The Devil Wears Prada are a band whose reputation precedes them. With a hard-hitting and intense live reputation, one of the strongest discographies in metalcore and an ever-growing desire to explore and evolve what they’re sonically capable of, the band have been one of the most important and influential components of their genre for well over a decade. As the band turn the page into their next chapter we sat down with founding member, guitarist and vocalist Jeremy DePoyster to talk about their new ‘ZII’ EP, their creative mindset and how they’re shaping both their future and their legacy.

A few months ago when the band first announced ‘ZII’ – the follow up to their widely adored ‘Zombie’ EP – they took their fanbase completely by surprise, seeing excitement and anticipation surge at an incredible pace. To an extent, the band expected this, but were still blown away by such a response. “We knew that the idea itself was kind of a goldmine,” explained DePoyster. “Everyone’s favourite thing is the ‘Zombie’ EP, and any time we’ve ever done a ‘Zombie’ tour or played those songs during a show, it’s always a highlight moment. I knew the songs and the mix were awesome, but just putting them out and seeing people hyped up was super sick. That magic feeling never goes away. I don’t know if it’s a culmination of the past year or the past decade for the band, but it really feels like a brand new moment.”

The original ‘Zombie’ was also a big groundbreaking moment for the band, remaining a fan favourite ever since, and the band still look back at it fondly. “I will never bash that EP,” DePoyster exclaimed. “I think it’s really awesome, which is the way I feel about this one too. It’s exactly the aggressive music that we would want to hear right now, which I think is what the original was too.

“It’s actually very similar, for me, that the material guitar-wise on the first EP was so far above what I could do at the time,” he detailed. “I had to work extremely hard to learn how to play stuff of that calibre. I’ve never been the strongest guitar player in the band, and I’m still not, so that’s like a fun internal challenge of someone handing you a track and saying, ‘You can’t play this – learn how to play it.’ Some of the stuff Kyle was sending me, I was like ‘dude, I will NEVER do that, EVER,’ and so you just work for weeks and weeks and you get it down.”

Due to the timing of the release, many may think that the creation of the record was born from the desolate depths of the pandemic, but this couldn’t be further from the truth – there was always an intention to revisit the concept. “It was always something that was going to happen, but in this format it didn’t really make sense until right now when we could meet that bar of the caliber of songs that it would take.

“I can specifically remember this one moment,” he recalled, “we were playing in San Diego, we were on the bus and the whole team was there – the agents, the managers and probably the label – and we were talking about what’s next. We had two ideas; we were either going to do a new ‘Zombie’ EP or we were gonna go down a brand new rabbit hole. I think, at that moment, we weren’t willing to be relegated to a pure legacy.”

Despite their enthusiasm for wanting to try out something new, their team encouraged them to at least float the idea of revisiting the ‘Zombie’ concept, which the band embraced and followed their advice. “Jon [Gering, keyboardist] and Kyle [Sipress, guitarist] went and wrote some songs for what was going to be ‘ZII’ and they just kinda sucked,” he stated. “It just wasn’t there at the time, so instead we took a left turn and went and made ‘The Act’. We were super pumped about what came out of that, and I think that opened the pathway for them to start writing the ‘ZII’ stuff.”

That writing process birthed some of the band’s heaviest work in a decade, creating five menacing and punishing tracks that vividly continue the narrative that the original EP began. There’s an intense darkness that runs through the whole record, but DePoyster explained that element is always lurking in their music. “That’s a testament to Mike [Hranica, lead vocalist] and his style. His lyrics generally take a darker tone – even when they’re optimistic there’s always a bit of sadness in there – and I think that’s just a motif that’s worked really well for us. I assume that if we do something that it’s gonna be dark!”

Beyond the lyrical depth, the music is also incredibly theatrical, something else that’s grown and evolved from the original EP. “That’s down to two very specific individuals,” DePoyster detailed. “The first is Joey Sturgis who worked on the first ‘Zombie’ EP; he produced it and he actually did an overwhelming majority of the keyboards on that album, and all the samples – the shotgun blasts and the chainsaws and stuff – and he killed it. Fast forward to now and it’s Jon our keyboard player that’s producing it, and he’s the one that’s coming up with all those underlying keyboards and thematic moments. That was his choice, the way he writes songs and keyboard parts and layers; it’s just more cinematic.”

DePoyster attributes their growing strength and musical direction to the current line-up, feeling completely gelled and in sync with one another. “If you could go to the town that we all grew up in you’d realise there is no possible way that a cool band would ever come out of there,” he joked. “I think it’s hard to believe that lighting strikes twice in the same place, but right now, it definitely feels like it has. I’ll be very angry and disappointed if anyone leaves the line-up at this point, I wanna go another fifteen years without any changes!”

