Interview
Interview
Make Them Suffer: “You have to adapt or die”
Sean Harmanis talks line-up changes, pushing boundaries, and the defiant self-titled album from the Australian metal heavyweights
Not long ago, Make Them Suffer were standing at a crossroads.
Over a decade into the Perth band’s career, the pandemic brutally knocked the wind out of their sails, with crushing 2020 album, How To Survive A Funeral, released into a world grappling with devastation and isolation. With the departure of keyboardist/vocalist Booka Nile coming shortly after, an internal conversation was held to determine the course of the band’s future.
“We essentially came to the conclusion that we would continue as a band in a more casual sense, playing the occasional local show as a four-piece. Honestly, we were just staying together for the friendship, and Jaya [Jeffery, bass], Jordan [Mather, drums] and myself were pretty on board with that,” vocalist Sean Harmanis shrugs.
“Nick [McLernon, guitar] wanted to keep pushing to see if we could find a suitable replacement [for Nile] though, and some names were thrown around. Through fate, Nick ended up bumping into Alex [Reade, vocals & keys], who told him that things weren’t going smoothly in her band either.”
The stars seemingly aligned, and it wasn’t long before Reade officially joined the band’s ranks. With the freshly energised quintet’s chemistry strengthening with every show played, they soon headed into the studio with one collective goal in mind: making the definitive Make Them Suffer record.
11 airtight songs that dart between darkness and light at feverish pace; their self-titled fifth album is a bold reclamation of everything the five-piece stand for. Riff-fuelled melodic anthems teem with equal parts aggression and vulnerability, feeding electronic influences into their ever-evolving sound. In 2025, the Perth powerhouses are well and truly back.
“We found the missing piece of the puzzle, and no one’s fulfilled that role as well as Alex has. That was the confidence we needed for everyone to keep pushing,” Harmanis nods.
“I remember playing a show for the first time in two years and seeing the way that people were reacting. Hearing the feedback from people and how excited everyone was for our return, it was like, ‘Oh, I remember why I’m doing this now’.”
With a triumphant new chapter opening up before them, as Make Them Suffer prepare to bring their pulverising live show back to the UK this spring, they’re feeling more positive about their future than ever before. Ahead of their return, Harmanis walks us through the rediscovery of their identity, and how an insistence on pushing boundaries has fuelled their fervent creative drive.
Since Reade came onboard, it feels as though a new chapter for Make Them Suffer has begun. Have you noticed a shift in the band’s collective energy?
Alex has a very positive mental attitude, [and is] a very positive person. Nick and I are the leading creative forces of the band, and when it comes to being creative in songwriting you develop a bit of a – I don’t want to say a cynical outlook – but you have to be quite critical. It’s hard to determine what’s good and bad in music, particularly if it’s something you’ve written yourself. You’re often quite critical of your own work, and you’re very analytical when it comes to listening to other music. Having Alex come in as this motivator, she’s instilling us with confidence in what we’re doing. In both writing and playing, we’re always our own worst critics, but Alex has come as a former fan of the band and given us a reality check. We often use this metaphor for being in a band, that it’s like being on a sports team together. That comes with this locker room hierarchy, and someone on a basketball team might not do much on the court, but you don’t know how much they’re doing in the locker room behind closed doors. When it comes to someone like Alex, she’s our cheerleader. It’s very motivating.
The line-up shift plays a large part in the self-titled record sounding the way that it does, and there is a feeling of rebirth surging through these songs. Coming into it, what was the vision from a sonic perspective?
For the majority of the band’s career, I’ve hated the name Make Them Suffer. When we started writing this record though, it felt like the songs actually sounded like Make Them Suffer for the first time in a long time. That name suited the EP and maybe our demo, but as we moved into Neverbloom it fit less, and by Old Souls and Worlds Apart the sound felt quite far removed from the band’s name. Now though, it feels like a fitting name again, and I’m so happy we never changed it. It’s bold, iconic, simple, and easy to remember, so one of the main thoughts that we had coming into this album was trying to embrace the band name and that ethos.
We had this goal of writing an album that consisted solely of bangers. There are loose themes that flow throughout the record – the whole thing is a little bit futuristic and there are some Blade Runner and Matrix vibes – but as far as our records go, this one is probably the least conceptually motivated. We didn’t place as much emphasis as we usually would on things like tracks flowing into one another, it was more about just writing 10 really good songs that represent Make Them Suffer. I think we achieved that.
It feels like an assertion of the band’s identity, which is why it feels like the right time for that self-titled stamp….
Part of it is just the climate in music at the moment. That was a motivating factor for wanting to do an album that felt like this integral collection of songs, because it could be a gateway into our band for a lot of people. We weren’t just writing songs specifically with playlisting in mind, but we understand that getting Spotify playlisting is very important. Some people don’t really like that, but in my eyes, it comes down to a philosophy that is true for many areas of life – you have to adapt or die. You’ve got to stick with the times, and as much as I love a good concept record, for obvious reasons it doesn’t really translate to Spotify playlisting. It made sense for us to create a collection of songs that people could expect to see live, and that define our band. That’s not to say that the next record will continue in that trajectory, and we might want to do a concept EP next, or something completely different. We tend to get bored if we sit on one sound for too long, but that was where our heads were at for this one.
