The Devil Wears Prada Hope Kids Feel the Passion of New Album

The Ohio-based Christian metalcore band The Devil Wears Prada wants fans to feel the passion on its new album "With Roots Above and Branches Below," which hits stores today.

"We put more time into the singing melodies as well as all the screaming patterns to get the best takes possible, the meaner takes and emotional takes," said vocalist Mike Hranica during an interview with Noisecreep during a band rehearsal.

"I think for me, being the vocalist, I hope kids will feel that when they hear the new record. They will know that is it a little bit more passionate, which is something that I've been going for."

The passion has always been there, he said. But now that Hranica has become more comfortable with recording, it's easier for it to flow.

"It's not so much that this record has more passion than the rest," Hranica explained. "It has the same; maybe more. I was more comfortable recording it so I'm hoping that more passion can be heard in the record for someone who is just a casual listener."

Hranica said the band played three songs from it on its recent tour. The Devil Wears Prada-which also includes guitarist/"clean" vocalist Jeremy DePoyster, keyboardist James Baney, bassist Andy Trick, drummer Daniel Williams and guitarist Chris Rubey-will showcase more tunes when it heads out on the Warped Tour this summer.

"We're all excited to show off the new material," Hranica said. "It's kind of weird because we want to show all of it. But we don't want play more than three songs, being that people won't know any of them. I think we're going to put one of them up on MySpace soon. We want to show it all off, but I guess we'll have to wait until Warped Tour to play more songs."

Rubey, he said, wrote most of the album by himself on his computer. Then the rest of the band members "topped it off" and put their own layers over top of it.

"That's what always happens on our CDs," Hranica said. "On this record, it happened more than normal because we were out on tour. It was pretty much the same approach. We recorded with the same guy (producer Joey Sturgis). He progressed us a lot.

"Production on this record is miles above our first record, and still way above our second record, too. I think that offers a little bit of progression to our sound. It's the same band, but we wanted to add more and learn to do this, learn to do that. He just packed it in and hopefully it comes out as a CD that's the same band and the same sound, but just a progression and not something that's too similar to our old stuff."