Suicide Silence knew that they were taking a big chance by jettisoning the deathcore sound that defined their first four albums. Their fifth one, which was released on February 24th, was produced by Ross Robinson and featured a ton of clean singing from Eddie Hermida for his second album with the band. It was a bold move, and as the videos for “Doris” and “Silence” proved, not as popular with longtime fans of the band.
While we’ll be covering this later this week with Metal by Numbers, the first week sales results are out, and they’re, well, not good. Suicide Silence’s self-titled album sold somewhere around 4,650 copies in its first week. That’s a respectable amount for any band, but it’s by far the lowest amount of albums the band has sold it’s opening week. 2014’s You Can’t Stop Me sold somewhere around 15,000 it’s first week, or more than three times what the new one sold. 2011’s The Black Crown and 2009’s No Time to Bleed each sold just slightly less, moving around 14,000. Even their 2007 debut, The Cleansing, sold 7,200 it’s first week out.
That’s rough, and essentially seems like a lot of Suicide Silence’s core audience that gave the band a chance after Mitch Lucker died have decided to give the new album a pass. Granted, deathcore has a limited audience, and with three years in between albums, some deathcore fans might have aged out of the genre. There’s also an argument to be made that streaming has taken over in that time, so they wouldn’t have reached 15,000 anyway. But what it really comes down to is that their fans don’t like the new album. There’s potentially a whole new audience for the band in fans that like the nu-metal leanings of the album, but they either haven’t been turned on to the new stuff yet, or are taking a “wait and see” attitude.
