MIKE MUIR: “If people don’t struggle, they don’t accomplish anything”

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES' MIKE MUIR: “If people don't struggle, they don't accomplish anything”

10-09-2025

In a new interview with Australia’s Sense Music Media, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES frontman Mike Muir spoke about the advice he would give to young people who are struggling with decision-making and hope amid societal pressures, uncertainty and perfectionism affecting their life choices. He said in part: “I remember years ago I was with my son and some of his friends, and they were talking about all how things were terrible and this and that with the police. And I said, ‘Oh, yeah? How many times have you had your nose broken by the police?’ Never. ‘How many times have you been handcuffed and beat in an alley by the police?’ Never. ‘How many times you had your ribs broken by the police?’ Never. You know what I mean? And, yeah, it happened to me all kinds of times.

“There’s a certain thing, and it’s not a generational thing,” he continued. “The difference is, I think that with some of my kids’ teachers, they basically are teaching that you have no control over the world. There’s this contradiction of you can be anything without having to put any work in. And the world’s not fair. My dad said the world’s not fair. It’s like the lyrics on the latest SUICIDAL TENDENCIES single ‘Adrenaline Addict’ — it’s, like, ‘One life to live. And this is what you’re doing? Life isn’t fair. No one said it would be.’ No one owes you anything. No one owes you anything.

“People will say, ‘Oh, you don’t know people’s struggles.’ I go, ‘I don’t know their struggles, but I know if they don’t struggle, they don’t accomplish anything.’ Kind of like there’s a class and the little kids and they had the chickens and they’re hatching the chickens. And one of the little birds, it still hadn’t broken through. And they could just see it and it looked so weak and this and that, and so they all wanted to break the shell. Guess which one died — the one they broke the shell for, because he needs that struggle to be able to have the strength. You know what I mean? That’s life. And I think that sometimes… I’m not like saying that you go out in the snow naked and this and that. Life is gonna be — there’s gonna be difficult things. You need to be prepared for whatever it is, as best as you can. Don’t put the blinders on and say, ‘But I didn’t know. Well, I didn’t know.’ I wanna know.

“There’s a difference between being angry and a difference between being happy. My dad always said, and a valid point, he goes, ‘On a journey when you’re doing something you really say you want to do, but don’t believe you can do, every step — using symbolism — every step you take is painful, but when you get to the point where you are, then you’re, like, ‘This is amazing.’ And so there’s a lot of work to get to that point that something’s amazing. And I think that’s one of the things with people. They’re not told, ‘Dude, it’s okay to feel like fucking shit sometimes.’ It’s not okay to accept feeling like shit all the time and thinking that’s what your destiny is. It’s okay for things not to go the way you want them to.

“I took a psychology class, and they had this book — I think it was called ‘The First 100’ or something like that — and it was about lottery winners, the first hundred lottery winners. And seven of ’em were murdered, some of them were in jail, the vast majority had absolute terrible things happen to ’em, whether it was the family doesn’t associate with them, blah, blah, all kinds of stuff. There’s very few that said, ‘I’m glad it turned out the way it did.’

“There’s that saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ And anything that comes easy, you don’t appreciate,” Mike added. “So I look at things and people say, ‘This is fucked up.’ I go, ‘Yeah, it is. So what have you done about it?’ ‘I can’t do anything.’ And I go, ‘That’s why it’s fucked up.'”

In a recent interview with the Hear 2 Zen podcast, vocalist Mike Muir of crossover thrash veterans SUICIDAL TENDENCIES spoke about the band’s recently released single “Adrenaline Addict”, which came out in April. SUICIDAL TENDENCIES‘ first new song in seven years features Muir alongside longtime guitarist Dean Pleasants, THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN guitarist Ben Weinman, bassist Tye Trujillo (son of METALLICA‘s Robert Trujillo) and former SLIPKNOT drummer Jay Weinberg. The track also includes guest vocals from singer Nisha Star.

