Interview: Talking with David Simonich and Bobby Crow of Signs of the Swarm (eng)

RiskTheDeath : Can you introduce yourself and the band for those who don’t know you ?

David Simonich : Hello, my name is David Simonich. I do vocals for Signs Of The Swarm.
Bobby Crow : And I am Bobby Crow. I play drums for Signs Of The Swarm. Together we do a lot of the writing and work for the band. And Dave and I have done a lot of writing on this next album. We spend a lot of time together. So it’s always a pleasure.

RTD : Many Deathcore bands are emerging from the US, what makes the US a good country for Deathcore ? And how do you manage to keep doing something different from the other bands ?

D.S. : I think a lot of deathcore bands come from the United States because it is a very opportunity based country. If you have the free time, you’re able to do it. And there’s a lot of fuckin pissed off people in the United States. So I believe that, like that, aggression stems into it along with having the free time and the possibility of actually being able to live your dream, because living in the United States, you are what you make your life. That’s my opinion on it.
B.C. : Also it’s very easy to travel here, because we have so much lands without borders. So if you can save up the money, basically, you can go anywhere. Between that and just making friends, it’s very easy to travel and kind of explore. Also, there’s so many people, you can almost always find someone who will like this stuff, or support you, especially if you’re just a nice person, and you just kind of put the energy out there. There’s this big sense of community. I didn’t have anywhere else to go when I was younger. So I would go to shows, go see metal bands and stuff, and you meet friends. And I was just like : I like drums anyways, and I want to do this. I started playing in bands like 12 years ago and this is the first band I’ve ever been lucky enough to be a part of that kind of got to go anywhere and get out of our hometown. And, like I said, even if you’re not the best band, if you are nice, and you put the energy out there, you can pretty much make yourself successful.
D.S. : But I definitely have to say that it’s hard to find that element that makes you stand out versus everyone else. And for Signs Of The Swarm, we stick out because I like to say like our vocal styles, even before me, stood out. It wasn’t just the standard “I sound like Phil Bozeman or I sound like Dickie Allen or I sound like this person”, I sound like myself. And I believe that a heavy factor in being different is just finding your own sound, and adding your influences and stuff. A lot of people just try to fit the cookie cutter. And then it just sounds like everybody else whenever it’s not them being creative and using their fullest potential. I’m sure that they have stuff deep down inside that they don’t even really even know. Stuff that they could put out into there in such an art form. I feel like people are nervous to do that sometimes. And that might cause them to just sound like every other person. But yeah, that’s like my opinion on the whole, like, being different. It’s really just like finding the shit that you like. And then whenever there’s like a group of individuals that like, off the wall shit, they implemented into a genre that doesn’t make fucking sense and makes it sound cool. Like, we’re putting clean vocals in some of the heaviest deathcore in existence. Really don’t see that too often. It’s just an artistic vision that we had and that we wanted to kind of bring to life. And that kind of made some songs on this record different.

RTD : Including instrument swaps, many line-up changes happened to the band. What was the aim of these changes ? Did the band’s signature sound change ?

B.C. : I’ve noticed that in America it’s much different than in other countries. We’ve talked about it to a lot of tourists or our friends. And for example, Ingested I’m sure you know them. When we spoke to them about how their opinion on lineup changes is, they’re very much against it because hearing from them I’ve understood that it is a very different look in Europe. When lineup change people care a lot about who was in the band and also when it chained up lineups, people seem to pay more attention, whereas here in America, people seem to care more generally about just the music than who is really in the band, obviously, people attach themselves to Dave because he’s the vocalist. So when we had the vocals change, it was definitely a big shake up. But I think with instrumental changes like drums, guitar, it’s different. Luckily, Cory, our guitar player, has been the stable member of the band for like, eight years. So people see his face, and they’re familiar with that. But also because the main way that bands like us (of our size) make money is from touring. So to make the band sustainable,  we have to tour a lot and it is very hard to be away from your family. Or if you have a job that you depend on, it’s hard to be away from the jobs for a long period of time. So most of our lineup changes have come from touring because it is very difficult and even more for certain people. And some people just would rather have a settled life at home where they can play guitar, make music from home with their family. And that’s totally fine. So I would say most of our lineup changes have come from that. So, I joined the band on guitar, played bass, drums, all this stuff. We did a lot of moving around, but it was all out of necessity, really. I really like this band, and I believe in this band a lot. And I love all the dudes in the band. So personally, when people left and we couldn’t find members, I was like, Okay, I’ll play drums for a tour to do what I like, I think most of us are willing to do whatever is necessary to make the band succeed at the end of the day. That has contributed to the change of our sound, the way we think about things. Most of it has been for the better. We tour a lot, we wouldn’t be able to tour as much as we do and play to as many people around the world if we had had the same lineup as we did a few years ago, because some people weren’t able to before.

