WayTooLoud.com recently posted an interview with guitarist Alex Webster and vocalist George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher of CANNIBAL CORPSE, in which they discuss their participation in the Sounds Of The Underground tour, and the current wave of metalcore bands. An excerpt follows:

WayTooLoud.com: After Sounds Of The Underground, has anyone talked to you about doing any more support tours? I'd love to see that, where you scare the headliners!

Alex Webster: We've had a little bit of interest from some people, but nothing has panned out yet to anything that we've been supporting since then. We've done a few festivals in Europe, but other than that, we've been headlining since that tour. It does seem to open up some doors though, because some people have been talking to us about doing some things, where before, it was hard to get anybody even to think about having us open for them. It's been tough. If you look at our tour history, very rarely have we done supporting tours. There's probably been less than five tours where we were the support band, as opposed to being the headliner. Our first two tours that we did were headliners, so right off the bat we were headlining.

WayTooLoud.com: Is there any chance with LAMB OF GOD? The reason why I'm asking is because they opened up for you in… was it 2000?

Alex: 2001. Lamb Of God, DIMMU BORGIR and THE HAUNTED opened for us on a North American tour. I think except for The Haunted, all those bands are bigger than us now, which is cool by us, and we would be happy to open for any band that's bigger than us, even if they haven't been around for long, just because you want to introduce your music to new fans and all that. Lamb Of God have asked about having us open for them, but the timing didn't work out. They were a band that did ask about it. I think it would be great! I would love to open for those guys. We really appreciate that they've had us in mind, even though the scheduling didn't work out in the past.

WayTooLoud.com: I think in just about every interview, I see you talk about every new country you've played in. Is that a really important thing on the agenda, to play in new countries as often as you can?

Alex: I like to do it. I think all the other guys like it too. It's a lot of fun to just go to different places because you just don't know what to expect. It's exciting. It's also something we like doing because people are going to be excited to see you if they've never seen you before, and that makes it even that much better for us, to have a crowd that's really frothing at the mouth when you hit the stage. It's not like they've been waiting three years to see you, they've been waiting pretty much since the band started, if some of them are older fans. We played Peru for the first time, El Salvador for the first time, Equador for the first time, and there were definitely some old school fans there that have been following the band for well over a decade that have never had a chance to see us before, so it's a lot of fun. Same thing with Iceland. We got to play Iceland earlier in the year, and that was fun as well. This year we've had at least those four countries that I listed. And Guatemala, we've never played there before, so that's five countries that we've done this year that we've never done before. All of them were well worth the trip. Great shows.

WayTooLoud.com: From the appearance of things, metalcore seems to have helped out every kind of real metal there is. Do you guys think that you've benefited from this?

Alex: Any kind of metal we support, even if we don't necessarily listen to it a whole lot. A lot of the metalcore bands are pretty good. I think they have enough of an element of death metal to them that they've helped attract fans to the death metal scene. Like if you have metalcore bands occasionally doing a tour with a death metal band, it's kind of a fan exchange, where the fans of one scene can learn about the music of another, and I think it's positive because those fans wouldn't have made death metal a first stop. It wouldn't have been their first choice to check out death metal, but once they've had a chance to see a band like us like at Sounds Of The Underground or whatever, it got them more interested in death metal. If those bands didn't exist, then Sounds Of The Underground probably wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't have done that tour, so we wouldn't have had that chance. I definitely think that metalcore bands have probably opened some doors for the death metal scene, and maybe the black metal scene as well.

The interview, in its entirety, can be viewed here.