Greg Puciato Details ‘Unhealthy’ Anxiety Over End of Dillinger Escape Plan

The Dillinger Escape Plan finale in 2017 was a celebration of the band's career for many fans, but it also was an agonizing period for vocalist Greg Puciato. In a new chat with Metal Hammer, the singer details the anxiety and depression he went through as their touring wound down and the period shortly after, plus how he eventually worked through it.

Though Puciato had been on record about wanting Dillinger Escape Plan to end during the tour, that doesn't mean the decision came without some strife for the singer. In the Metal Hammer story it's revealed that Puciato was taking Xanax to deal with his anxiety on the tour and at one point suffered a panic attack so significant he felt he was having a heart attack.

The singer says, “Having the thing that was a major part of my identity ending during that same time obviously didn’t help. The stress of it ending and the stress of having to drag the dying corpse of it across the world for a couple of years was not healthy. But then at some point, around early 2018, it just started to fade away. It just started to dissipate, and I just thought, ‘I’m through it.’ I got to the other side of it. And now I feel great. It’s fucking weird.”

Though things are better for him now, Puciato revealed that depression really took hold after the final dates. He recalled, “When it comes to anxiety and depression, I think that’s all stuff that you haven’t allowed yourself to process. I held off a lot of things for a long time that started to become unavoidable, and when they all started to hit me I wasn’t prepared for it."

He added, "The only thing I could be grateful for was I had creative outlets to be able to get through it. But I was drinking really heavily, doing tons of drugs, cocaine, I was partying a lot. I was numbing myself and avoiding having to deal with all this shit, and it fucked me up for a few years. I was like a different person; for three or four years I didn’t even recognize myself, I thought I was gone. I was just this wreck of a person."

But one of the ways he eventually got through it was returning to music. "I had a shit-ton of output during that time, I had a lot of shows, a lot of therapy, you just get through it somehow,” he said.

Not long after the end of Dillinger Escape Plan, he recorded a second Black Queen album. He's also continued to work with Killer Be Killed and released his solo record Child Soldier earlier this year.

Speaking about his current state, the singer says, “I turned 40 this year, and this whole year for me is about integration and owning every part of me. And I feel like this record is a symbol of that. It’s mirroring something that’s going on in my personal life where I do feel like completely fine and at ease with who I am. Here it is, here I am, deal with it, don’t deal with it, I don’t care. It took a long time to get to that point.”

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