RTD : Signs Of The Swarm has the reputation to be a really heavy deathcore band, is this what people should expect from “Absolvere”, the upcoming album ?

D.S. : Yeah, they should definitely expect the ass beating riffs and all the super heavy slams, but they’re gonna get a fucking curveball whenever they hear some special tracks on the record.
B.C. : We very much wanted to elaborate like there are some tracks that are big callbacks to our previous albums. Like track seven “Revelations Ov a Silent King”, we talked about a lot. Track five, “Nameless” is very reminiscent of the “Vital Deprivation” era. But, I would say with a lot more musicality, and technical progression, I guess. We all love deathcore. But we all love a lot of different styles of music, a lot of atmospheres. And so we tried to bring that into this record. We’ve had a lot more time for writing it with this record as well. So we’ve been able to kind of elaborate and explore more, I guess, and take our time. Very special for us.

RTD : Four songs were out since the release of “Vital Deprivation”, but only “Totem” and “Hollow Prison” are part of « Absolvere ». Is there any particular reason for this ?

D.S. : We wanted to kind of experiment a little with singles, because all of our content is all album based. So we really never got the chance to do the science project of releasing a single and we took on the first one as “Pernicious”. That one was a song that Bobby cooked up on his own. And we heard it and we were like, let’s fucking put this bitch out just as is. And then move forward into “The Collection” .We were still dialing in our mix and our mastering for our album. So we’re like, let’s put out another single for the fans and stuff. And then let’s trick everyone to think that this stuff’s going to be album related, but come out swinging whenever we have like, a handful of videos promoting just our record. And then we have these very strong singles that did very well on their own.

RTD : There are two featurings on the album (Alex Erian from Despised Icon, Ben Duerr from Shadow of Intent). How does it feel to have Alex Erian on the album, whose band Despised Icon is considered one of the pioneers of Deathcore ?

D.S. : That guy has been influential to me for over 10 years now. Like, literally, if you search on YouTube, you could definitely find a video of me covering “Eulogy” 11 years ago. I did that with a very close friend of mine back in the day that helped me kind of find my roots as a vocalist. And yeah, you can find that out there. But it’s seriously mind blowing to have him on a track. And also to have such a close friend to collaborate with us on this album (Ben Duerr). It was very awesome to have both of them. And I’m grateful that I can now call Alex one of my friends. It kind of grew into having a friendship. And it’s really awesome.

RTD : I was really surprised to hear some clean vocals on two songs of the album. What do they bring to the album in your opinion and who’s the one doing these vocals ?

D.S. : (Laughs) It’s not me. It’s not me. You want to cover this one?
B.C. : So Cory, our guitar player, he’s the main founding member of the band. Still, after all this time. He has a beautiful singing voice. And we used to live in an apartment together. And he would do covers and sing along to Periphery and all these big, crazy, beautiful singing voice bands. And we kind of always joked about it. And then when we were working on this album, it lent itself to being able to allow us to do some cleans. We were thinking about having a featuring to make it not so much us doing it. And it didn’t pan out. So Cory was like “Well, fuck, I’ll give it a shot”. And we were just like “dude, if you want to give it a go, we’ll listen. We’ll hear you out.”
D.S : Dude, you remember him sending that Tesseract video? It fucking floored me, dude. Like he said, he did cover a Tesseract ! And I was like, oh, yep, you’re doing it !
B.C. : We went to do track three “Dreaming desecration” and Cory went to a friend of ours to work on the vocals, because it’s kind of different for us. We didn’t want to go with the same person that usually does our unclean vocals. It turned out really special. It’s different, but it fits. And for me, it kind of gives me something to grab on to like, I never thought that I could sing along to a Signs Of the Swarm song. I sing all the time. Like I’m in my car singing the fucking thing or music and stuff. And I’m just like, this is so cool. And I think it’s done peacefully, where it’s not overbearing, you know, like a band like Periphery or Tesseract, which is like where he gets a lot of his influence. But it complements David in a way that doesn’t take away from what David is doing.  What can be special with metalcore or deathcore is that, it might be a bit too much or, people might get annoyed by it or something, but I think it’s just kind of sprinkled in there.
D.S. : Yeah. Plus, it’s really unique sounding compared to what everybody else does. Everyone tries doing the pitch yelling or like pitch screaming or something to kind of accommodate the clean singing fans. And I feel like that it just came out so unique that it’s like its own type of thing. There’s moments where I’m listening to the record and it’s like Cory doing the singing and I’m doing the vocals behind him and I’m just like, “I can’t fucking believe this is us”. I’m just shocked. 
B.C. : And then immediately after it. It hits right into it with the most ridiculous breakdown. Oh, this is the band again ! (Laughs)

