Interviews

Stephen Rutishauser – Chelsea Grin ‘A Commitment to Be Better’

Apr 4, 2025

8 min read

Salt Lake City deathcore legends in Chelsea Grin are selling tickets fast to their upcoming co-headline tour with metalcore magicians in Currents. In light of this phenomenal tour package, we had a chat with guitarist Stephen Rutishauser for a yarn about Chelsea Grin’s return to Australia, how they challenge themselves to grow as musicians, and the evolution of deathcore.

Few bands have left their mark on deathcore quite like Chelsea Grin, with a brutal double album behind them and a huge Australian co-headline tour ahead, there's plenty to talk about. Joining us today with Wall of Sound, we have guitarist Stephen Rutishauser to dive into the tour, new music and ever evolving world of heavy music. Stephen, thank you for joining us mate.

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for chatting.

Always welcome. I'm so stoked that you guys are gonna be back in Australia as co-headliners. You were here in 2023 with Thy Art Is Murder, which was an amazing set. That gig was my first experience seeing you guys, and it was insane, like unforgettable stuff. Beyond the longer set as a co-headliner are there any kind of deep cuts or surprises we're going to see on this run? I know it'll be our first time seeing Josh Miller on drums in Australia, which is going to be awesome. I'm keen to hear what we can expect.

We come out there so sparsely every few years, maybe. So there's always some sort of level up or change that's happening. As you mentioned now we have Josh and he's our not-so-secret, secret weapon. We've been lucky to play with all amazing drummers, but having Josh, man, I can't tell you, you know, just the polish and shine it gives to the set for us, at least that we experience. As far as what we're going to be playing, we have these new albums that we haven't had a chance - well, you know, they're new-ish, I'll say, but the newest albums, we haven't had a chance to play a lot of that In Australia yet. We have a headlining set so we've got to jam as many songs in there as we can. I think our approach has always been we know there's songs from way back in the day, the first albums even that people will want to hear, and there's songs all throughout that people want to hear. And maybe there's certain albums that aren't as in vogue or enticing, but we have a pretty good finger on the pulse of what people are going to want to hear from us.

We're bringing a pretty cool setlist I think, and it's very representative of the band as a whole. You'll hear all the sounds that that we've kind of covered as a band, which throughout the years has been a lot and we want to bring something for everybody, but also make sure that, there's no point in the set where nobody’s checked out, bored, whatever it may be.

Always trying to bring it, keep the energy alive. It's easy with Australia. I mean, not to say we could just do whatever we want and it go over well, but when we really try and bring something good, we feel that the effort is always made so worth it for us by Australian crowds, by the experience we have over there. So we want to go as hard as we can, because we know we'll get it back. And that's why we appreciate and love being out there so dang much.

Yeah it's crazy because, obviously you guys have such a full on schedule with touring and music and stuff. It's really awesome for us to get you guys out here when we can. It'll be awesome to see these new songs and some deep cuts will be a welcome addition. Speaking of scheduling, with Tom and Josh, they're quite obviously heavily involved in Darko. Has that impacted your scheduling and creative process per chance? Do you find that their work in Darko brings fresh ideas to Chelsea Grin, or do you keep the two worlds fairly separate?

I mean, it doesn't affect our scheduling. We tour when we tour, and we do whatever else our life includes in the time in between. Chelsea Grin’s at a point now where we don't feel the need to tour constantly. I think when you're a fresher band, and your livelihood really is hinged on touring, you try to squeeze in as much as you can. We're lucky now that we get to take tours as we please and just sort of go when we feel the time is right, rather than it being a need, you know? I mean, we need to tour, but we don't need to. We don't need to be out eight months out of the year. So there's so much time at home to still do what all we want to do.

Tom and Josh have their time to do Darko, we all have our time to do [Chelsea] Grin. We all have our time to live our own personal lives as well. I do think that having Josh now with us - it's a big reason why we wanted him to join us - is because he's shown that he's so creative and so talented and has so many ideas. We've been around for a long, long time. I mean, even me, I'm not original, but I've been with the band for 11 years now, and eventually I'm like, 'Okay well I've expressed myself, I've got a sound that I've been able to cultivate, but we want it to be more, and we want to grow this.' Josh is such a helpful member of the team when it comes to what's next.

