There are so many things that kept forcing metal back down to the underground. It survives everywhere on the planet.

Personally, I love the cookie monster grunts. I like how they alienate listeners. We sound the way we sound. We're individuals. We don't all like the same music. Everybody contributes their own influences, style, and history.

When I was really young, I was really into Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and those kinds of bands.

Now since I've gotten back into it, I've been listening to a lot more of the 1990s death metal type stuff.

We made basement practice songs.To have them presented in such a huge fashion today - like at Primavera, where it's thousands of people in a festival environment - is surreal. I never thought some of the songs would ever need to be projected at such a volume or to such a wide span of people.

It was pretty common to form bands that only lasted a few years. Slint was my favorite band that I was in at the time, and I didn't realize that I was bummed out about it until quite a while later.

Most people found out about Slint in the mid or late 90s, but we were an '80s band. We started in 1986 and broke up at the end of 1990.