Adrenaline Rush

He just may be the first dude to ever describe his band's tunes with an analogy that involves the gouging of retinas.

"It's like watching someone get their eyeball poked with a needle," begins Mitch Lucker, singer for nouveau death metal upstarts Suicide Silence. "You're going to be like, 'Oh, I want to watch it,' then ... (makes some gargling, telltale signs of gastrointestinal distress).

"With our music, it's the same thing," he continues. "It holds you in, because it's something so messed up. 'I shouldn't be listening to this.' 'I shouldn't be watching this.' But yet you continue. It's human nature."

As Lucker alludes to, death metal long has been a genre posited on great bodily harm, the flaming freeway pileup that's difficult to avert your gaze from.

It's the musical equivalent of the blood and plasma soaked slasher flick, with the emphasis on agony: guttural, pained grunts are what pass for vocals, the drums are merciless in their unrelenting velocity and the guitars generally manifest themselves in dense chunks of riffs that rumble by like stampeding livestock.

Even the bands' very logos, all sharp angles and knifelike edges, connote menace.

The appeal of the music is rooted in the same impulse that leads some adventure-minded types to constantly be seeking the highest point to leap from or the most perilous peak to scale: It's a nonstop rush defined by immediate gratification, intensity for the sheer sake of intensity, the reason adrenal glands were created.

It's something that appeals to a small cadre of macabre-minded thrill seekers -- those who elevate brute force, challenging time signatures and a high level of instrumental complexity over melody and hooks.

As such, the music tends to go over with the general public like a severed head in the ice box.

But all that's starting to change, and these Riverside, Calif., natives are one of the main reasons why. The band's full-length debut, 2007's "The Cleansing," a nasty, bilious blast of high-octane misanthropy, has become an underground hit, climbing into the Billboard top 100, a rarity for a disc this extreme.

By incorporating seismic, boulder-heavy breakdowns and a streamlined, hard-core aesthetic into their turgid grind, the band has found favor outside the traditional death metal ranks and begrudgingly become the face of the deathcore subgenre, a term the band isn't fond of.

Last summer, Suicide Silence toured to much fanfare on the Mayhem Festival, a more mainstream-oriented metal road show headlined by platinum selling headbangers Slipknot and Disturbed, and they first built a name for themselves on the D.I.Y. hard-core circuit.

Because of this, the makeup of their fan base is a bit broader than that of most of their ilk.

"When I'm onstage, looking out, I see a mixture of straight-up metal heads who just want to headbang in the front row with long-ass hair, and then all along the barrier, a handful of 13- to 16-year-old girls who are just losing their minds, freaking out like they're watching the Beatles," Lucker marvels. "And you're like, 'What the hell? This is a metal show.' "

A substantial female presence is something that has long been absent from death metal, and not without cause. There are still some virulently misogynistic strains of the genre, although they tend to exist in the deep, deep underground. And the scene's all-time top-selling act, Cannibal Corpse, gained notoriety early on in their career with songs that revelled in violence toward women, though they no longer explore those themes in their tunes.

But when it comes to a band like Suicide Silence, whose lyrics tend to revolve around matters of religion, betrayal and revenge, they're more about a kind of confessional, open-ended aggression that's largely attributable to Lucker's roots in nü metal music, which largely revolves around personal feelings of rage and alienation rather than more fantastical tales of gore and bloodshed.

Lucker's dad, who played guitar and gave impromptu lessons to kids in the neighborhood, first got him into heavy music when he was still in grade school by buying him Korn, Deftones and Sepultura cassettes. Soon, Lucker was jamming with his brother's band in the family garage, singing Hatebreed tunes through a small, 12-inch guitar amp and a cheap Radio Shack mic.

Nowadays, Lucker's ascended to a different realm entirely. He just completed his band's much-anticipated sophomore record and is going to hit the road with heavyweights such as Disturbed and Slayer on separate tours later in the year.

This weekend, Suicide Silence is hitting town as part of the annual Extreme Thing sports and music fest, where they'll easily be the heaviest band to ever play the event and will take the stage alongside nonmetal headliners Bad Religion and Silverstein.

They likely will be among the most polarizing acts at Extreme Thing, but hey, at least the event will live up to its name this year with these dudes in tow.

"We're a band that can go nuts on any stage," Lucker enthuses. "People will either love us or hate us, but they're going to be like, 'Damn, that band's throwing down hard. I hate their music, but they go crazy live.' "

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.