We’ve said it before. We think metalcore is stale. Yet somehow Iowa genre veterans managed to breathe some new life with their album ‘Wake’ released last year. We take the opportunity to talk to guitarist Ryan Leitru about what he thinks the current state of metalcore is, and of course about the development of the album that sparked our attention into the genre again.

Before their London performance we caught up with Ryan to get some insight into a band that have been a part of the metalcore scene for over a decade. With an ever growing fan base over that time, it seems the band are musically doing something right. And they certainly are, with ‘Wake’ convincing us bunch of metalcore-panners that there might be something left after all.

Read an extract from the interview and listen to the full audio interview below:

So you said that you have to like this or that genre…it leads me to the question – what do you actually think of the state of metalcore?

I think I would say that it is stale at best. There’s not a lot of people that are doing a ton of creative things. There are exceptions – Architects – which is a UK band – are doing stuff that is pretty creative and outside of the box. There’s a band we’re on tour with right now called Silent Planet that are in my opinion a very creative version of what is happening in the metalcore scene right now.

I think there is some creativity left, you just have to look for it. It’s usually in a sea of bands that could be the same band with a different singer. I think there’s a reason that there’s a reason that a ceiling has been hit in the metalcore world. There’s not a real push for anybody to do anything new. I think people are growing tired of it, and will continue to grow tired of it. It’s the same thing that happened to nu-metal about 15 years ago.

I do think the bands that are authentic and doing things creative, they are the ones that will stick around for a really long time. The ones that will matter are the ones that are able to stick around when the trends move. The ones that persevered from the nu-metal movement are bands like Slipknot and Korn – they are still around and still relevant, even though their counterparts are all but gone…

When you were making the record ‘Wake’, did you have that in mind that you really didn’t want to do something that was stale?

Yea, I think we wanted to do something that was a little less typical not only for the genre but for us as well. At some point you think ‘I am nearly 28 and I’ve been playing in the same band for over 10 years’. My tastes have changed since I was 18 pretty significantly, but at some point you realise you have to be who your band is.

So there’s that growing tension as an artist to make sure that the band progresses, but we can’t progress too much because we have to be the same band, people listen to us for that reason! You listen to the Deftones because you like the Deftones, not because they sound like Slayer. There’s that need to be the band, but there’s also that need to be creatively satisfied. I think you need to learn to live in that tension and push it as far as you can, and try to do some new things…

Listen to the entire interview below!