INTERVIEW: Spencer Charnas from Ice Nine Kills

Every band needs an angle. A reason for the passive observer to stay and spend a minute or two watching a band’s music video on You Tube, or to keep a track playing via the many streaming services available when the desire to skip to a favoured artist beckons. Those prospective fans could become indentifiable supporters, purchasing merchandise and attending shows.

Ice Nine Kills wrap their brand of metalcore in a heavy dose of horror film inspiration. Slasher, gore, evil possession… even wicked clowns are referenced as the listener tackles the brand-new studio album from the band, The Silver Scream.

This is no gimmick, frontman Spencer Charnas is an avid fan and supporter of horror as a film genre. Referencing many of his favoured characters across The Silver Scream, it had to be the number 13 that lent its qualities to the volume of cuts selected to comprise the album.

“It was definitely a difficult thing to pick out just 13 because, I’m a huge fan of the genre and I always have been since I was a little kid, but I think it was, it was very important to touch on the most iconic ones… Freddie, Jason, Michael and at the same time also touching on a few others that weren’t in the huge mainstream, or iconic films that everyone in the world would associate with.

(We) touched on some that were classics in their own right, cult classics like Silent Night, Deadly Night, which if you’re a hardcore slasher fan, you’re going to know about. I wanted to help expose more people to some of the lesser known ones. I hope we were able to do that with this album.”

Producer extraordinaire Drew Falk lent his considerable talent to Ice Nine Kills for The Silver Scream. An excellent choice to bring the many layers of sound to life across the album, Falk worked with Frankie Palmeri and the best emerging guitarist in the business, Josh Travis, to help carve the Emmure’s heavy weight statement from 2017, Look At Yourself. Charnas offers the following thoughts.

“Drew is fantastic. I had admired his work that he had done with Motionless In White. I just thought that he really brought a, a beefy sound to the production. And also I knew that he had worked with them, song writing wise. So we were very excited to get in there and get in a lab with him, so to speak. And it was just a great experience and it was a true collaborative effort because not only did we work with Drew but also, um, our long-time producer, Steve Sobczak, who operates out of Syracuse, New York, it was just a great experience and everyone’s brought something different to the table“

Surviving, yet alone thriving in a music business that isn’t as supportive of heavy metal and rock music as it is of platforming other genres is not easy. Charnas reflects on what has been an interesting journey for Ice Nine Kills, identifying the philosophy that helped the band forge success.

“It definitely has been a challenge over the years, but I think as soon as we sort of carved out our own place in the genre and stopped worrying about what other bands were doing a and what other bands were sounding like. I think that’s when we really started to see some success in the business and I think that’s just goes for anything, you know, you got to stand out in this world to make a difference. think we learned that over time and have been fortunate enough to have found our own way”

ICE NINE KILLS release their new album The Silver Scream on October 5 via Fearless Records / Caroline Australia.