Strapping Young Lad – Alien

I found Devin when he was around seventeen years old and I needed a singer for my band. So when I heard tapes of him singing I thought there was really something there but the music he was playing was bizarre; it was really heavy and industrial and I thought, “It’s really good but I’m not supposed to like this because I like this…” But when he was working with me the poor guy was stuck under my thumb because my music is not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship. I want things a certain way. Devin wasn’t writing at that time but when he went off and did his own thing and when he did… I’m going to use the ‘G’ word here… I think he’s a genius, I really do. He’s so passionate, so intense and – at times – so tormented, but there’s this redeeming quality of deep, deep beauty about everything he does. I think that in the future when people evolve, if they go back and actually listen to musicians of the past, when it comes to metal, he should be number one. There’s stuff in his catalogue that nobody else would have the balls to venture into.