The process of Forensix

By Desecration Drummer Michael Hourihan

After nearly three years of touring and promoting the concept album Process of Decay, we decided it was time we finished off writing the material we started just after we brought the album out (we're constantly putting new ideas together; even if we don't intend to use them for a long time, this helps us pick only the best material for an album without any filler tracks or riffs, something we pride ourselves on. The track “Silent Beneath Science” has been in Desecration's live set-list for over a year).

The album was well received, but we didn't see the need to follow up with another concept album. Therefore, we just concentrated on making each song as strong as possible, and eventually decided on a forensic science theme, Ollie taking much inspiration from his day-job as a mortician. Being our sixth studio album, we decided to incorporate the word “six” into the title, hence Forensix.

The band also did a short tour with Polish death metal veterans Vader, and completely fell in love with their self written / performed intro music (which was also the intro for the Beast album), which reminded us soooo much of the best, most fun days of (cheese) Metal - the eighties! This intro music was our inspiration to do our own guitar intro, though we chose a dark theme rather than an eighties-hair-guitar-god style, which we think suits the theme of the album, and appropriately titled it “The Committal”.

The rest of the tracks were written between the completion of Process of Decay, and the last day of the actual recording of Forensix. They were all written in our usual way; some of them were written with a basic formula in mind, whilst with others we just jammed on riffs and discussed where the song should go from there, and worked that way. Being a creative process, this sometimes takes time, and we sometimes use “prototype” riffs so we can get a feel for the song and finish off structuring it, and replace the riffs with better ones as and when we come up with them. The last song we recorded (also the last song on the album), “Heatsplit” was structured in the studio the night before we recorded the drum tracks for it. The album was recorded, mixed and mastered at Copro Records' house studio, Phillia, by Nick Hemmingway.

For the cover artwork, we got Jumali Katani to paint our mortuary-set cover, while Dave MacLean put the inlay together, using an old medical textbook theme as wallpaper for the inlay text.

Forensix was officially released in January 2009, although it received very good reviews in Terrorizer (8.5/10), Metal Hammer (7/10) and Kerrang!! (4/5) in December 2008.