Darkest Hour aren’t giving up the fight.
It’s early October when Revolver reaches guitarist Mike Schleibaum, who co-founded the Washington, D.C. melodeath quintet in the mid-Nineties with vocalist John Henry back when they were still teenagers.
30 years, 10 full-lengths and countless global tours later, they’re on the precipice of delivering Suffer Divine, a frankly divine assault of skin-blistering beats, razor-wired melodies and impeccable shred. Though Darkest Hour spent 2025 celebrating three decades of heaviness on an anniversary tour, Schleibaum says he was even more excited to push forward with another set of punishing tunes. And he knows it’s pretty special that he gets to do so.
“We have dedicated our life to making melodic death-metal art,” he says proudly, further reflecting, “Monetizing enough off of it to be able to only spend our time doing this, in an age where it costs $35 for a cheeseburger… Nothing is guaranteed or owed to any artist, no matter how long they’ve done anything.”
As you might expect from the veteran outfit, Suffer Divine is full of metallic battle tracks. It’s a record that reflects on inner struggles, whether waging war against one’s addictive tendencies (“Vile Angel”) or figuring out the instinctual will to survive (“Warrior”) — the latter’s music video notably takes place in a boxing ring to drive the metaphor home.
That said, the band are also raging against ominous powers around us. Of “Suffer Divine,” Henry had previously explained that the high-BPM batterer is a pointed missive to those who “push and peddle hatred and division.” He lashes out against misogyny and “dark history.”
“The fact that a melodic death-metal band is more fucking logical when it comes to its moralistic vision than the United States government is insane to me,” he says. “My 15-year-old kid is trying to navigate life being like, ‘Death-metal, punk and hardcore lyrics say this, and this makes sense, but look what the fucking world says to do.’”
Pep Williams
You guys got wickedly gunky for the “Suffer Divine” video. How’d that all go down?
Mike Schleibaum Well… the song, in general, has this idea of turning hate and adversity into fuel. As we were coming up ideas, we were thinking about having things spitting on us. And then that evolved to like, “Let’s just spray us with a bunch of shit.” And then we were talking about getting a pressure washer. It got crazy. Like, “Where could we set everything up where he could hit us with a fire hose?”
Thomas [Mignone, director] has a really long history of doing different music videos — including a lot of blood work, a lot of gore and a lot of splatter — so he walked us through the fact that certain things look good on camera. The cinematographer came up with the goo. It was basically this chocolate powder mixture with water, a little starch and some food coloring. It ended up being green, even though in the video [it looks] black. He was swirling it around when we got there and it had this really faint, bitter chocolate smell. It was kind of gross, to be honest. It didn’t have a bad taste, but it left a stain.
We had the photoshoots for the record the next day, so we were tripping about how stained we were gonna get from all this. But we decided to own the idea. So, I went first and it was pretty awesome because he just started throwing the shit all over me. It was really hard to play, but our drummer [Travis Orbin], this gargantuan beefy dude, loved getting hit with shit. Other guys were having a tough time — John was singing and immediately [got goo] in his eyeball.
After we shot this video, I got to go in the shower first. I showered off the guitar. We had to take the guitar apart and clean every bit of it. Same with the drum set.
Was that one of your main guitars, or a gimmick guitar for the shoot?
Shout out to ESP Guitars, my sponsor. I have a signature ESP LTD MSV Mike Schleibaum Flying V with them, and I have many in my arsenal. They’re all pretty reliable.
I fucking torture guitars. Anybody who’s been on tour with Darkest Hour knows that backstage we’re playing all the time and fucking shit up. We’re knocking them around. I knew, based on all the things I’ve done to guitars in the past, that it could handle getting in the shower with me. We washed it off. We let it dry out. It’s fine.
Was this the most that you suffered for your art?
I want to preface all this with this quote I saw somewhere. I’m gonna butcher it, but it was something like, “What a privilege it is to be made miserable by a quest of your own choice.”
It is a privilege to be able to get to do what we’ve done for 31 years: 11 records, going all around the world over and over again, getting signature guitars. The level of adversity that we’ve had to stomach to do this compared to what is happening [around the world] in 2026 is pretty laughable. For somebody in a position like we’re in to complain is, in my opinion, disingenuous.
That said, allow me to do that, by telling you that, yes, it has sucked to have to go on the fucking internet and post pictures of every goddamn thing the band’s eating.
The real fight “Warrior” touches on hasn’t been the shit outside — you know, getting arrested, all the times we almost died in van wrecks, the times we got robbed. The main thing that’s been hard is the fight within yourself, as an artist, to be like, “Why keep going?” To really love this, you need to put the weapons down and be like, “Fuck it. I like being in a band because all the real fucked-up shit that’s happened to us is really our best stories.” When we’re 80, that’s all the shit we’re going to be talking about.
