INTERVIEW: Genre, charts & Metal – Trevor Strnad talks Deflorate

The Black Dahlia Murder released their latest album just last month: Deflorate. To talk about the album and what’s going on in the BDM camp, I caught up with frontman Trevor Strnad for a bit of a chat.

When I spoke with The Black Dahlia Murder‘s vocalist Trevor Strnad, it was a lovely day in California and the band were just two days into their most recent headlining tour of the United States, which they began very soon after finishing up a month-long tour just prior.  After a short break over Christmas, these guys are heading to Europe; but it isn’t going to stop there either.

‘We’re just gonna try to spend as much time on the road as possible, hit as many places as possible, try to push the new record as hard as we can,’ Strnad explained. ‘It seems to be going well so far, so we’re just excited for the future, you know?’

Knowing fully well that the BDM guys like to have a bit of fun – if you’ve seen the guys’ DVD Majesty you’d know it yourself – I couldn’t resist asking what sort of pranks they play on each other when they’re on the road, to keep themselves occupied. While Strnad couldn’t recall too many pranks, there was one in particular that he remembered.

‘Brian has been known to prank our manager a lot and fuck with him all the time,’ he said. ‘He’s always screwing his life up,’ Strnad giggled. ‘You know, calling him up in weird voices and pretending that we got in an accident and stuff like that. He’s done some pretty ruthless stuff, you know.’

But like Strnad explained, he’s been with the band for a long time and knows what to expect; so while it sounds fairly harsh, their manager is a good bloke and rolls with whatever the BDM guys throw at him.

Being the sort of band that looks they way they do, and that have been the butt of many discriminations largely because of the way they look, I asked Strnad what his take was regarding genre. Specifically, I wondered what he thought of the notion that only a band has the right to pigeonhole itself into a particular genre. In discussing genre, Strnad told me that he thinks that it’s kind of an obsession, to try and define things and cram them into genres. READ MORE–>