A band that has never been afraid to change things up as they progress and evolve, Australia’s Make Them Suffer continue to bring new sounds into their music even after a span of 15 years. Their latest album, a self-titled release, exemplifies that spirit to continue to evolve with the times, providing a modern yet hard-hitting sound with a broad appeal. We spoke to vocalist Sean Harmanis to get his insights on the process of everything from the new album, to band dynamics, to the early challenges the band faced in trying to make a name for themselves.
Dead Rhetoric: You joked that the self-titled album was ‘a greatest hits album, but with new songs’ on the press release. Do you feel it’s representative of what you’ve done over the years?
Sean Harmanis: In some ways. Undeniably, this sounds very different to a lot of our other work, just on the surface. But in some ways, yes, because the songwriting tools that we have gained along the way and how to put a song together – certain decisions that we make when writing songs – there are still go-to things that we go to. There are things that I do as a vocalist or other people do, that make them “Make Them Suffer.” There’s always that element of female vocals and a softer element paired with it, whether it’s piano, synth, or classical elements. That’s the bread and butter formula. We have transported that to a more modern, futuristic kind of realm with this one.
Dead Rhetoric: How do you feel that your own vocal performance has changed since when you started?
Harmanis: I definitely feel like I have a lot more control over what I do. I can find an exact pitch, the tonality that I am trying to get with a lot of the lines is a lot more accurate. My taste in what I think are good and bad vocals has changed a lot. I used to do the cookie cutter lows and highs, and now I’m more into audibility. Being able to hear the lyrics is important for me, as well as knowing the correct phrasing and timbre to deliver that line in. Some words need to be said in the right way to evoke the emotion that word gives. I’d say that is what I have been diving into more.
Dead Rhetoric: So how much emphasis do you put on those sort of things like timbre and phrasing?
Harmanis: It’s what I spend the most time thinking about when we are writing a song. I think a lot of vocalists do that. I often try to figure out the phrasing before putting the words to it, and having an idea of what the song is going to center around. Some songs we will start off from a lyric or an idea/concept, but a lot of the songs start with finding what the correct rhythm is to accompany the instruments and building backwards from there.
Dead Rhetoric: What keeps your spark and excitement going as a group, knowing that the group has changed and evolved over time?
Harmanis: I suppose it’s the fact that we always switch it up. It’s every record for us. It’s always a bit of a learning experience. There’s an uncharted territory that we are trying to record, not on every song, since some are safer than others. But if you compare our sound from this album to the previous one, it’s like night and day even between those two. We are always moving and evolving, and I think that keeps the pressure on us. All the while, I feel like we are honing our sound, even still, and I’m always open to doing something completely different. It’s exciting for us.
Nick [McLernon] has even said that he tried a different tuning for his guitar on this album, for example. He said that he had felt he had run out of juice a bit with what we had been playing before. He felt it opened up a whole bunch of new doors for him, creatively. It’s not just tuning, but the tonality of the guitar is different. You have a whole set of sounds that accompany it and it’s a whole new world. The world of futuristic, synth-y cyberspace that we have been trying to experiment with everything. That whole Blade soundtrack kind of vibe [laughs].
Dead Rhetoric: Regardless of the different albums over time, what do you feel is an essential piece of a Make Them Suffer song?
Harmanis: It’s very difficult, but we have given it a bit of thought. I think for me, personally, Make Them Suffer has always been a band that centers its sound around contrasts. Good and evil, light and heavy, beautiful and angry…that kind of opposing emotions and sounds. Even in the lyrics, there is that juxtaposition. We have that within the vocals, as well as between the melody on the piano versus the guitars.
Even in our songwriting, we sometimes make intentional decisions to have transitions be jarring. It can jump from one extreme to another, and I think that has become one part of our sound. I think it’s shocking for some people, but it’s a very deliberate choice. We love pushing the boundaries of how far we can drive both of those opposing elements in the song.
Dead Rhetoric: Could you speak to the dynamic with yourself and Nick over the years, as members that have been there the longest?
Harmanis: Nick lives in Melbourne and I live in Perth, which is where Nick used to live. Perth is our hometown. So we do a lot of communication about songwriting through the internet and email. We don’t actually talk too much on a day to day basis except when fielding each other’s questions about decision points for the band. Not just the songwriting, but what we are doing tour-wise, the financial things, and stuff like that. In some ways, it’s probably good, because when we tour together and go into the studio, we have a lot of time together.
It’s very confined spaces and having to have integral discussions, and we have gotten it down – the art of keeping conversations civil down to an artform. Nick is a pretty fiery dude, and so am I in a different way. Sometimes tensions can get high, and in the studio I don’t think we have ever had a recording without getting into at least one argument. We are much better at resolving those, and I think just a lot of time, we have opposing ideas about where we want the song to go in certain areas, and I think that it’s actually a lot of where our sound comes from. We have started doing this thing where he thinks it should be a certain riff and I think it’s a different one so we will just do half and half. It’s two measures of each, so that creates some choppy sounding songs and I think that has become a part of our sound, which has become quite interesting. It’s important to have that.
I’ve found when one person writes too much of one song, and is never challenged or anything like that, it can sound a little safe. It needs to have some tension, and you have to have strong opinions about the direction you want to go. It’s been a fundamental part of Nick and I’s relationship in the band.
Dead Rhetoric: It goes back to what you were saying about contrast in the band.
Harmanis: Yeah, exactly. Thankfully, we can always bring it back to a vote. At least there’s 5 members in the band and not six [laughs]!
Dead Rhetoric: Speaking of five members, what’s the impact of Alex [Reade] been on the band?