Asked if the arrival of “Adrenaline Addict” means that “this is the beginning of a run of new singles” from SUICIDAL TENDENCIES, Muir said: “It’s kind of long and convoluted, like everything with SUICIDAL is. This song originally is doing this thing with Josh Paul, who was our old bass player, and with Nisha. And so lyrically it’s actually very SUICIDAL, and we played it for some people they thought it was SUICIDAL. And then I did it and tried to sing like on Nisha‘s part and it just did not sound right and it did not have the same lyrical kind of meaning and stuff too. And so we were able to put that out for the (SUICIDAL TENDENCIES) tour, and it’s gonna be on a CYCO MIKO record,” he added, referencing the moniker under which he releases solo albums.

Elaborating on what fans can expect to hear on the upcoming CYCO MIKO LP, Mike said: “The CYCO MIKO record’s gonna have some new SUICIDAL, new INFECTIOUS GROOVES, different projects and different things that I’ve done, all these different songs in different ways for a song, like I’m singing in Spanish, and also with Robert Trujillo of METALLICA helping me sing on that and putting me to shame. But all kinds of different things. And it’s kind of a rollercoaster that probably should have been condemned, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun to ride, if you’re not scared of falling off. And so it’s fun. So that’ll be out the beginning of next year. And then SUICIDAL, the actual SUICIDAL record will be out after that. And there’ll be a couple of SUICIDAL tracks on the CYCO MIKO.”

Under the CYCO MIKO moniker, Muir has released three albums so far, 1995’s “Lost My Brain! (Once Again)”, 2011’s “The Mad Mad Muir Musical Tour (Part One)” and 1999’s “Schizophrenic Born Again Problem Child”, which was a split record that also included tracks from SUICIDAL TENDENCIES, NO MERCY and INFECTIOUS GROOVES.

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES supported METALLICA on the 2025 North American leg of the latter band’s “M72” world tour.

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES‘ latest album, “Still Cyco Punk After All These Years”, was released in 2018 via Suicidal Records. A reworking of Muir‘s 1996 solo outing “Lost My Brain! (Once Again)”, “Still Cyco Punk” featured founding SLAYER drummer Dave Lombardo.

In April of this year SUICIDAL TENDENCIES have released a new single, “Adrenaline Addict”. The single comes with an official visualizer.

Watch “Adrenaline Addict”below.

Last year SUICIDAL TENDENCIES released a new single, “Nós Somos Família”, a reworked version of their late 1990s song “We Are Family”. The Portuguese-language rendition of the track brings together Brazilian artists Badauí (CPM22), B Negão (PLANET HEMP), João Gordo (RATOS DE PORÃO), Rodrigo Lima (DEAD FISH), Supla, Fernanda Lira (CRYPTA, ex-NERVOSA), Marcão Britto and Thiago Castanho (Charlie Brown Jr), in addition to world skateboarding champions Sandro Dias and Pedro Barros.

“Nós Somos Família” is the first SUICIDAL TENDENCIES studio recording to feature new drummer Jay Weinberg, a former member of SLIPKNOT who joined the Mike Muir-fronted outfit earlier this year. The song was recorded at Estúdio Central (formerly RedBull Station) in São Paulo, Brazil, and was executive produced by SUICIDAL TENDENCIES‘ longtime collaborator Alex Palaia. British producer Paul Northfield and Brazilian sound engineer Rico Manzano also participated in the project.

Watch “Nós Somos Família” below.

Regarding how “Nós Somos Família” came about, Muir told Brazilian music journalist Igor Miranda: “We’d always talked about like doing a song with some other people. And my friends got on the phone. We got Jay in the studio, recorded a track. I said, ‘Let me talk to a few people.’ They said, ‘Who would you want me to talk to?’ I mentioned a few people and got everybody in the studio recording on it. And it was just a great to see everybody on FaceTime or whatever doing it, how excited everybody was, how gracious they were with their time and everything. Amazing.”