To both promote the release of the EP and enhance the visual element of the EP’s storytelling, the band hosted the ‘Undead Stream’ streaming event that saw them do a full play through of ‘ZII’ in a live setting, complete with studio quality audio and a huge, immersive lighting show. With gigging unable to go ahead due to the pandemic this was the obvious way to showcase the new music in all it’s aggressive glory, but it presented a few challenges; one of them being rehearsals.

“We all live in different areas really far away, probably 12 hours from each other,” DePoyster explained. “So what we normally do is our drummer will track the whole set that we’re about to play three or four months from then, and he’ll send it to all of us. Then we each record our pass-through and build a master set file, and we all rehearse to that. Once we got in the room, I don’t know how many days of rehearsal we did – it was a blur – but we did a lot. We played the songs what felt like a hundred times each just so that by the time it came through live it wasn’t screwed up. Jon is the ring leader, just whipping people when they get out of shape!”

This isn’t the first stream that they’ve done, but DePoyster stressfully recalled it was the hardest to put together. “We’ve done three of them now and they just about kill me every time! I have a super awesome team of people that I work with, the video team and the audio team and especially the lighting team for this one. It was way more ramped up than what did in the fall.

“In the fall it was more like, ‘Let’s showcase what it sounds like to be in the studio with us’,” he elaborated. “That felt like a cool place to showcase what it sounds like for us to play music together. For this, I was like, ‘If we’re gonna showcase these brand new songs that no one’s ever heard before, it has to feel like you’re at a show.’ We brought in the huge lighting, the guy who mixed the stream is the guy who mixed the album which really paid off, and all the cameras – it’s so far out of what we normally put together but it was worth it. Even if nobody had shown up I would’ve been happy, but it was a huge response which was sick.”

It certainly did feel like a live performance, bringing the electricity and adrenaline of a live performance of a gig directly into fans’ homes. As this was the first time they’d played the new material, though, not having the audience to bounce their energy off made the nuances of performing live trickier to navigate than they’d anticipated. “Mechanically, the first week or so that you play a new song, you’re figuring out physically where to go. ‘Do I wanna go over by this monitor and hang out over here, do I need to get up to my microphone, am I gonna hang out by the drummer?’ I know it sounds kinda lame to talk about how the sausage is made but it’s a stage; you have to move around a little bit, and it felt very vulnerable to try and get that down.”

That vulnerability will hopefully become a thing of the past sooner rather than later. As the world recovers from the global pandemic and live touring is able to take place once again, the band aim to approach their entire operation in a different way and keep their feet constantly on the gas.

“We’re never gonna come off the road,” he declares. “I think if we wanted a break, we got it – it’s time to get back to work! I don’t care if we ever make another dollar around the world, I just wanna be back on the road out there.”

The new material is going to be coming out with them too, and DePoyster assures the streaming event isn’t the only time they’ll be playing ‘ZII’ in full. “We have a tour in the states coming up and I don’t think we’ll play the whole thing front to back there, but I think worldwide, once things open up. Literally as soon as the gates open, we’re coming over and playing stuff so I think we’ll probably just, oh I don’t know, kick it off song one and then just play the whole EP and see how it goes! It’s kind of made to be played live, so that’d be kind of fun!”

It’s not just the touring intensity, though. They want to completely rethink the way they approach releasing music. “I think the biggest change is gonna be frequency,” he confidently states. “I think the way that we consume media, personally and the world at large, is totally different now. As an artist, you can capitalise on that.

“Rather than spending three years writing an album and dropping it on one day, because of the ease of releasing through things like Spotify and Apple Music and stuff like that, we can actually almost – as soon as we finish a song, we can get it mixed and mastered and put it up online and have people react to it,” he continues. “Obviously we’re still gonna make albums, that’s crazy to think you wouldn’t do that, but let’s let each of the songs exhibit where we’re feeling creatively in that moment. I think guys like Oli [Sykes] and Jordan [Fish] with Bring Me The Horizon have done a great job of that. You can almost watch their progression through what they’re doing musically with how frequently they release stuff, so I think that’s something that we’ll definitely do moving forward.”

With future releases in mind, the ‘Zombie’ EP isn’t the only concept that they’ve explored. 2015 saw them release the ‘Space’ EP, and fans will be pleased to know that there’s also scope to revisit that in the future too. “We have to do it, we’d be stupid not to,” DePoyster laughed. “I think it would be fun to revisit. I think it would be fun to go back with a more confident mindset and less experimental. Instead of saying CAN we do a ‘Space’ EP, how would we do it KNOWING we can do it?”

The Devil Wears Prada’s new EP ‘ZII’ is available everywhere now. Make sure you keep your eyes peeled for their live return to this side of the pond; if their performances are going to be anything like the Undead Stream, you’ll want to make sure you don’t miss out.

DAVE STEWART