By Greg Pratt

Fans of THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER know that even though the band lays down some brutally heavy melodic death metal—perhaps heavier and deathier than ever on new hellride Deflorate—they’re pretty much just fun-lovin’ goofballs. So the silly nature of vocalist Trevor Strnad’s reply when we ask him what he’s up to as we get him on the phone to chat about all things Murder is no surprise.

“I’m wearing pyjama pants and Googling the new album over and over to find reviews every ten seconds,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve found some good reviews so far; I’m pretty excited. Across the board, things seem to be pretty good right now.”

Indeed, things are good for the Michigan-based band. They hit their stride with Deflorate (album number four), combining the precision and tightness of last disc, ‘07’s Nocturnal, with a newfound speed and seriousness which suits their craft just fine. It also adds a new guitarist.

“We’ve had Ryan (Knight, guitarist, ex-ARSIS) for a while now and we’ve known that he’s the dude and he’s awesome and stuff but there’s a little bit of skepticism from some people. But now the album’s coming out and shutting people up. We definitely hit a stride with Nocturnal and set a new bar for ourselves, so we had to respond to the pressure and make a better album.”

Knight came on after a couple of songs had already been written for the disc, but did manage to write two songs for Deflorate. Strnad is clearly overjoyed at this latest addition to a band that has had a huge amount of lineup changes over the years (not all of which have ended amicably).

“Bringing Ryan into the fold… part of the awesomeness of that was we knew we were going to trust him to be a creative part of the band, and we told him from the get-go that we wanted him to help us write some songs and go full fucking throttle,” says Strnad. “He responded very well to that. We didn’t have a whole lot of time, as usual, to write it. All the touring and member changes, member changes can take up a lot of time… but he stepped in in a time of pressure and said he’d help us write and he wrote two awesome songs for the album, so it’s been cool.”

This time around actually also saw bassist Bart Williams contributing to the songwriting process for the first time, making this disc a group effort from a band that is slowly gaining a cohesive rhythm section, and gaining a grasp on what it takes to stand out in extreme metal.

“It’s a pretty good feeling to have everybody involved and just realize there’s a lot more stuff we can do,” says Strnad. “It made this album a little more varied than the previous ones, and that’s a good thing for us. When you’re playing fast all the time, you need to put in some dynamics and pay attention to the details to get someone to play a whole album of really fast songs.”

But, having said that, this disc does feature some of the band’s fastest material, some songs raging past in a Swedish-by-(um)-Midwest-USA blur. “Yeah, for sure,” says Strnad. “But then there’s some stuff that’s a little put pulled back, like ‘Necropolis’. We realized you don’t have to be completely fast all the time. At least for us, anyway; it’s not just fast for fast’s sake. But getting a little bit faster was just part of the natural growth of the band. We’ve been playing together for a long time and we have a really solid rhythm section now—it’s the same since Nocturnal, so that’s helped things be more cohesive between albums, it’s not as much of a shock to have a whole new half-a-lineup. So, I think we really hit our stride with Nocturnal and we had to respond accordingly.”

Look for the band to tour extensively worldwide for the disc (“We’ll be just creeping around the entire world bit by bit; it looks like this will be our most rigorous schedule yet,” says Strnad). And despite a recent arena tour with SLIPKNOT getting cancelled, it seems like The Black Dahlia Murder could be the band to bring death metal to many new faces in the next few years.

“There are no signs of stopping, even though it’s the fourth record,” says Strnad. “It sounds crazy to me to say that—we have a fourth album. I remember dreaming about having one album when I was 13 years old. I used to draw all these death metal album covers, thinking, man, wouldn’t it be cool if I could put out a CD someday? It would be the coolest thing ever. It still is, man - it’s still awesome and we still get really excited to face the next challenge, and the more eyes we have looking at us, the more we’re feeling the heat, so we just have to respond. And here we are with the new album.”

And although I’m sure this has been brought up many, many times over the course of the band’s history, I had to quickly talk about that band name. It’s a strong one, named after a famous murder case, one which I kept finding extremely graphic pictures of when Googling the band’s name in preparation for this story.

“It’s pretty heinous, man,” says Strnad. “There are a lot of different band names out there that are similar to ours that have “The” or “Murder” or a colour, but ours is the only one tied to this insane murder case that people are still obsessed with. It was something that really interested me and when I found out about it; it scared the shit out of me, which is hard to do these days, growing up around metal and death metal and horror my whole life. It was something that was really strong and it’s a powerful thing—it can represent the death of the American Dream, this little girl goes out to California with stars in her eyes and is brutally cut down. It represents the changing of times towards violence and towards… I don’t know; it’s a really powerful thing.”

And, as a parting shot, I had to ask the one burning question that’s been bothering everyone who’s been reading interviews with this band for the past eight years. How the bloody hell do you pronounce this dude’s last name?

“It’s ‘Stir-nad,’” he says. “It’s pretty wild; I don’t expect a lot of people to know it. When I get married I’m going to take my old lady’s name - I don’t really care what it is. And I’m the last Strnad of the generation; I would be the one that would make it go on or not. At least in my family. I have encountered other Strnads on Facebook who I’ve never even heard of. So that’s cool that they’re carrying the curse, too (laughs).”