The Robb Pierce interview

For Harvey Robb Pierce, the hardest part wasn’t learning to play guitar. It was learning to stop talking about music and start building the band he always wanted to hear.

Every musician has that moment.

The moment when they realize the music they’re making isn’t quite the music they’re hearing in their head.

For Harvey Robb Pierce, that feeling lasted years.

Long before Decapitation of a New Day existed, Pierce was already playing in bands. Starting in the 1990s with Six Bullet, he spent years writing songs, performing shows, and learning the mechanics of heavy music. The band lasted until 2012, but even during those years something felt unfinished.

“I kept feeling like I wanted to make the music that I make now,” Pierce explains.

At the time, he was writing melodic metal inspired by the bands he grew up with. But new ideas kept creeping in. Darker ideas. More dramatic ideas. He became fascinated with songwriting structure, especially key changes and the emotional shifts they created.

An Alice Cooper concert helped push those ideas even further.

“I heard him doing key changes and I was like, that’s exactly what I want to do.”

The more Pierce listened, the more he realized he wanted to move beyond the formulas he’d been following. Black metal, death metal, traditional heavy metal, classic rock—it all started blending together into something uniquely his own.

The problem wasn’t the music.

The problem was getting there.

Like many musicians, Pierce spent years surrounded by conversations about what could happen someday. Rehearsals turned into parties. Practice sessions turned into stories about old shows and future plans.

Everybody talked.

Nobody moved forward.

Eventually he got tired of hearing the same conversation.

“I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to do it.”

In 2012, Pierce quit drinking.

Not because of religion.

Not because somebody forced him to.

Not because of a dramatic intervention.

He simply decided he wanted music more than alcohol.

More than a decade later, he still hasn’t touched a drink.

That decision changed everything.

With a clear focus, Pierce began building Decapitation of a New Day, a band named after a lyric he had written years earlier. The phrase came from the loss of friends whose deaths shattered plans, ideas, and dreams that never had a chance to become reality.

Instead of letting those experiences define him, he turned them into music.

Along the way, he found the right collaborators, including vocalist Brent Lucero Julian, whose ability to move between screams, melodies, and aggressive vocal styles helped give the band its distinct identity. Together, they built a sound that feels equally influenced by death metal, black metal, traditional heavy metal, and modern extreme music.

What separates Decapitation of a New Day from many contemporary bands isn’t technical ability.

It’s songwriting.

The riffs aren’t there simply to be heavy.

The songs are built to move.

To evolve.

To tell stories.

That approach became especially important during the creation of The Raven, a collection of songs written in response to the death of a close friend during the COVID years. Unable to tour and isolated from one another during lockdowns, Pierce poured those emotions into new material.

The result became some of the most personal music the band has recorded.

Instead of releasing the songs as a traditional album, the group adopted a modern strategy suggested by their producer—releasing singles one at a time. While the songs belong together as a larger work, the staggered release schedule allowed the music to continue reaching listeners over a longer period.

The same approach would later continue with The Three Horsemen material.

For Pierce, however, the focus has never been trends or algorithms.

It’s always been the songs.

It’s always been the next riff.

The next idea.

The next opportunity to create something better than what came before.

After more than three decades of making music, he still talks about songwriting with the same excitement as a teenager discovering heavy metal for the first time.

That’s probably why Decapitation of a New Day sounds the way it does.

Some musicians chase popularity.

Some chase trends.

Harvey Rob Pierce spent years chasing a sound.

And after all this time, he’s still chasing it.