By Greg Pratt

Blissfucker, the fourth album from American crust/grind/hardcore wrecking balls TRAP THEM, isn't going to surprise fans of the band in any huge way. The staples of their sound are all there--d-beats, grinding hardcore, crusted-up death metal, all the Deathwish Inc.-esque/Kurt Ballou-produced rage you could ever hope for--and the vocal delivery of Ryan McKenney has never been more full of rage. Sounds like dude is gargling marbles for half the album, which isn't true, of course. But he is gargling fake teeth.

"This is the first record where I have like no teeth," admits McKenney when we get him on the squawkbox and pull him away from the WWE Network ("It's on 24 hours a day around here," he deadpans). "I got dentures last year, so I knew no matter what, recognizing the words was going to be somewhat hard, they’d be a bit more gargled. But the way I came into it I wasn’t worried about anybody trying to figure out what the lyrics were. I was trying to have the essence of what I was doing instead of trying to dig too deep into any meanings."

McKenney says he can talk fine still (we can vouch for that), but due to knocking out one too many teeth along the way in the name of extreme music, he had to go the route of the denture. Sounds agonizing... sort of like listening to Blissfucker. As a matter of fact, the first day I got the album I was in the midst of a particularly stressful few days and I quite literally could not deal with the album. Sometimes negative music helps in negative times; this was just too much for me to handle, and I admitted it to McKenney.

"That was my intention," he says. "In the past, there’s been a different tone from my end. But this time I wanted people to feel uncomfortable with it. I wanted them to recognize that there’s just no positive note on this record. You saying that was your reaction is pretty much what I was going for. Like, I don’t intend to make people feel angst, but I have my focus with this band. In the past people were able to somewhat take some form of inspiration from it, and I didn’t want to negate that this time but I really wanted to get the point across of pure rage and pure frustration."

So, no hope, all is bad, wipe out all positive thinking; we get it, but at the same time some good comes out of all this: Trap Them sound like a band totally in tune with each other and feeling completely confident on this album.

"Yes. Absolutely," agrees McKenney. "This one for the most part was Brian [Izzi, guitarist] and I having the whole idea of what this record is. It’s full circle back to how we started the band. We knew what we wanted to do. This record was for us to do things that we’ve always sort of moved towards, but this was the one where we’re going to fully realize it."

And that realization contains a few riffs amongst all the hatred and disgust that are actually... uplifting? Upbeat? Happy? Well, no, no, and no, but they at least have a bit of a hint of a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

"Yeah," says McKenney. "And I was really stoked when Brian showed me those songs. I think he’s amazingly talented as is, but for him to create songs of that feel was completely out of left field. And he did it perfectly. And it didn’t get written and have us be like, ‘Uh, that doesn’t sound like Trap Them.’ It does. He found a way to have that undertone. So on those songs that do have those more somewhat uplifting riffs, I intentionally made those the most vicious of lyrics. I wanted to balance it out. He knew exactly what I was doing, too. Depending on how your ear works, you can analyze it and think that I’m actually saying something good. But I promise you: I'm really not.”