I think for us it's really about right now; not changing our sound, but incorporating more, trying new things, taking more risk. I think that's something every band wants to do, and every band talks about doing, but we're very, very serious about it right now. We don't want to just continue with the status quo. Our band has always been lucky to grow and to improve in our minds, but we're at the point in our career now where we want to make some waves, and we want to do it while keeping our core fanbase happy. You know, we always want them to be stoked.

We always want to be Chelsea Grin, but we want to grow too for our own sakes.

We just want to try new things. And I think that we do want to keep the Darko sound and the Chelsea Grin sound as two separate things, right? It's only natural though, that Josh's sound - we want his sound as part of as part of our sound as well, but we're challenging ourselves to think outside the box of what he or I, or any of the guys might like reflexively want to write, and so, you know, we want to keep it separate, but at the same time, we're trying to make something that's a little bit separate from all of it. It's still our band, it's still us, it still sounds like us, but we're actually taking big swings and really trying to redefine what deathcore or even just what Chelsea Grin can be. It is a challenging thing. We've gotten together to write a lot, we always make cool songs, but sometimes we just say, 'Hey, we know we're swinging for the fences, and while this may be a great Chelsea Grin song, it's not quite hitting that mark of what we truly feel is as a risk, is a change, is refreshing.'

So we're being very methodical and very critical of this whole process, and there's so many things to factor in. Is this just another safe Chelsea Grin song? Does this sound too much like Darko, or does it sound like we're trying to force it? And it's a process, but luckily we're all motivated. Everybody has their talents and things they bring to the table, and we're not afraid to say, “Hey if it's not 100% right then it's not worth putting out,” because we deserve to do what we like. We deserve to achieve our vision and our fanbase, future, past, current deserves our best effort. We're in this phase right now of refining what Chelsea Grin can be, and we won't settle for anything less than the vision realized.

That’s awesome. I love that you guys are still working hard on maintaining and keeping that core identity. You guys have been a band for so long now, you're a legacy act, you've got so many years of experience and so many records behind you that it's really cool that you're differentiating and still maintaining that identity whilst trying to push the boundaries, which is always awesome to hear in a technical aspect and just in a pure enjoyment aspect. With deathcore it's very much exploded over the past few years. There's a lot of newer acts making waves, and a lot of long time bands evolving today. Have you noticed a shift in the crowds at shows or in how people are engaging with deathcore as one of the heavier sub-genres over the past few years?

Absolutely. We're lucky to see the crowds growing. There's more people coming, which is an awesome thing, but (also) the diversity of the crowds we see. Not to downplay the average metal fan, our shows were a lot of guys, they're having a great time and that's all fantastic.

But now we see more women coming to the shows. We see younger people coming to shows, older people coming to the shows, people we may never have seen before, people wearing shirts of bands that have not a single breakdown in any album ever. This is appealing to a wider fan base, and that's just good for everyone, right?

You walk on stage and you see the growth that's happening, not necessarily just in the size of the venue or the number of people in that venue, but in the new people that are coming to the shows. The growth is visible and it's felt and it's just so easy to observe. You go to a show, and even as a concert goer, my peers at the show with me, it's not the crowd I've been seeing at these shows since I was a kid. It's that crowd plus more.

Yeah, that's awesome. We always love to see more people getting involved, it supports the artists, and it just gets the sound out there which is just great for everyone. That's really, really good to see, and I’m glad that you guys get to ride the waves with that a little bit too. Talking on your last release, we had that really ambitious double release Suffer in Hell // Suffer in Heaven. Great, great releases. It's quite a sizeable project. Do you think that might have influenced any new material? Maybe anything in the works possibly?

Yeah, like I said, ever since Josh joined the band, ever since those albums came out, we've been writing. And it never stops. I’m sitting at my computer right now and I'm looking and there's like 20 ideas in a folder of new Grin.

There's the process of whittling it down, you're not going to see 20 of these ideas get worked on. It's constant, and with Josh in, like I said, it's writing now more than ever, trying to crack a code which is really exciting for us. It's a challenge. It gets sort of old, tiring and uninspired to just achieve what you've already achieved. For us, the people that we are, there's nothing wrong with finding your sound and sticking with it. But to us that sound is never – for better or for worse – has never been locked in place. Not because we're unhappy with what we've made, but because we're all getting older. We're all changing as people. Our vision for this band has changed for the better, so the writing is constant. The last two albums definitely were kind of us doing whatever we wanted to do at the time.

