Every few years, when a new DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN album drops, you can count on a few things: there’s going to be a new lineup in the constantly morphing pioneering New Jersey mathcore band; the music is gonna have a few surprises; it’s gonna kick ass. The band’s new disc, Option Paralysis, certainly fulfills all of those quotas.

But, see, at first, we were worried it might not kick ass. All of the pre-release talk had the band going on about how heavy the disc was, how it was the craziest thing they’d ever done. But we like the weird pop songs the band has been toying with the past couple albums, more so than the technical metalcore that they may have helped create but has since become so played into the ground by other bands it’s barely even enjoyable hearing Dillinger do it.

But, rest assured the album still has vocalist Greg Puciato’s melodic vocalizing styles on songs like killer opener “Farewell, Mona Lisa” and album standout “Gold Teeth on a Bum,” which also contains some excellent new-wave-inspired guitar work. So, certainly, this album is not all heavy all the time, and we’re glad for it.

“Man, you know what I think it is? This record actually seems to have more melody than any record we’ve ever done but it’s in a less typical way,” says Puciato. “When we first started writing these songs we quickly realized we didn’t have any traditional poppy songs. We didn’t have a ‘Milk Lizard’ or a ‘Black Bubblegum’. So when we were listening to them instrumentally, before I put vocals on them, it seemed like it was going to be a less melodic record, just because there were no completely obvious radio songs or video songs.”
“In the past, we had to compartmentalize those [melodic songs] because we weren’t very good at doing them,” he continues. “We were really good at writing crazy aggressive technical metal songs but we were not as good at writing the songs that were more like rock songs so we had to completely separate those in order to build our skills at it. Now that we’ve become just as comfortable painting with those colours as with the crazy techy stuff we can integrate them into the same songs. So we have more melodies, it’s just less separated.”

And with more melodies will come more detractors, more folks saying Dillinger is getting wimpier, a phenomenon which it seems would have been going on for the last couple albums, “wimpy” as they were. But, Puciato says that’s actually not the case.

“No, man; I think we just shook people off,” he says. “With Miss Machine we shook off a certain amount of people and then there were people who didn’t jump but were like, ‘Well, I want to see if they’re going to put out Calculating Infinity Part 2’, and then when we didn’t do that, for Ire Works, I think a couple more people jumped ship, and that was good. It’s like getting rid of the dead leaves on a plant.”
“The people we have with us now are the fans who are probably going to stick around for whatever we decide to do, and that’s important,” he says. “We may have lost a little bit for a while and then it stabilized and now it’s growing, which is good, because these are fans of who are we are as adults, not a record we did ten years ago.”

The disc marks the recorded debut of drummer Billy Rymer, who does a great job playing the band’s difficult material and filling some pretty big drumming shoes (last dude out, Gil Sharone, was also a monster behind the kit, and, oddly, once starred on Full House). Puciato says the band has never been stronger than they are now, thanks to the infusion of new blood into the beast.

“Billy has been here for a little over a year. It’s funny, we started 2007, 2008, and 2009 with different drummers. We also recently noticed that we’ve never recorded two consecutive records with the same lineup, which is kind of hilarious (laughs). But I really hope every position is really stable for a while now, because we seemed to have tapped into a pretty deep creative artery, which 10, 12 years into a career is pretty rare. As far as camaraderie and getting along is concerned, it’s the best we’ve ever been, and creatively it’s the fastest we’ve ever wrote an album as well. As long as people don’t get worn down by the grind of playing this music every night for a year and a half, I think we’ve got some mileage in this lineup.”

Ah, yes, the Dillinger grind, the grind that spits out band members in an Axl-like fashion. I guess it only makes sense that the grind is only going to get harder as the band dudes head into their thirties and beyond.

“You have to have an intrinsic love for it,” says Puciato. “You have to love this more than you love having a normal home life, more than you love having free time. We don’t do this because this is all there is to do—no one in this band is not educated, no one in this band is devoid of any other employable skills. We’re not doing it for money, because I could probably make more money being a garbage man on a full-time basis than I could doing this. You have to have a love for it. Right now, everyone that’s here does. This is our lives. It’s not a hobby we had in our twenties that we’re going to look back on and say, ‘Remember when we were in a band? That was cool.’ This is what we’ve chosen to do with our lives.”

So the band’s forging ahead, after a much-talked-about split from long-time label Relapse Records and the formation of their own Party Smasher Inc. label, which, for this album, has backing from Season Of Mist Records, a situation which Puciato has nothing but good things to say about. And judging from some of the cool stuff going on surrounding this release—like the deluxe box set available for DEP geeks—it looks like things are working out (despite a short delay in the Canadian release date of the album).

“The box set is really, honestly, kind of insane,” says Puciato. “When we were coming up with it conceptually, even the designers at Season of Mist were like, ‘We don’t really know how we’re going to do this, but we’re excited by it because it’s taking us out of our comfort zone.’ When we finally got them in, every aspect of it was really really killer. The flag that comes with it is genuinely massive, there are so many neat little things about it; even the box itself is magnetized so it feels really high quality and it closes really cool. I don’t want to be a dork and have my own box set sitting on my end table in my apartment (laughs); I wish it was another band’s so I could put it out there and say, ‘Look how fucking cool this is.’ But I can’t do that to my own stuff.”

So, new drummer in place, new kick-ass album out, dorky packaging a success, next step is, of course, the endless road. But first, the band has to get through the endless Warped Tour.

“We’re going to play a festival in Europe that AEROSMITH is headlining the day of (laughs). I’m genuinely insanely excited about that,” says Puciato. “But then we have eight weeks of Warped Tour, which to me is not that thrilling of an idea. But we’ll see. You end up playing for 45 minutes a day on that thing, and you’re out for eight weeks and every show is in an amateur baseball stadium that’s 45 minutes away from any cool city you could think of. It’s a lot of rotting away on that tour. So we’ll just have to get through it.”

The endless road has also featured an endless stream of mismatched Dillinger tours, from COHEED & CAMBRIA to MEGADETH, many of which end with less-than-amiable results. But, in a way, those were all growing pains, a band trying to find their place in the world. In the end, they had to build their own house and live there, and that’s where they are now, finally content.

“We went through a period where we were trying to find a place, then we ended up carving out our own place. We feel very comfortable playing with a lot of different bands. We just played a show with NAS and DAMIAN MARLEY. We feel just as comfortable playing with MESHUGGAH as we would playing with BJÖRK at this point. As long as it’s good and it’s something that we feel is creative or forward thinking or has some sort of artistic merit, I don’t really care what kind of music it is.”
“We started to realize we were looking for the wrong things if we were trying to find peers musically,” admits Puciato. “I think instead we feel more comfortable when we’re affiliated with people who have the same attitude as us. It doesn’t matter what style of music they are, or even if they’re doing the same art form; I would feel more comfortable affiliating with a graphic designer, painter, or filmmaker if they had the same attitude as us, rather than a band that tries to sound like us but in attitude sounded completely different.”