Harmanis: It’s been incredible. People have welcomed her with open arms and I think that, with good reason. Tonally and everything, she sounds fantastic. Outside of the singing side of things, she has added this additional element of being able to contribute screaming vocal capacity. To me, that’s almost more fun and impressive than her singing ability, and her singing ability is amazing. The back and forth on the screams is something that gets us excited in the studio. It’s something we really enjoy doing. I think it brought that new X-factor for this new era of our sound.
I’ve been loving having her in the band, and everyone else feels the same. I think that really shows, with the comments from the fans and everything, she seems to be very highly regarded and with good reason.
Dead Rhetoric: You’ve toured with a number of bands that I hate to say but some would argue aren’t ‘metal.’ Bands like Bad Omens, for example, that make some extreme metal fans scoff at least. What have you taken away from bands outside of the more extreme scene?
Harmanis: I think bands like Bad Omens are extremely impressive in their music. I actually really like them, I think their songwriting is really some of the best going at the moment. I think touring with them, and many other bands that have been growing in a similar realm, have opened the floodgates to this new generation of people listening to them. Through that, they are getting into metal in general. I think that’s really important. So we have taken note when we did the Bad Omens tour in the US – their fans are very unique.
It’s almost like The Beatles. They have swarming fans trying to get a photo, it’s absolutely crazy. You get to the venue at the beginning of the day and people are lining up, and it was crazy to see that sort of fandom. Now when we go back to the States, we see a handful of fans at every one of our shows and we can identify them as ‘the Bad Omens’ fans that we met on that tour. They behave in similar ways, and I think it’s really nice. They are super supportive. They have really opened up a metal resurgence, because of bands like that.
We also toured with Bring Me the Horizon as well, for example, in Australia. That was an arena-level tour. We had never played a tour of that magnitude before. Watching Bad Omens and Bring Me the Horizon, those bands had such a step up in terms of their live production, professionalism, and showmanship. We were a little rough around the edges, and it’s been a part of our brand. We like to rock out pretty hard on stage.
But at the same time, the production that goes into a Bring Me the Horizon show is just unbelievable to witness. You don’t even need to be a fan of the band to enjoy their live show. You don’t need to know a single song, it’s just purely just entertaining and amazing. Seeing how that translates, we really want to incorporate some of that into our live show.
Dead Rhetoric: I think you are completely on point with that. Some of those bands, despite how some people might like it, are injecting some new blood into the scene, which it desperately needs.
Harmanis: Metal has always had an element of elitist and gatekeeping and that sort of thing. I remember it was different when I started getting into it and I was obsessed with bands like Job for a Cowboy and the Doom EP. You had this group of people saying that it wasn’t death metal. People got into fights at All Shall Perish shows because you had the metal people and the hardcore people there.
It’s always been an element, and then you get older and you like ‘all metal’ and you realize that none of it really mattered. People are always going to gatekeep in metal and that’s just the nature of some of the people that the genre attracts. I welcome any change with open arms. A saying I have always tried to live my life by is “adapt or die” [laughs].
Dead Rhetoric: In your opinion, what are some of the challenges of being an Australian band and trying to break into the international touring circuit?
Harmanis: It was particularly difficult for us because we are from Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia. It’s the only major city on the west coast. It’s the most isolated capital city in the world. The width of Australia is roughly the same as the United States, but there are no cities in between. It’s a four day drive from Perth to any of the other major cities, like Brisbane. For us, there was the added challenge of not really having a community to ask questions when we started touring, as well as the added cost of booking flights over there. Whereas the east coast they could rent a van and drive up and down the coast. We had the added cost of flights.
It was definitely a bit of a challenge for us and we have been going for about 15 years. It has taken us a little bit longer than some, and one of the reasons for that is that we were a local band for four years before we started touring. We played maybe 1 or 2 weekends in our third or fourth year. That was thousands of dollars of money down the drain for a few shows in Melbourne. It took a while to just get out of Perth. Then we made it out and started touring Australia, and this is probably year five or six of the band now and we finally got an offer to go to Europe and went there on the Bonecrusher Tour in 2013. It was later renamed the ‘Bandcrusher’ tour by the people on it, because we were opening a six or seven band bill and the tour just flopped really hard. A lot of the headlining bands on that tour even lost a lot of money, and a number of bands ended up breaking up or going on hiatus after it. The booking agent was actually very apologetic to us when he first met us in person, but we were just the opening band so we were happy to play to 100 people every night. For us, it was fine and we were just excited to be in Europe at the time.
Going on that tour and seeing the scale of the European market, and thinking about that seven band bill – it was our first time in Europe. We wondered how long it would take for us to just climb to the top of this bill. It dawned on us that it was a really long slog. When you are first faced with the international market, it’s overwhelming for a lot of bands. It took a while and it was daunting at first, but the thing with being in a band or a musician, is that persistence really does pay off.
If you just stick at it, people will stick around. We still have people who have been listening to us since the EP and our first album despite sounding completely different on those. They still leave comments and it’s like, “What? Why are you still listening?” But good on you, thanks for sticking around somehow! They are still checking us out [laughs]! It’s been a journey for sure, navigating to where we are in the touring market now.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s next for the band after the album comes out?
Harmanis: I think the main goal is to try and up our live show and try to do some headlining shows and tours in markets outside of the US. I’d love to headline the States and Europe and just see how we do. We get enough requests for sure for longer sets. It’s tough to know how tangible those comments can be sometimes and if it actually translates to people coming to shows.
Regardless of the success of the tours, it would be exciting to bring a headline set to even a small number of people. I think that fans that have been listening and stuck with us know that it’s a pretty special and exciting time for the band and we want to share that with the fans who have been there through thick and thin.