who liked it, but I wasn’t really concerned about that. You know, when people do like it, it’s good and when people like it for the reason why I like it — I think that’s great. That’s a whole different situation… I think for us, it’s a lot of times, if you look back at what was big at certain times and someone put something on, and you laugh at it; “I can’t believe people listened to that and liked it,” you know? For us, we’ve got records that are getting up to 30 years old and we still think they’re great and don’t sound dated or old or (from) a time period. For us, that’s… Music is more important that we do now, (from the perspective) that 10, 15 and 20 years from now, people that maybe aren’t born or people hear it for the first time will go, “Wow, that’s killer”. I think a lot of times people panic and they try to rush out music because they’re afraid that they won’t have an audience anymore for whatever reason. Whether it’s (because) stylistically it won’t be any good and because the stuff that we have is not really stylistically in tune with what people are doing now, it doesn’t really matter. So when it comes out, even though some of it may be five or seven years old when it comes out, it’s going to be different than what people are listening to (at the moment). So we don’t have that concern.”
Suicidal Tendencies’ last studio album, “Free Your Soul and Save Your Mind,” came out back in the year 2000. Their most recent release was last year’s No Mercy Fool! The Suicidal Family, which features re-recorded tracks from the band’s classic 1987 album Join the Army as well as never-before material. Speaking of the new record, the legendary thrash punkers announced a short Australian tour, set to take place this May.
Pop-punk has been a really hit and miss genre in the past 10 years and this is where this sentence leads into a bad pun. Avoiding that, Direct Hit are a band churning out great quality pop-punks tunes, all for the benefit of the listener. The four piece from Milwaukee have been operating in one form or another since 2007 and have already released 5 EPs that they made available for free download. Nick Woods took time out from a busy schedule to talk to Dying Scene about what makes Direct Hit tick.