How The Black Dahlia Murder shone a spotlight on real-life human evil with Ritual

Led by the late, great Trever Strnad , The Black Dahlia Murder were proud standard bearers for death metal throughout the 2000s and 2010s. But with their fifth album, 2011’s Ritual, the Michigan band took a turn for the really dark, delving real life human evil. In this classic interview from the time, Trevor told Hammer about his journey to the dark side.

Picture the scene: you’re lying in bed, just drifting off to sleep after a long Tuesday at work or school. You’re trying to unwind and fight off thinking about tomorrow’s to do, list, when you sense a twinge of something uneasy and a faint whiff of tension grips the air. Before you can gather what’s going on around you, your mouth is covered with brute force and you struggle for breath as you’re pinned down and no amount of strength or struggling can save you. You’re flipped onto all fours and yet – horrifically – there’s nobody in the room.

If the experience being raped by a malevolent, supernatural force in the most eye-watering manner possible sounds extreme, then turn the page, because it happens to be one of the cheerier themes being covered by Michigan death metallers The Black Dahlia Murder on their latest collection of morbid tales, Ritual .

“That’s pretty much the tip of the iceberg!” booms frontman Trevor Strnad, sounding rather proud of himself. “The last song is about asking our fans to kill their parents. It says that you’ve gotten tattoos and you piss them off regularly with your decision making, so now it’s time to kill them in the name of The Black Dahlia Murder! When we started out as a band and I was writing the lyrics for [debut album] Unhallowed , I would just write the darkest, most violent lyrics that I could. This is a return to those roots, but I wanted violence and more mysticism and so we took further strides into talking about the world of black magic. The theme of rituals got us pretty excited.”

With each track having a ritual attached to it and themes including re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion as a tool to talk to Satan ( Carbonized In Cruciform ) and being trapped inside a stone body by evil druids ( Malenchanments Of The Necrosphere ) complementing what is musically the darkest record of the band’s career, Trevor would do more than simply explore into the furthest corners of his malevolent, twisted mind for inspiration. Locking himself away for days at a time, the frontman would spend hours sat in front of his monitor plumbing the depths of human depravity online, watching the kind of sinister footage that makes 2 Girls 1 Cup look like an episode of In The Night Garden . While Cannibal Corpse and Autopsy might specialise in the neon-coloured cartoon-styled splatterings of blood and gore, The Black Dahlia Murder wanted to make Ritual a very real and sinister portrayal of human evil and the possible horrors brought about as a consequence of their dabblings with dark forces.

“I spent a lot of time investigating cults and I believe that they’re out there. I believe that there’s more going on than we know about,” says Trevor with the kind of bloodchilling conviction that leaves you fearing having your innards ripped from your torso by hooded weirdos in your local forest. “I was reading about people who survived ritual abuse and had come forward with repressed memories of Satanic abuse. I’d watch child molester confessions – the most brutal, depressing clips you can imagine. After days of sitting there and thinking ‘Oh my God! People are bad!’ over and over again, you’re not found wanting for inspiration of what man is capable of. All of that research was about doing the most Black Dahlia thing that we could possibly do. We felt that the best albums that we’ve put out so far have been the macabre ones, and we wanted this to represent the most macabre record of our career.”

As well as putting out the grimmest album that the band could muster, Ritual is also the most musically diverse and experimental collection of songs that they’ve put their name upon. While other bands seem to be obsessed with upping the brutality factor, The Black Dahlia Murder have chosen to boldly up the ante creatively and concentrate on pushing the boundaries of what a melodic death metal band can achieve to devastating effect. On this crushing latest release from the band, they have thrown caution to the wind by adding a wide assortment of atmospherics and lashings of pianos, acoustic guitars, strings and more to their sound to concoct an epic in the truest sense of the word; all without losing a solitary shred of their trademark remorseless ferocity.

“It was about taking the listener on an exciting, fucked- up journey rather than just blasting them,” agrees Trevor. “We always try to challenge ourselves and take things into new territories but without straying too far from what we’ve always been about. We’ve always written good melodies with the guitars being the catchy, melodic part of the music more than the singing. We felt that people had reacted most to our songs that have a big, dramatic feel to them like Deathmask Divine from Nocturnal . We made the decision to play a lot with dynamics and let the music breathe without losing any of the heaviness and we also wanted to make the most varied album we’d ever made and that’s what Ritual is.”

