It is, we wanted to make a record that reflected our love of Hard-Rock music and it is sort of Metal though we don't really describe ourselves as Metal.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Hopefully people can look at our band and see that we're a heavy rock band. We're definitely not a metal band, but we're a band that focuses on meaningful lyrics and melody.
To do an extreme metal record is something that is well within my capacity as a musician to write stuff out of the box, write stuff that's probably more extreme than the band I'm in at the present time, and it's something that needs to come out of me one way or another.
Metal isn't necessarily aggressive. There's metal that's contemplative, there's metal that's sad, and there's metal that's exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express.
Metal is still the biggest music now in America.
As long as it says Metallica on the record it's Metallica.
There's real potency in metal. Metal fans love metal as if it's a nation they would fight for. It's not diluted by pop culture.
All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?
That's what I love from metal, and that's what I love from hip-hop. That's what I love from any music that's hard, that's got an edge to it-The attitude in it.
I'm completely open about the fact that I don't love every genre of metal. I like what I like. It's got to have some vocal quality and some semblance of melody.
It's totally produced now. It's almost like a conveyor belt of what metal's supposed to be like these days. It's not music to me.