Kataklysm vocalist Maurizio Iacono‘s third studio album, “Victims Of This Fallen World“, was a controversial record in the band’s career. Not only did it see Iacono assume the vocal duties from Sylvain Houde, it also found the Canadian death metal band implementing nü-metal elements into their craft.

In a recent appearance on the Garza Podcast, which is hosted by Suicide Silence guitarist Chris Garza, Iacono summed up why Kataklysm shifted in that direction with the album, stating [transcribed by theprp.com]:

“It was our nü-metal record. Every band does it. So that was the record that when I was telling you, sometimes you just got to let things take its time, Right? And then at the beginning it was such a shocker, because you know everybody had short hair on it, it was just such a weird… We needed a complete break and rebranding and restructuring of the band at the time.

We had to get away from where we were. After you do a record like ‘Temple Of Knowledge‘ that has, I don’t know, 250 riffs per song. It was such a chaotic record, and and the level of extremity with Sylvain [Houde, ex-Kataklysm vocalist] singing over everything. You know, he had no idea of pattern, it was just going off.

It was just an animalistic kind of record and it revolutionized a lot of things. I mean, I remember a lot of people coming to our shows, like Gene Hoglan and all these guys coming in, and that was the record, you know? They loved it and I think it was the pinnacle of that era for us.

But we needed a change and then when we did that, we kind of really… You could see on [the album art] it don’t look death metal. So basically when we did that it shocked people, dude. … JF‘s [Kataklysm guitarist Jean-François Dagenais] got the Deftones kind of look there and that was his band back then..”

Iacono isn’t wrong about bands jumping on the nü-metal bandwagon in the mid to late 90s, as Slayer, Machine Head, Tommy Lee and more all took a swing at reinventing themselves amid the genre’s exploding popularity. However, Kataklysm‘s hometown fans in Montreal, QC got their proper introduction to the band’s new sound via a show with Morbid Angel. Iacono admitted the backlash to the stylistic change was immediate:

“…We come on there and the fans are just like [flipping the bird], they were just throwing bottles and shit. I was like, ‘Fuck, we’re done.’ Like, I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be hard.’ So, I didn’t, you know, we didn’t… We did what we wanted to do at the time. We weren’t following what we came from because we needed that, like I said, that split.”

As for the circumstances that influenced that record, Iacono stated:

“It was dark years. It was dark because my father had died in 97. It was very hard on me. So basically while we’re doing the record and everything, right? So like it’s it was a very tough dark album. So that album is like really a dark kind of period in the band’s overall career. It came out with agony behind it.

And like I said, we wanted to do what we liked. We like groove stuff and we liked more easy listening stuff and we wanted to have more structure in our music. So that’s why we did this type of record and that’s what we were all about.

But we thought we were finished after that that release party with Morbid Angel. And I was like, ‘We’re done.’ But we had that Vader tour. It was booked already. So we’re like, ‘Let’s just end this thing the right way and let’s just do this tour’, right?

So we go with Vader, we do the tour in Europe. And the Germans and the European crowd went crazy on the record. So they liked it. They were happy to see us back there. We had a great response. So we’re like, ‘Wait a minute. Why don’t we fine-tune this a little bit?’”

He went on to say of receiving that support overseas:

“I was like, ‘Okay, there’s a movement here.’ What if we combined a little bit of the old stuff we used to do and this new direction, which is more easy listening in the sense of like structure and stuff. So it’s a mix. It’s a hybrid of that chaotic thing mixed with kind of like a bit of the nü-metal and big riffs and groove stuff.”