Metal Anarchy

Earlier today, A Day To Remember surprise released a new album, titled “Big Ole Album Vol. 1,” on CD and vinyl (digital copies out March 21). Now, during a recent interview with Kerrang!, Jeremy McKinnon further discussed the effort.

McKinnon said the following when the interviewer mentioned the Gojira-influenced riff on “Silence”:

“That’s funny that you say that, because that song is obviously very inspired by them. We also worked with Cody Quistad [Wage War] on this record, who I love writing with, and he was messing around one day and just went, ‘(Makes riff noise).’ That whole chorus immediately popped into my head – I’ve no idea why, or where it came from. It took me back to this time when I was a kid, when I had a buddy who was super into heavier music.

He had gotten me into the first Coal Chamber record, and I had always said to him, ‘I can do that [Dez Fafara] voice, y’know!’ He would make me do it in front of him to prove it. Hearing that song from Drew [Fulk] made me think all that way back and be like, ‘I could do that voice on this song…’ I think it sound fucking crazy. It’s my dad’s favourite song on the record – every time I saw him, he’d make sure we had kept it on there!”

He also revealed that Bring Me The Horizon frontman Oli Sykes has a writing credit on the album:

“We show up to the studio one day with coffee, and Zakk [Cervini] says, ‘Hey, we’ve got this little idea that we’ve been messing around with.’ He’s obviously worked with Bring Me a lot in recent years, and he’d told Oli that he was working with us. Oli had sent Zakk a voice memo of this melody with some lyrics, a few of them mumbled here and there, and Zakk put some music to it. We hear this idea and were immediately like, ‘Well, it’s obvious what we’re working on today – this is badass!’ We worked up the story to speak to what was going on in our life, and that became ‘Die For Me.’”

He also added the following about plans for Vol. 2:

“There is another album, yes. It’ll be its own entirely separate thing that comes later. We’ve got quite a bit done for Vol. 2, but it’s not quite finished yet. What will be cool is that we can react to what people like about Vol. 1, and write more towards that. That’s a place we’ve never been before, to adjust in real time like that to give the fans more of what they liked, and less of what they didn’t. That feels exciting to me.”