Whitechapel are one of death metal’s most reliably brutal bands, and that’s not about to change. Or is it? The band’s last album, Our Endless War, was a top ten album. Just because of the success of that album doesn’t mean they’re going soft and selling out, though. Or are they? It depends on who you ask. Guitarist Alex Wade said that the band were inspired by Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe’s clean vocals on vii: Sturm und Drang during an interview with Revolver:

“I’m not gonna say the whole record is chuggy, but a lot of it is. And there are also passages that have a lot of atmosphere, as well as clean parts that let the songs breathe before we come back with something really heavy. If you’re playing really fast and you try to throw in a bunch of different guitar parts it just sounds like mush. But when you’ve got one guy barreling right down the middle and the other two complimenting the riff, it opens up new opportunities.

“…We all thought it was really cool how Randy [Blythe] from Lamb Of God wasn’t afraid to try some manly melodic vocals on their last record [VII: Sturm und Drang]. So Phil’s diving into that a little and seeing where it goes. He’s actually got a great singing voice.”

Apparently, that didn’t go over so well with someone else in the band, namely guitarist Zach Housholder, who totally shot down the talk of there being clean singing on the album:

For the love of god, everyone needs to quit freaking out. There’s no clean singing on our upcoming album.

— Zach Householder (@Zachchapel) April 7, 2016

End of story, right? Looks like there won’t be any clean vocals on the new album. The other guitarist said so. It would take Phil Bozeman himself denying the existence of clean vocals on Whitechapel’s next album to –

There's only 2 songs on the record that have clean vocals. Just an FYI.

— Phil Bozeman (@phillybo) April 7, 2016

Ok, we don’t even know what’s going on right now.

[via Lambgoat]