Bullet For My Valentine frontman Matt Tuck has declared that metalcore is far from a dirty word. Hell, he’s still proud to be part of the scene that redefined heavy music in the early 2000s.
Speaking to Duane James of Australia’s Wall Of Sound, Tuck reflected on the era that birthed a generation of tattooed shredders and hair-flailing circle pits, sharing a sense of pride about the movement that launched Bullet For My Valentine alongside heavyweights like Avenged Sevenfold, Killswitch Engage, and Parkway Drive.
“No, I love metalcore. You can’t tar us with that brush solely. But I think if you had to put us under an umbrella or a genre or something, I think metalcore is something that, that’s what we would class ourselves as, especially back in the day. I mean, I think we’ve evolved a lot more and we got more diverse since then, but, yeah, I don’t think it’s a dirty word at all.
“It was so cool to be part of this new thing. Nu metal was kind of dying out. We were part of something like Avenged Sevenfold and Killswitch Engage and Parkway [Drive] and all these bands. It was just like a new movement of metal. And it was not just about kind of low riffs… That’s all cool — it has its place — but I think showmanship and technicality and showing off just hadn’t been there.”
Tuck also tipped his hat to the thrash titans that shaped Bullet For My Valentine from Megadeth and Metallica to Slayer and Testament: “We grew up on bands like Megadeth and Testament, Metallica and Slayer, and all this stuff, and we wanted to kind of do our version of that. And, obviously, Bullet is very different to all of those bands, but the DNA, we extracted that and we wanted to make it ours, which is what we did.
As for new Bullet For My Valentine, the band was in the studio back in November 2024 with producer Carl Bown (Bring Me the Horizon, Sleep Token) who produced Venom, Gravity, and Bullet For My Valentine. On the direction of the new stuff, guitarist Michael “Padge” Paget told TotalRock: “It’s gonna be super heavy. We mess around with some crazy tuning on this one, something we haven’t done before.
“So it’s gonna be really interesting and fresh for the fans — and us. I think [we have a song in] drop G [tuning]. But, yeah, all of the usual Bullet trademarks are there. It’s in our DNA, so hooks, the vocal melodies, the huge choruses, big guitars, all the standard stuff’s gonna be there, but definitely different to what we’ve ever done before.”
He continued: “We’ve always said we never wanna make the same album twice,” he explained. “One, I think it’s cop-out because we’ve already done it. We’ll never do what The Poison did for a debut album. And we like to keep it fresh for ourselves and challenge ourselves, make it interesting for the fans.
“Music changes over time, and there’s classic metal, there’s metalcore, there’s modern metal, there’s contemporary metal, this new wave of modern metal as well now coming out,” he added. “So we’ve gotta keep up with the curve and do our thing, but our way. So, so it’s gonna be interesting, but I think people are really gonna love it. It’s gonna be awesome.”
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