The Devil Wears Prada are a six-piece metal-core band from Ohio, US. They are currently touring the UK with Enter Shikari and Suit Yourself Magazine sat down with Mike (vocals) and Jeremy (guitar) from the band before their show to shoot the shit:

SY: Hey guys! How’s it going? How are you finding England?
Mike: How am I what, England?!
Jeremy: Found it great! Landed right in London and found it right away!

SY: How did the band start and how did you decide which route you wanted to take?
Jeremy: Um…actually a couple of the other guys just started the band for fun and then Mike joined after a little bit and then I joined right after they started playing shows. Just started out as something to do, you know. We lived in Ohio, not much else to do! And it just kinda took off from there and just kept getting bigger, so we just kept doing it. As far as direction I think we just went with what we were listening to at the time or just kinda stuff that we liked at the time.

SY: Awesome! So what were your original trails of music that you were heading for?
Mike: Well, mostly Underoath and like Still Remains; just like synth inspired, post-hardcore metal.
Jeremy: James started out doing these weird piano things, like really synthy stuff, and as we move on he gets more and more into big samples. I think everyone evolves in their own music and Mike does it with his vocal styles.

SY: Everyone coming together in their own ways! Like it! How has your music developed over the years?
Mike: I think just getting better at what we individually do. You can’t help but get a better. Musically for us we don’t really change our sound much but I think it does get more mature from album to album.
Jeremy: You’re kinda forced to listen to bands outside your genre just because you’ve become friends with all the bands in your genre and its weird like; ‘Ahhh! I can’t listen to that any more. I’m friends with those guys!’ so you have to listen to other stuff.

SY: Being a Christian band, what kind of message are you sending out in your songs?
Mike: A Christian one?!
Jeremy: Hope!
Mike: Damnation!
Jeremy: Damnation in hell! …There’s just so much negativity right now. We just wanna bring the message that there is this other side, the Jesus side of things where it’s positive and it’s love. There are lots of things that say ‘you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that’ but that shouldn’t be the main focus.

SY: Agreed! Having been in America for the past 6 months I noticed the music industries are quite different. How do you feel about the cultural differences in the music scenes around the world like fans, venues and atmospheres?
Jeremy: I think in America it’s a different just because the scene’s so much more saturated, there’s a lot more competition. There are all these different bands in different countries – like Enter Shikari here and Parkway Drive in Australia - that are massive but it’s so much harder to do something like that in America because there are so many bands. It’s the biggest music market in the world! But at the same time that’s kinda cool because then you have a big variety of stuff.
Mike: It makes it easier because then you have more places to go to play shows.
Jeremy: Instead of playing like 10 dates you can play like 38 or 48 dates.

SY: Every band has embarrassing moments! What’s the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened on stage?
Mike: Ha! One time on tour, James, within the first 30 seconds of a song, hit his head on the base drum mic stand and his eye instantly got huge. He ran off stage and we were like ‘what?!’ and they took him to the hospital right then!
Jeremy: I thought his eye had fallen out until the end of the show! Didn’t one time your junk fall out of your shorts?
Mike: No!
Jeremy: I thought it did…

www.myspace.com/tdwp

Chloe Jackson