It’s always like loading the chamber for a game of Russian Roulette when you choose to fuck with convention, especially when you’re dealing with an audience as famously tetchy as the extreme metal community. While one listen to Ritual will make it glaringly obvious that the band are still heavier than a sack full of Snookis, the second that the word ‘cello’ comes into play, it’s understandable that alarm bells would go off.

“If we thought it would put people off or make people think that it had changed the band too much, we wouldn’t do it,” Trevor snorts dismissively. “There have been precedents set in this kind of thing before with At The Gates on Terminal Spirits Disease . That was the biggest influence for us to want to do this. Darkane have those big orchestral moments too and we love it when bands bring those elements into melodic death metal. It gives you that little bit extra to play for. It’s not as though it dilutes the sound of the record in any way, so anyone who bitches about that really wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”

“We’ve realised our sound and what works best for us and we’re just about making great songs and not getting caught up in any of the bullshit that surrounds that,” Trevor continues to explain. “We wanted this album to be more engaging and more three-dimensional than anything that we’ve put out in the past. There are key changes and cool solos that take the listener to a higher place and there’s writing in a way that we couldn’t have done when we started this band. This year celebrates the 10th anniversary of the band and we wanted to do something that shows that we’ve been around the block and that we’re wiser. We’ve pulled out lots of different tricks on this album that will surprise anyone that feels like they know what to expect from a Black Dahlia album but also keep all of our fans happy too. Right now, this is the most excited I’ve ever been about our band and what the future holds.”

It’s this headstrong dedication to pushing the boundaries of what both themselves and death metal are capable of that has seen The Black Dahlia Murder become the most popular death metal band of this generation. They already have a top 50 record to their name in the Billboard charts, have played slots on every festival from Summer Slaughter and Mayhem in the States to Hevy and Sonisphere in the UK and their universal popularity shows absolutely no signs of slowing down any time soon. The watertight argument about what has set the Michigan natives apart from their peers is the knowledge that fans want their favourite bands to move forwards and experiment and that you can do that while still staying true to yourselves and the sound that made people fall in love with your band in the first place. Progression through aggression, if you will.

“It’s always going to be Black Dahlia and I think people know at this point, when we’re about to release our fifth album, people know that we’re not going to start singing in the near future,” Trevor laughs when asked whether added popularity has to be dovetailed with added commercial appeal. “A lot of people out there depend on us because when you look at Soilwork and In Flames going down a completely commercial route, I can barely identify them as the bands I used to love so much. I don’t want to put anyone through that with The Black Dahlia Murder. It wouldn’t be us. With Ritual , we wanted to make the statement that we’re still here and we’re not going to be relenting anytime soon. I just want to be thought of as a band that’s progressing. We’re conscious about making sure we’re always moving forward without alienating anyone who already likes our band.”

That impenetrable stance of being true to who you are and a dogged refusal to compromise that for anything or anyone is one of the most endearing things about The Black Dahlia Murder. Being part of a world in which blabbering internet shit-talkers seem to be setting more rules and regulations within our genre with every passing day, the Michigan riot-starters have always had the grapefruits to throw a middle finger into the face of any who dared to challenge them, herd them into ‘playing the game’ or had the audacity to question their metal.

“Some people will tell you that we’re not a death metal band because we have short hair and don’t wear leather pants!” laughs Trevor. “A lot of people can see that we don’t have a pose to our band. We could grow our hair and have some kind of evil onstage persona but that wouldn’t be real. As fucking hilarious as it would be to try and be one of those bands, it just wouldn’t be us. We’re just metal kids being ourselves.

“We’re not good looking enough to be a haircut band and we’re not scary-looking so we can’t be a necro choice so we have no option but to be ourselves,” continues Trevor, his voice swelling with pride. “We do photoshoots and make videos because we want to take this band as far as we can but we’ll always do them on our terms and some of the pictures or whatever might seem odd to some outsiders but that’s just the way we have found things work best for us. Metallica, Megadeth and Pantera were the bands that influenced us the most and it was OK that they looked how they wanted to look and that they liked punk rock or hardcore or classical or whatever but today, it seems people are so anally retentive. God damn, man – just fucking lighten up and headbang!”

That’s one ritual we can all be part of.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 220