He continued: “I think when it comes to music, a lot of times people talk about travel and this and that and I always say, you see the side from a hotel room or driving down the road, but when people welcome you and you can go to places and feel at home and they welcome you in their homes and you meet their families and all that, that’s an amazing feeling. And then on the music side, for some people to be on a song that you did, that’s just something that I never would have dreamed of when it first started.”

Elaborating on the challenges of bringing together so many different artists on one song, Muir said: “Well, a lot of it came about when I was down there talking to a lot of people, and people were, like, ‘Oh, we should do a song,’ or and we just kind of got talking about music and different things like that. And so, usually years ago or something, it would be very difficult. Everybody’s got the labels they’ve gotta get signed off on and all those things. And now the beauty is if somebody wants to do something, they can do it pretty much. And fortunately, there’s a lot of people that wanted to do it. And then the problem is people’s schedules and getting a bunch of people and trying to find everybody’s schedule that works out to get them in the studio at the same time. A lot of people had to do a lot of — we call it ‘pretzel’, twisting and changing schedules and this and that, which makes it even more appreciative that it happened because it isn’t easy. And the more people you have, the harder it is and stuff. So it’s just something that, yeah, like I said, I never would expect something like that to happen. And everybody just really went out of their way to make it as smooth as possible. And I think also, the other thing is, for me I don’t understand Portuguese or whatever, but when I listen to it, you could you tell each person’s kind of individuality or whatever and their distinctiveness, but it all works together. And I know sometimes when I’ve heard projects or whatever with different people, it doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t fit. And for me, I hear that and I go, this sounds amazing to me. It sounds really, really exciting and energetic. I love it.”

During a press conference at last month’s Hellfest in Clisson, France, Muir was asked if there are any plans for him and his SUICIDAL TENDENCIES bandmates to work on new music. He said: “When we did the last record of all-new material, it was ‘World Gone Mad’ in 2016, I kind of said, it sounds bad, but I don’t enjoy making records, because it’s like full-on mental fuck to me and, then it’s the time and the family and everything. It’s difficult. But now having (guitarist) Ben (Weinman, guitar) in the band, (drummer) Jay in the band…. One of the first things Jay did after we did a couple shows, he’s just, like, going, ‘Dude, I wanna fucking make a record.’ And the way he and Ben, they said it, they go, like… Ben was, like, ‘When I was 12 years old and I heard SUICIDAL, it spoke to me. And other music, I heard a lot of music.’ He goes, ‘I wanna do a record like that.’ And that’s exactly what Jay said. Obviously, having (bassist) Tye (Trujillo), Robert‘s (Trujillo) a son in there, Robert‘s, like, ‘Dude, you guys need to make a record. do that thing.’ And so I think that we’re definitely leaning towards doing it.”

He continued: “We realized that a lot of people, with music, you look around and you see what’s popular, what’s trendy, and we go back to what was popular and trendy when we did our first record, and we didn’t do any of that and all the reviews were terrible. And so we’ll do a record that people probably will not like, and I will be very happy and stuff. But I think that years from now that people will sit there, and there’ll be a lot of people that are not so much into trends or genres that’ll go, like, ‘That’s a fucking really bad-ass record.’ And so that’s what I want to do. As I say, I like to like people, but I don’t care if people like me. (Laughs) It makes my life easier.”

Last year, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES celebrated the 40th anniversary of their debut album on a number of shows in the fall, including in New York City; Silver Spring, Maryland; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Berkeley, California. SUICIDAL TENDENCIES also celebrated the 40th anniversary of the LP on a tour of Australia.

The 2024 lineup of SUICIDAL TENDENCIES includes founding member Muir alongside guitarists Ben Weinman (THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN) and Dean Pleasants, bassist Tye Trujillo (son of Robert Trujillo), as well as the band’s latest addition, drummer Jay Weinberg.

Social media