It’s all part of the journey, and that’s something this record acknowledges a whole lot. Listening through these songs you can hear how every era of this band has been integral in building up to where we are now…
We wouldn’t be able to write songs like ‘Venusian Blues’ without what we’ve done before. We wouldn’t have even thought of writing a song in that direction if we hadn’t put out an album like Worlds Apart or a song like ‘Ether’. Then there are songs on the new album like ‘No Hard Feelings’, which might not have existed if we didn’t write songs like ‘Let Me In’ or ‘Save Yourself’ back in the day. Then we have ‘Doomswitch’, which is a new sound for us in a lot of ways, and ‘Oscillator’ which feels similar to a song like ‘Power Overwhelming’. It’s because of all the experimentation over the course of our career that we’re able to write a lot of the music we are today. It’s how we’re able to confidently switch styles more frequently than your average band, and that’s really fun for us to do. It keeps us motivated and keeps us excited about being creative, so we’re always trying to push boundaries and do something new.
The flexibility to do that comes as a byproduct of self-producing the record too. How was the process of working with no outside influence, and getting to have that level of control over the direction?
I like the freedom of it, but it’s also nice having an external person to weigh in and settle a dispute. If you can’t quite agree on what riff comes next, it’s useful to have someone to swing that vote in either direction. Particularly when you’re one of the main songwriters, it’s easy to become too close to the project, and that can warp your perspective. On the last album, How To Survive A Funeral, I remember sending all the tracks to our management and label. We had our picks of what we felt were the singles, and to me ‘Erase Me’ was obviously a filler. When we heard back from the team though, they all said that ‘Erase Me’ was going to be one of the lead singles. To me it was one of the weaker tracks, but my perspective was warped because I’d been living in the studio for six weeks. Having the external force of a producer smooths out a lot of those bumps in the road. Having said that though, when you’re self-producing you get the glory and the sense of accomplishment. We did this all by ourselves, and after working with Drew [Fulk, producer] on How To Survive A Funeral, we levelled up in our knowledge of production, songwriting, and workflow. We took a lot away from that, and that gave us the confidence to self-produce this time.
It works particularly well on a record like this where you’re trying to make a statement about your sound. This band has always struck a balance between heaviness and delicacy, exploring both darkness and light, and these songs feel like the perfect example of that juxtaposition…
That’s the central theme of Make Them Suffer, and the axis on which everything revolves. There are a number of different ways in which we incorporate juxtaposition into songs, and they’re all very important. It’s what makes us, us. Our X Factor, if you will.
That’s how a song like ‘Mana God’ and another like ‘No Hard Feelings’ can both sit comfortably within the same world as one another. As a fan of music, are you typically drawn to artists unafraid to explore all sides of the spectrum?
It’s interesting, because not much of the metal that I listen to is that diverse, but a lot of the non-metal is. Gorillaz are one of my favourite acts, and when you listen to their self-titled album, every song is almost a completely different genre. I love Radiohead too, and they’re another band that’s changed a lot over the years. The heavy music that I listen to is mostly just slamming, brutal death metal or hardcore though. I prefer not to think when I’m listening to metal, because when I listen to a metalcore playlist I start getting analytical and breaking down the song. When I’m not listening to metal though, I definitely appreciate artists that experiment a bit more.”
Being able to experiment with your own sound a little more on tracks like ‘Doomswitch’, how has it been to see the fan response?
“There are two realms in which our fans exist. There are the ones that enjoy going to the shows and listening to the singles, then there are the legacy fans who enjoy the concept elements of an album like Neverbloom. I think a lot of people struggled with the switch-up on this album, because it is more of a compilation of songs. Over the last few years, I have intentionally taken a massive break from social media and reading comments on YouTube. I find that regardless of whether they’re positive or negative, they still affect me. The positive comments can make me feel like I’m hot stuff and having that kind of ego complex is not a healthy way to exist. I try to steer clear of reading feedback and comments where I can, and I think that keeps you humble. At the same time though, the people that are coming to the shows, buying shirts, buying the record, and listening to the album on Spotify are literally what’s keeping it afloat. Becoming less and less active on social media and being so detached from that world, when I go back on tour and see the way that people are reacting it feels so special. Every time I’m like, “Whoa, I forgot that this exists”. It’s this massive part of my life that people seem to really care about, and it’s so nice when I get to come back to that.
Having that mentality allows you to be more present onstage too, to really take in the importance of those moments…
I actually remember having a conversation with my mum when we were on our first tour back in the States. I gave her a call, and she was asking how the tour was going. I remember expressing to her how I’d forgotten about how special it is to just be able to live in the moment. It’s something that is so easy to do when you’re onstage, because you’re only thinking about the next word you’re going to say. Often, you’re not even thinking about that because you’ve sung those songs so many times that it’s almost autopilot. I think that feeling is one of the things that keeps a lot of people going. Being able to forget about everything else that’s going on, to forget about the past and not worry about the future. You’re just here, you’re performing, and that’s all that’s happening.
Now firmly in this new era, with a run of UK shows taking place in May, how are you feeling about the future of Make Them Suffer?
I’m confident we’re going to deliver an insane live set, because we’ve only been improving. The production’s only been getting better, we’re really happy with the crew that we’ve been working with, and all the prep work has been great. These headline tours are proving grounds for us, and we want to pack out these rooms. In terms of what we’re bringing, I have the utmost confidence in all of us. What we’re going to be delivering during these live performances is very fitting for what’s happening in the band at the moment in a creative sense, and a good representation of where we’re at. In the past, we’ve been a little scared to do headliners, because of the pressure of performing a headline show. It’s a little more stressful because you’re playing for much longer and you have to present as a headline band. But having done the Australian headliner, seeing how well that did and how positive we felt about our own personal performance, we’re super confident going into these shows. We’re ready for it.
Make Them Suffer play a string of dates in UK and Ireland from 8 May. Find tickets here
Photo by Venla Shalin / Getty
