Strychnia just finished recording their debut album, “The Anatomy of Execution”. The band choose to work with Bobby Torres of Frightbox Recordings. The album will consist of nine songs. The album will be released worldwide in June 14, 2011 and available for purchase online at iTunes, Napster, and Amazon MP.
State your names and positions in the band.
Kevin - Vocals, Rory - Guitar, Trevor - Guitar, Mike - Bass, Ryan - Drums
How did the band come together? Who contacted who and what made you wanna start the band?
The band formed back in the summer of 2009… Half of the band was pretty much already playing in a band and later came together to form Strychnia. Rory (Guitar) and Ryan (Drums) had been playing together for years, they were in multiple bands together and when the band first came together they were the founding members. Ryan attended high school with Kevin (Vocals) and had seen him perform with his band at the school’s Battle of the Bands. Ryan later invited Kevin to jam/tryout for Strychnia. Upon jamming together in Spring 2009 the trio rehearsed “Postmortem” by Slayer, which is funny because the band still covers the same song every show over the course of 2 years. Ryan and Rory were both interested in Kevin’s vocals and asked if he would like to keep playing together and working on some original songs. Kevin was interested but still too focused on his current band that he was in. When Kevin’s band fell apart, he began jamming with Ryan and Rory very often. Kevin told them his guitarist from his last band is now searching for another band… turns out Ryan and Rory both used to play in a band with the same guitarist. Kenny (Guitarist) joined Strychnia and the band began searching for a bassist. In August 2009, Strychnia, a 4-piece Death/Thrash band had formed.
The band played their first show August 30th, 2009 at a local bowling alley… the band played a set of 4 original songs, and their infamous Slayer cover, “Postmortem”. Hell broke loose in the pit and Strychnia ended up being kicked out of the venue, plugs pulled mid-thrash. One of Ryan’s friends in the pit happened to play Bass and after being impressed by the band’s performance and removed from the venue, he told Ryan he would like to come and tryout for the band. After trying out for the first time, Mike (Bass) joined Strychnia. The band began writing music, rehearsing every week… the band began to draw a lot of attention and landed a few local gigs. Shortly after the band’s first show, Kenny was kicked out of the band for personal reasons. The band began searching for a second guitarist again, while playing shows as a 4-piece. In November 2009, Kevin happened to hear one of his classmates at community college talking about last night’s Lamb of God show. He began conversing with him and asked him what kind of music he’s into and Trevor responded with bands that were fit for Strychnia’s style. Kevin asked him if he played any instruments and Trevor explained that he has played Guitar in bands for years. Kevin invited Trevor to Strychnia’s next scheduled rehearsal, and after trying out the band was impressed and asked him to join. This line-up still stands the same today! (June 2011)
How has your music evolved since you first began playing music together?
Hmm, where to begin.. We all came from different backgrounds of musical influence. We all dig the same bands and stuff, but our main influences were a bit broad. For example, Kevin’s vocals were heavily influenced by Deathcore bands such as Suicide Silence and Whitechapel. When we first started playing we had a real thrashy sound. We still love to thrash but as the first few months went by, we ditched a few of the old songs we had and started to write more heavy death metal stuff. We’ve always considered our sound very unique, and find “Death/Thrash” to be the closest genre to describe our sound. We’ve also all grown as musicians and we are a hell of a lot better than we were two years ago. So our skill with our instruments improved, and our sound gradually got better.
The question on everyone’s mind: what took so long to get this record out?
Hah… oh man. Well, the album ended up costing us $2500… that’s a lot of money for five band members all about 18 years old at the time besides one guitarist being 21 at the time. Therefore, money was the obvious issue. We planned on paying our producer half up front, and the other half midway through the recording process. After about 2 weeks of recording, our producer wanted the second half of the money. One of our band members couldn’t come up with his cut and we began pushing back the recording process to finish the album. Next week turned in to two, and into three, and before you know it, a month has gone by. Then when he finally got the money, a different band member got injured and lost his job and could not pay his cut and we still couldn’t finish up the album. So we finally came to a conclusion and two band members spotted the cash for the band member who couldn’t pay his cut and we went in for a week and banged out the rest of the album. So it really was all financial problems, we are really young and none of us have great jobs where we can just throw a couple hundred bucks out the window and consider it nothing.
What were some of your inspirations while writing the record?
Shows. We would all hop in Kevin’s van and buy a bunch of booze and go out to see some of our favorite bands play and we would just have a great time. We would jump in the pits and be like damn, we need to get big and play shows like this! We were all so motivated to write some heavy fucking metal and play it anywhere and everywhere. It also helped that we were all really good friends, we loved to just get together and go to house parties or drink/smoke with some friends in a member’s basement. Like, we would hang out so much that we would just always be jamming and enjoying our music.
What song changed the most during the recording process of Anatomy of Execution?
"Apocalyptic Visions", no doubt about it. This was one of the first songs we ever wrote/played. Ryan and Rory wrote the entirety of this song and were playing it before anyone else joined the band. We ended up changing the thrash riff completely in two parts of the song. Many people agreed with us that the original riff sounded way too similar to Austrian Death Machine’s "Get To The Choppa" thrash riff. So Rory just spent free time in the studio writing some new riffs and we found one that we all like and we put it in there.
Most anticipated albums for 2011?
Arch Enemy’s new album, and looking forward to hear from Behemoth again
Any records labels you’re wanting to notice you or give a shout-out to?
Earache, Nuclear Blast, Metal Blade, Century Media … love so many bands on those labels
What were some of your music influences and how involved in music were you growing up?
Some of us were more involved in music, and others just enjoyed listening to music from Day 1. Rory and Ryan started playing their instruments and playing in bands at a really young age and others like Kevin just flat out enjoyed listening to music while traveling a lot from a young age.
Would you play Summer Slaughter or Mayhem Fest if you were offered an opening slot?
Absolutely, even though they are really starting to butcher some of the line-ups… we have seen crowds of all types love our music. We have played in front of punk crowds, thrash crowds, death metal crowds, even those little fucking emo kids like our shit. An opportunity to get on any tour that big with bands that popular, would be an honor.
What records have you been really enjoying lately?
There’s a couple bands that just released some killer albums… Deicide’s “To Hell With God” is a favorite, but other bands like Abysmal Dawn, Destruction, Sodom, Dimmu Borgir, and Onslaught all released some sick albums recently.
Who do you want to tour with, but haven’t yet?
FUCKING SLAYER! we all love Slayer, their #1. But there are so many bands we would kill to tour with… Cannibal Corpse, Decapitated, Vader, Exodus, Kreator, Overkill, Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth… there’s just so many.
If you had a chance to shoot a music video without any limits, what kind of video would you make and for what song? And do you have any music videos planned at all?
"Vile Creation", the song is just lyrically insane. It’s pretty much about doctors experimenting on a human being and the test subject basically mutates and gets really fucking pissed off and starts fucking shit up.
Do you have any parting thoughts for Kill The Music?
We want to thank everyone who’s helped us along the way, friends family etc. Again, we are pretty damn young and we have worked our asses off to get where we are today in this terrible music scene in our area. As for our fans, we can’t thank you enough… Without the fans, nothing would be possible. We’re just hoping the album gets a good response and we can land a nice record deal in the near future!
https://www.facebook.com/Strychnia
