Make Them Suffer On What Inspired Their New Self-Titled Album

On Friday, 8th November, Perth metalcore titans Make Them Suffer will release their fifth studio album, Self-Titled. The eponymous LP promises to be a ferocious 11-track statement of identity for the scene veterans, simultaneously honouring their past while sharpening the knife to carve out a new sonic path forward.

As we gear up for Make Them Suffer to reach our ears next week, band members Nick McLernon and Sean Harmanis sat down with Music Feeds to discuss the top 5 biggest creative influences behind their forthcoming LP. Read their words down below.

Make Them Suffer – ‘Oscillator’

1. Pushing Through Adversity

Nick: With everything that’s happened in these past two years, I could be here for three hours explaining this, but our main influence would be: when we nearly lost the band, it helped us not to take it for granted. We thought we were going to lose 10 years of work, and that we were going to lose the band, and there was uncertainty as to whether people would continue to make music. We were making music throughout our entire 20s, so none of us really know much else. The adversities that we’ve gone through just to keep the band alive, I have to say that is our strongest and main influence. I can’t think of anything else that has influenced this record as strongly except for pure…I think the closest word is probably determination. But it’s determination that is also like desire. And it’s very aggressive. I don’t want to use the word hatred because it’s not hatred. But you can feel it, you can see it when we play live. You could call it life experience or something like that, but that is a main influence for this album.

2. Bad Omens

Nick: And between all of that, while making this album we were touring with a lot of bands that we were actually learning from. Before COVID, we weren’t really on tours that benefited us, and we weren’t learning things from other people. We were on tour and getting drunk and enjoying life – which isn’t a bad thing, but we definitely weren’t learning new things every tour. But since the end of COVID, the first international tour we came back to do was the Bad Omens tour. When you think of bands on that scale and you’re around bands like that on the road, it’s such a learning experience. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about how those sorts of bands perform, and about how they write. So you could say that is another major influence towards our new record in that way!

3. Their Hometown Roots

Sean: There are so many things that inspired me, for one it would be my friends and family at home, and just my hometown in general. Being from Perth, I think there’s a lot of pride in wanting to do justice for that, and to represent Perth in a way that will make everyone at home feel proud. Our fans in Perth have been there since the beginning, and they know our full journey and our story. Alongside that, my everyday life inspired me, my relationships with people, my relationships with my family, and my relationship with myself.

4. Nerdy Pastimes

Sean: Stemming from that, I also get to add fun elements of myself into songs. I’ve always been a bit of a nerd, I’ve always played computer games and Magic: The Gathering and stuff like that. And I always get to put some sort of homage to those things in the records, which is always very exciting for me. ‘Mana God’ [single] is actually a reference to my time spent playing games and Magic cards and the like!

5. Their Past, Present & Future

Sean: And a final inspiration and influence for me is the story and the history of the band itself. To add to what Nick said, Make Them Suffer has had an incredibly rich history and there’s been a lot of different chapters of the band. And I think that’s one of the coolest things about us, and one of the things that longtime fans might be drawn to. I certainly am drawn to that too! I suppose knowing the history of the band and the journey and everything we’ve been through, the ups and downs, it can get emotional sometimes thinking about it. For example, there was a moment when we played Copenhell earlier this year, it was this amazing experience and we’d never really done a successful run of the European summer circuit prior to that. I literally got off stage and had tears in my eyes because it felt like we’d been slogging for such a long time for the approval of that market, of heavy metal in Europe, and also the more “metal” crowd, I suppose you could say the elitists of that genre. Growing as a band and in our formative years, deathcore and death metal were two very different things, and metalcore and heavy metal were two very different things as well. I think there was a lot of shunning and elitism around that, and we were never really accepted by the metal community. So when we played that festival, I finally felt that acceptance. There have been a lot of amazing moments like that throughout the band’s career. And in terms of influencing this album, it would definitely have to also be the history of the band, where we’re from and a sense of pride in how much we’ve overcome as a band.

Make Them Suffer is out everywhere on Friday, 8th November and you can pre-order it here.