The Black Dahlia Murder"Metal, I’m just still obsessed with it man,” The Black Dahlia Murder’s Trevor Strnad admits. The band has only now taken their first break since first hitting the road in 2003. Some of his favourite moments from each album cycle, he tells The Music, have been touring with King Diamond and Behemoth, Ozzfest, headlining Summer Slaughter festival and sharing a stage with friends on the Mayhem festival. Hitting China is one of the most recent achievements. “We’re still pushing,” Strnad continues, “we’re still trying to play as many shows as we can and get out as much as we can. We still have goals and a lot we want to accomplish. We’re just forward-thinking, always!”
The Black Dahlia Murder’s highly anticipated seventh record will be out through Metal Blade in September, but Strnad is mostly tight lipped for the time being. “It’s definitely a more raw sounding album than we have done in a long time and I would say it’s the most natural sounding thing since Unhallowed that we’ve done. We kept it raw and really live sounding.”
"Metal, I’m just still obsessed with it man.”
As for having six records under the belt, “It seemed to come out of us pretty fast, man — in a matter of months, really. We got off tour, used a little bit of time to relax and then we got to work, man, using Pro Tools to cook up some demos and patching the songs around.”
While the band has definitely needed these past few months to recharge the batteries Strnad hails the usefulness of Pro Tools on the songwriting process. “Ryan [Knight] and Brian [Eschbach] are the two songwriters and they usually write the songs by themselves into Pro Tools, and by the time I hear it I’ll usually hear like a quarter and it always sounds great. They’ll have both guitars, they’ll have harmonies, they’ll have programmed drums that sound realistic so entering the Pro Tools world has definitely been a good route for us!” With members of the band living all over the United States you can see why this is such a benefit. “It’s all done by email… by the time I hear the demos I just sit around with it and write lyrics, you know… in my underwear!” adds a cheeky Strnad.
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The Black Dahlia Murder have just released the first single from that upcoming record and will slowly drop each track to increase excitement in the lead up to release. That said, personally Strnad is glad to have given up collecting rare CDs. “Some of the old stuff that I wanted was $300 bucks for one CD where, you kinda gotta just go, ‘No, I’ll just wait for the re-press!’” As for the band’s legendary pre-show marijuana intake, “Alan [Cassidy, drummer], he can smoke weed but just not too close to when he plays, as opposed to Brian who will furiously smoke a huge strong one right as he walks on stage. I myself can’t be going up there looking through a fish-eye lens! You don’t wanna have dry mouth either as a singer. That makes it even harder to try and do your thing!”