What’s the wildest bit of Darkest Hour lore that you’d care to share?
Everybody knows about us getting arrested in Oklahoma because we had some weed, but dude, now they’ve got the Cannabis Cup there. So, that’s some Snoop Dogg, low-level jail stuff.
The time we got $10,000 ripped off of us sucked. I would say all the real big fucked-up things that have happened to Darkest Hour are already out there.
The new record’s “Vile Angel” has the line, “If you do anything too much, it swallows you whole.” How does that speak to being in a band?
This is one of my favorite songs, because John’s an awesome vocalist and a killer lyricist.
This song is about addiction, but it’s not about addiction in the way that you might think. It’s about the addiction to anything. The addiction of loving this band so much can be too much, and it can fuck up your life. You will learn that. If you love anything too much, it will fuck shit up. Too much of a good thing is not a good thing. It’s like an ancient Chinese proverb. This is the personification of that.
You fucking love Jack Daniels? Well, guess what? The right amount to drink of it is like that much [Schleibaum squeezes his fingers together tightly]. That can be true about anything: work, art. You have to find balance and humility.
When you get wrapped up in shit to where you can’t see yourself, or you can’t see other people, it’s a tough and terrible thing. You can read into the “Vile Angel” however you want. I think everybody’s vile angel is in their own story. But everybody has a battle. Even through people’s privilege, people suffer. The song is written to be universal, because his struggle isn’t exactly the same as mine. But I can relate to the struggle.
Last year you did the 30th anniversary tour. How did reflecting on the band that way guide you towards the songs on this record?
It guided me with fucking rage, because I hate celebrating old shit, man. [Laughs] But I also love and cherish every one of these records so much, and the moment in time that they’re made in. We don’t mind celebrating it.
So, it drove us to write more music because we don’t want to sit around and just talk about some shit we did like 20 years ago. As an artist, that is the most fucked-up shit. For us, it’s literally about the last thing you wrote. You gotta get out there and create.
“Suffer Divine” is a song that targets “people that peddle hatred and division,” per John, but there is a sense of community and striving for connection on a song like “Tribalists”: “No one wants to be alone.”
That song, in particular, is a tough one. We wanted to write something about the tribalism of humanity, and just that.
I mean, we’ve been all over the world. We love it. We love meeting people in different places and from different cultures. The other guys in the band have done an awesome job of learning other languages — I can’t even speak English. I’ll talk in so much slang. But the other guys have done well with learning other languages and being able to communicate and connect and experience other cultures. That’s one of the most special things about getting to do this. But the more you do it, the more you realize that no matter where you go, people still see you as being from a certain tribe.
People know immediately that we’re American. We’re loud like Australians, but it doesn’t quite make sense. And we’re definitely not Canadians because we’re fucking crazy looking.
If you ever meet me on the street and you ask me where I’m from, I’m gonna lie to you [and] tell you that I’m from California. People love California. I mean, maybe not in the South nowadays — people got a fucking opinion every once in a while about, like, “Don’t California my land,” or whatever — but usually California is universally loved. Hollywood. Beaches.
The place that gets the bad rap lately is Washington D.C., so me having to explain myself being from there opens up a whole can of worms, you know what I mean?
How does Darkest Hour’s music try to keep people together — to unite, to move past just the tribalist packs?
First of all, the one thing I’ve always loved — the thing that drew me to hardcore punk — was that it wasn’t sports.
I grew up loving ice hockey. The first time I ever really heard heavy metal was at a skating rink, because my parents would have never let me listen to it [at home]. I loved the competitive nature of sports, I loved the camaraderie of being on a team, and I still love ice hockey — shout out to the Washington Capitals — but when I discovered electric guitar and music, I realized that the coolest thing about going to a hardcore show was that I could like Earth Crisis as much as I did Snapcase, Damnation A.D. or Battery. Yeah, you could argue about who had a cooler singer or who had a cooler guitar player, but you couldn’t really argue about who was better? There’s a way to all be together and champion each other in a way that was unique. I hadn’t seen anything like that in my life until I went to my first hardcore show.
I think Darkest Hour, at its core, carries on that basic tradition. You will see us walking around at the show, and we will talk to you. If we see you on the street, we will talk to you. If we see you at your day job, we will talk to you. We’ve had people stay here and sleep on our floors, just like we’ve slept on other people’s floors. So, we understand that common bond between people that love your band and people that are the band.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.