Text: Anne-Marie Forker
Photo: Guillermo Briceno
Hey Diamond! Congratulations on the new album. It’s fresh and exciting. I particularly enjoyed the industrial elements and the guitar solo on “Live Not Fantasize”. Why did you choose that as the first single?
– A couple reasons, we were kind of back and forth with, I feel like we’re very much a multifaceted band, and the fact that we have songs that seem a little more “popular”, hard rockish and then we have the heavier side of our band as well. Dynamically, I like that. We’re able to do that. I think with the first single, I wanted it to be something a little on the heavier side from the record. But I also thought it was cool and kind of gave a foreshadowing, like you said, of some of the industrial elements of the record. Everyone loved the guitar solo in that song actually, and we thought it would be really cool if that was one of the first songs, because people do love to see what I come up with all guitar and I was really proud of that solo. I think it came out nicely. We also knew I had a signature guitar launching two around the same time and they were like “that would be so sick, you know, having that solo out at that time”. So, there were multiple reasons we picked that song, but it has a really infectious chorus and we feel like it was a good kind of welcome back for us.
Speaking of your signature guitar, congratulations! How did that come about?
– Actually, my artist rep at Jackson is also my artist rep at EVH amps, the amps that we use. So, for some years he had been asking me if I wanted to try out Jackson guitars. I was with another company where I was happy. Some years went by and he would periodically ask “hey, let me know when you want to check these out”. Finally, they came to me and wanted to talk about doing a signature run, and that’s something that I’ve just always wanted as a player. Growing up my favourite players, Kirk Hammett or Dimebag Daryl, any of those guys, all of them had signature guitars. It’s just something that I always wanted. So when they came to me with that, obviously, I was like, okay, let me think about this. I’m a very loyal person so I like to stick with companies that have stuck with me, but we started talking and they sent me a bunch of guitars for me to just try out. It wasn’t a rush or anything, but they just sent me a lot of Jacksons to try out and become acquainted with, and I ended up demoing and writing pretty much most of the record on the Jackson. So I got very comfortable with it and started loving it. They went ahead and built me a custom shop guitar. When they did that, and they sent it to me, I was like, “Wow! This guitar is awesome!” and so that pretty much sealed the deal. With a little bit of encouragement from Josh (Fore, vocals and rhythm guitar) in my band and other people, I decided to make the leap and do it and I’m very happy. It’s been awesome. A dream come true to have that and it’s a great guitar.
When did you first pick up the guitar?
– My 12th birthday, I think. I would say I spent the first two years or so just learning guitar by playing covers. I learned guitar basically to the “Master of Puppets” record, the Metallica record. I went and bought the tab book and I just started learning my favourite riffs. I remember having the Guns n’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction” book and the Nirvana Greatest Hits book. I’ve had so many tab books at the time. I just learnt for two years, I would just play for 13, 14 hours a day. It is still exciting for me to do that today. When I learn songs that I don’t know, I still get excited about it. When you learn a riff you like, you think, “Oh my God, I can do this!”. When I really got going with jamming in the band with Josh and everything, we finally wrote our first song about a year and a half to two years into me playing guitar. I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to do it for a living, so, that’s what made me start writing.
Speaking of writing songs, one of my favourites on this album is “Head Space”. What inspired that track?
– I think that was actually one of the last songs that come together, if I’m not mistaken, I’ll need Josh to help me clarify that, but we had the chorus for that song, it was in the first batch, but I think the verses and everything went through a bit of a transformation. When Josh tried to put the vocals on it started coming to life. It’s nu-metalish, kind of creepy, with good dynamics. It’s just a cool song and when you’re writing a record, you go through a lot of different phases mentally, you know, you have like your moments when you’re feeling really inspired and then you have your moments where you think “Oh boy. Are we bad? Why do we feel stuck or why do we have writer’s block?” So, it’s kind of a journey when you’re writing a record and I think lyrically, it channels the different mental states that everyone was going through. While we were writing that record it was just one of those songs that naturally came together. We didn’t labour over it a ton. It has one of the coolest bridges. I love the bridge of that song. Maybe it’ll be in the live set.
Another track with an interesting title was “Best of Luck”. What’s behind that?
– That song is cool because it’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek title. Josh is always talking to me about wanting to do a song that’s kind of, like, talking to the people in the industry that treat you shitty in the beginning of our journey, and I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it, but especially in the entertainment business, when you send an email out to someone, whether it’s a manager or label, they’re basically telling you no, or they say something crappy to you, and they always sign their emails with “best of luck”. It always kind of seemed like they didn’t think you’re going to do anything, you know? It was a funny way of talking back. That’s what the song is about, essentially. It’s not from a place of hatred or anything. We got the last laugh.
Which was hardest track to put together and took the longest, and which was the easiest?
– “Parasite”, surprisingly, because we rewrote that song probably three or four times. There are literally three or four different versions of “Parasite” that sound nothing like each other. They all sound completely different, different melodies, different verses, literally completely different songs. We could release one of them and no one would ever know that it was. The easiest was probably between “Best of Luck” and “Anything Like Myself”. “Anything Like Myself”, I don’t remember us labouring over it. Josh and I just got in a room one day when we were home from the studio, on a break, and we ended up writing that song basically in a few hours. So that one was pretty easy.
You did vocals on this record as well. How did that come about?
– For some years now Josh has been mentioning that I should try to sing on a track, and I always said “No”, I wasn’t super confident enough to try to sing a verse or anything. So, on the last record I did do some backups on a couple songs, on some choruses or some harmonies, and stuff like that. This time, on this record, it shows how we’ve grown. Some of these songs were just cool dynamically to have me sing on. But I was at a place where I felt confident enough to get in and actually sing and try and do it.
The cover art is really striking. It’s a bug. Why a bug?
– Here’s a little secret, I hate bugs! I actually hate them, I’m terrified of them, but it’s interesting, some sort of metaphor. This album is all about embracing maybe the parts of you that you don’t love. Everybody has something about themselves that they don’t really love. Hence, the “Ugly Side of Me”. But for a lot of people, the parts of you that you don’t love are what make you, you, and what make you unique. You have these little things, bugs, that are ugly and you look at them, but they’re really just living, breathing things just trying to get through every day and trying to live their life, like humans. There are things about us we don’t like, or that other people don’t like, but really all of us are just trying to make a day-to-day, the best we can and be happy and healthy. Just like this other little ugly, living thing.
That’s a universal thing that people can relate to yeah. Are you going to come to Europe?
– We are! We announce Europe next week. We do have a good amount of dates in Europe I’m really excited about, some of the festivals like Copenhell and Resurrection Fest.
First published in Norway Rock Magazine #2/2025