RTD : What is your favorite song on the album and why ?

D.S. : Personally, I’d like to say “Death Whistle” is my favorite on the record. There’s just this vibe to it man. And I literally just want to throw my fucking arms up every single fucking time. It gets to this point where we’re just so together, on the same page. And I have to say that track really shows that we formed to be very strong as a unit.
B.C. : We wrote the songs, mostly in the order that they show up on the album. And by the time we got done, we finished the last song on the album “Death Whistle” about a month before we went to the studio. And we had been working together with our new guitarist Jeff and Dave and myself and Cory, for a couple months, two three days a week, working on the music. And by the time, the songs started to get a little more experimental, some cleans, some really like spacey guitars. Some of the songs have like 30 or 40 layers of guitar tracks, and effects and stuff. So we kind of started to find this groove in the sound. We got comfortable together. And I do feel like the last two songs plus “Death Whistle” form into each other. For me, it feels like one big 10 minutes song but it’s split up. I would say “Death Whistle«  as well probably is my favorite. Just because it feels like the album works up to this point. And like Dave said that moment, three minutes into the song, where you just want to fucking punch the air, all that energy from the previous couple songs building up to that moment. And then the whole rest of the song is just like the release. It’s very, very cool and very different for us. For us, it’s always for science. It’s like I put out a banger song, banger song, banger song, banger song, like intro, breakdown, slam, maybe a chorus and then the song is over. Working together and building up the emotion and the energy to that one has been very different and exciting for us.
D.S. : Yeah, I definitely agree. Everything leads up to a nice climax for “Death Whistle” and I think that’s what really sells it for me personally. There’s a side of me where I want to say that “Dreaming Desecration” is like tied for my favorite. And that’s just because of what the song actually means to me personally. But overall, I would always put my vote on “Death Whistle” first.

RTD : I recently saw a post mentioning an upcoming “Absolvere” release tour in the US with Ov Sulfur, the new band from the ex-Suffokate singer Ricky Hoover. What is your mindset about this tour after this long period of no shows ?

D.S. : We’re looking forward to just being able to reconnect with our fans and the United States. We’re not doing a very large tour because we were kind of skeptical that the circumstances would escalate back to where they previously were. So we got this little run together and it looks bright that it’s actually going to happen in everything. We’ve got special guests, Worm Shepherd. We’re very stoked to bring out some young up and comers with us, and very excited to meet up with Ov Sulfur they just kind of started up so like you’re stating that’s the old vocalist from Suffokate, and it’s really cool to actually be able to interact with this guy because I used to listen to Suffokate by big time back in the day. I remember going to his shows and literally watching this dude and being like, “Damn, if I can”.

RTD : Do you plan to tour in Europe and France ?

D.S. : We are working on some stuff, though. We’re talking about some Europe stuff for 2022. So hopefully that comes into play, because realistically, that is the craziest lineup that I’ve probably experienced so far in our career. So I’m pretty excited for that to come to light. I can’t really give any spoilers or anything, but it’s very exciting.

RTD : Any last words ?

D.S. : For all our French fans, thank you guys for supporting us. Last time we were in Lyon. It was a crazy show where you guys were very violent. And we appreciate the efforts that you put in for us while we do the thing for you guys. Thank you, anyone who’s listening outside of France also, if you’re listening outside of France, thank you for supporting us and just check out the RiskTheDeath interview with us and yeah, pre order « Absolvere« .
B.C. : Oh, I just wanna say thank you as well. Well, hopefully, we’re looking forward to next year to come back to Europe and all around the world, make friends and fans everywhere. Very looking forward to getting back on the road and getting to meet everybody again. So thank you for your time. We appreciate it.