Become the Hunter

“Since the beginning, Suicide Silence have been the band you love to hate,” vocalist Hernan “Eddie” Hermida tells Apple Music about the deathcore crew’s sixth album. “The band was always doing big things, but people didn’t understand why, and they talked shit on the internet.” After Suicide Silence’s original vocalist Mitch Lucker was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2012, Hermida had the unenviable task of replacing a frontman who was as revered by his fans as he was reviled by deathcore haters. When Hermida sat down to write lyrics for this album, he decided to turn the tables. “We were once hunted, and now we’re the hunters,” he explains. Below, he takes us through Become the Hunter’s distinct serial-killer theme, song by song. Meltdown “I’m obviously not singing on this, but the band had this concept from the beginning to do a musical intro for the record—just a really heavy, crushing opening of the door. It’s like, ‘Hey, guys—this is Suicide Silence. Don’t you forget.’ When [guitarist Chris] Garza would break his instruments onstage, people would say, ‘Suicide Silence had a meltdown!’ So that’s kind of where this comes from.” Two Steps “All my life, I’ve been fascinated with serial killers. And obviously Ted Bundy was the hype about a year ago when I was writing these lyrics—there were those two movies about him on Netflix. So this has loosely to do with Ted Bundy, who was a guy who would befriend his prey—he’d be two steps away. He’d get in really close and then all of a sudden you became part of his collection. To me, the song is about that evil creature that all of us can possess inside and how at any moment, without any control, we can become this monster.” Feel Alive “When serial killers became pop culture in the late ’70s, it seems like everyone was a strangler. There was the Hillside Strangler, the Stockwell Strangler, the Boston Strangler—and it just fascinated me because you have to assume it’s a really intimate experience. You really feel the per