There's so many different sounds, there's so many songs. That's why there's two albums. We're just going to write what comes from the heart. We're not so much thinking about what's going to make us bigger. We're not so much thinking about how exactly we can make everyone happy, where we kind of took the leap of faith of being like, 'well, if we write what really makes us happy, then the good will just be magnetized to it.' People will sense that we wrote what felt good.

And of course, I listened to those albums and I could critique them for days, right? It was never perfect, but it did sort of give us the chance to just exercise some of our creative muscles that hadn't been stretched yet and it's just always a process of refinement. Every album we put out informs what the next set of material will be. Every member, every person involved, every life change. You never know what's gonna impact the sound. Having Josh in that's a major deal, being at this stage in our career. There's a sense of fragility being a band of our age, the wrong move can be fatal. The right move could change everything. A certain move could change nothing. And we continue as we're going, which we're not complaining about either, but there's pressure. I could go on forever about all the factors that are guiding our hand and what we write right now.

The way we're approaching it is, we know whatever comes out next, whenever it comes out – which will be sooner than later – for sure we know it'll be good, we know it'll be right, and we know that we'll feel fulfilled from it, and we just hope everyone else feels the same.

Well the good thing is when as a listener, you can feel the genuine effort a band puts into their music (and )into their shows. You enjoy the music and those shows even more I find, at least for me personally, and probably a lot of other punters out there. So the fact that you're taking such a genuine approach to it is, the best thing that I love to hear. You guys always balanced, really eerie atmospheres and technical elements together. As a guitarist, what's been the biggest challenge in keeping fresh while staying true to your roots?

I think that it's really hard to keep up with guitarists nowadays. There's so many insane players out there, peers of mine, people I just watch on Instagram, people that film videos in their bedroom. The par for the course for being a modern metal guitarist is so freaking high right now. There's definitely pressure to keep up, and it's hard to practice my instrument every day. I'm writing music, I'm living my life, I'm also handling so much business stuff. As you get older, life gets more complicated, right?

As a guitarist I do feel that pressure. I do feel bummed at times that I can't pick it up more. I feel bummed when I go a week without playing my guitar. I pick it up, and all of a sudden I'm like, 'shit I shouldn't be playing an instrument anymore, I think it's time to call it.'

But I always want to be the guitarist I’m meant to be when I was picking up the instrument. I always want to have chops. I always want to play riffs. I always want to push the boundaries and have my own sound. It's interesting with Grin, because in the last few releases, we've really started to simplify things here and there. You know, we've got like ‘Hostage’, we've got songs like ‘Soul Slave’, ‘Suffer In Hell’, Suffer In Heaven’, ‘The Isnis’. Those are all pretty easy to play songs, and they do really well for us. While I want to be the shredder, the riffer, I want to continue to become the best guitarist I can be.

I'm also seeing that sometimes when I just get groovy with it, which comes really naturally to me, that goes over really well too. I'm constantly torn between writing a song that's meat and potatoes basic, but it's got a good groove you can ‘dance to’, and also, at the same time noodling around and pushing my limits as a player. I don't know if that answers the question, but there's always this, good pressure. Only good can come from it. I'm just always trying to get better, but also trying to listen to fans, and play what works, and find a way to mix it all together.

Well, isn't it this case where they say that diamonds are forged under pressure. That's where your best work seems to come out of a challenge, but pushing yourself allows you to put out work you're happy with.

Yeah, I think it helps you. It makes it hard, but you don't take no for an answer. You don't take the wrong song for a yes. You’re just constantly refining and holding yourself to a commitment to be better. And it's hard, but it always pays off.

Cool, awesome. Well, I think we'll have to wrap that up there man, thank you for the chat. It's been an absolute pleasure and thank you for stopping by Wall of Sound.

Hey, thanks for having me. We love Wall of Sound. We've been talking with you guys for a long time now, so I appreciate the chat.

Anytime man, you’re always welcome.

Interview by Tyler Lubke @huntsman421

Don’t miss your chance to see Chelsea Grin on their Australian co-headline tour with Currents. Tickets and shows are selling out fast. Get yours here.