Interview with Make Them Suffer vocalist Sean Harmanis | By Nicholas Senior
Perth, Australia’s Make Them Suffer refuse to stagnate. Their impressive third record, Worlds Apart, saw the light of day on July 28 via Rise Records, cementing the band’s ability to constantly and successfully reinvent themselves. Despite leaving the blackened deathcore style of their debut behind almost entirely, Make Them Suffer’s latest features some of the group’s most complex and heavy material yet. Leaning hard into gothic and space-rock influences, Worlds Apart is sure to win over listeners with its storytelling and twinkly metalcore stylings. With their latest musical formulation, Make Them Suffer are shining brighter than ever. They are one of the most impressive—and perhaps the most adventurous—current metalcore bands.
How do they manage all this change? Vocalist Sean Harmanis explains, “We’ve got pretty short attention spans. When we feel like we’ve kind of gotten one style to a point where we feel like we can get it down to a formulaic position, we switch it up. Obviously, having a keyboardist who is a female and can sing as well is an element that might set us apart from a lot of the bands in the market. Our perspective on it is this: previously, we were a blackened symphonic deathcore band or something along those lines, and then, we were, like, I don’t know—melodic hardcore [and] blackened something. Fuck, I don’t know, whatever [2015’s] Old Souls was,” he laughs. “We just kind of see ourselves as a metal band with keys, and then we’ll just evolve and change every album.”
Make Them Suffer took a different approach to writing metal songs, and it paid off wonderfully on Worlds Apart. “You don’t need too many elements to be a metal band,” Harmanis states. “I mean, I wrote a metalcore song today in, like, 20 minutes. It’s fucking easy to write metalcore, because there are so many stock, standard blueprints for how a song goes. We all know how to write those kinds of riffs. My view is that you can kind of set yourself apart by writing a riff that you like—it doesn’t need to be in the spectrum of metal—and when you record it with distorted guitars and screaming vocals, it’s going to come out a metal song. It doesn’t need to follow the conventions of a metal song.”
There’s always been much more to the band than just colorful language and curse-laden breakdowns that fit perfectly on a t-shirt. Each album is tied together by a story, and the music echoes the lyrical themes perfectly. So, what was the message this time? “The record was sort of a metaphor for what I’d been going through in my personal life,” Harmanis says. “It timed perfectly with a breakup, which was a blessing and a curse. We’re getting to a level now where we’re not full-time—we’re touring in this sort of weird gap where we’re not full-time, so we need to hold jobs at home—but at the same time, we’re gone six or seven months of the year. Juggling life at home and things like relationships and jobs and stuff like that is very tricky. So, a song like ‘Fireworks’ was my metaphor for ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we could just burn the entire scene to the ground and just say fuck it and turn our backs on what we’re doing?’”
Did Worlds Apart help Harmanis come to terms with these feelings? Is there a happy ending? “I’m still kind of struggling with that aspect,” he admits. “Writing ‘Save Yourself’—that particular song, I wrote that for myself. It’s a very personal song to me. Putting that into words and listening to it back really helped me to get a grasp of where I was and to accept everything that was happening. There are, technically, two endings to the record: a happy ending and a sad one. It just depends on which one you want.”
But does Harmanis actually like the sort of conceptual storytelling he has utilized on the band’s three full-length albums? “Actually, I tried and realized I couldn’t [do it any other way],” he says. “For Old Souls, I’d actually written a couple of songs without the intention of having it fall under a theme. Then, as the record started to [be] complete, I realized it was [thematic] and that it came about naturally. That was weird, because I’d tried to get away from trying to be conceptual. With this new record, I’m trying to come up with a balance between writing songs that are catchy and have good vocal melodies and writing within the scope of a narrative. I’ve realized that’s sort of my thing. I love the idea of each album being its own journey, its own piece of art, a complete unified package.”
