Suicide Commando interview – Johan Van Roy opens the gates of his musical hell

Forty years is an absurd lifespan for a project that has never been built for comfort. Suicide Commando began in the Belgian underground of the 1980s, shaped by closed factories, unemployment, Cold War tension, terror and the hard electronic language of bands such as Klinik, Front 242 and The Neon Judgement. In 2026, Johan Van Roy is not polishing that history into a safe anniversary narrative. With “Collective Suicide Vol. 1+2”, he opens the archive, lets the early rough recordings stand next to reworked material and new tracks, and treats four decades of darkness as something still active rather than neatly resolved.

The new retrospective looks back without turning Suicide Commando into a museum piece. It includes demo material, rare versions, reworked classics and the new track “Control & Consent”, while the anniversary concerts, including the WGT 2026 show at Agra Halle and the announced Oberhausen date, place that history back where it has always had its most violent physical charge: in front of an audience.

In this interview for Side-Line Magazine, Johan Van Roy talks about anger, darkness, old tapes, physical formats, AI, injury, the voice as weapon, copycats, WGT, the thin line between good and evil, and the one thing that has remained unchanged since the beginning: passion.

Suicide Commando interview

Karo: Forty years is a strange number for a project built on anger, darkness, speed and confrontation. Many artists soften with time, while Suicide Commando still seems to carry a very hard emotional charge. When you look at the project from 1986 to 2026, do you feel you have changed the sound, or has the world changed enough to make the same darkness sound different?

Johan: I grew up in the eighties with lots of factories closing down, lots of unemployment, but also the rise of terror organisations, even in Belgium, the cold war tensions … so it was a really dark period in history which you also could hear in the music of that decade with bands like Klinik, Front 242, The Neon Judgement … all coming from Belgium.
It definitely also had a big impact on me as a person and on my music.
I guess you’ll never hear happy pop tunes coming from my hand. It’s still the same darkness just wrapped in a different packaging, but the core remains the same, pitch black !

Karo: “Collective Suicide Vol. 1+2” documents a huge part of your history, from early demo material to rare versions, reworked classics and the new track “Control & Consent”. How did it feel to open the archive again after the 30th anniversary collection? Was it more like revisiting old evidence, cleaning old wounds, or finally accepting the full weight of what you have created?

Johan: Opening the gates of my musical hell made me realise how much my sound changed throughout the years. The atmosphere remained the same, but musically my sound did change a lot.

Ofcourse I see my own creations differently, not like a normal listener at home. You also have to see them in their own time period. It’s obvious that a song like “suicide” from 1987 sounds poorly recorded and outdated, but nonetheless I think it was essential to put some of these early recordings on “collective suicide” as well. And even though it sounds poorly recorded it still has a lot of value for myself and I’m still proud of it today.

Karo: A retrospective can easily become a monument, but “Collective Suicide Vol. 2” does not feel frozen because it includes new and reworked material. Why was it important for you to place “Control & Consent” inside an anniversary release, instead of keeping the collection purely historical?

Johan: For me it was essential to have material on both compilations covering the complete 40 years, so it had to include also some new material, even though “control & consent” goes back to my earlier works from the nineties, it also has this old school F242 vibe from the early days.

Karo: Suicide Commando has always dealt with violence, death, control, religion, obsession and human cruelty, yet the songs became club anthems for many people. After four decades, how do you understand that contradiction between brutal subject matter and collective dancefloor release?

Johan: I always liked to walk the line between good and evil, and sometimes it’s a very thin line.

I think we all have a negative side, we all have a yin and a yang … while most people would prefer to write about the birds and the bees, I was always more fascinated by the dark side of life.

Karo: Some of the reworked tracks, like “Come Down With Me”, “Jesus Freak” and “Death Lies Waiting”, return through your current production perspective. When you rebuild an older song now, what are you listening for? The weakness of the original, the energy that survived, or the person you were when you first made it?

Johan: Feel free to call it a professional quirk, but usually I only listen to my own songs searching for things that could be done differently or better, so reworking my old songs usually means trying to get an even better version or result.
But I always try to keep the original vibe of a song alive and intact.

Karo: The WGT 2026 anniversary show at Agra Halle was a symbolic moment, because Leipzig has always carried a special emotional weight for the dark scene. How did that concert feel from your side? Did it feel like a celebration, a confrontation with your own history, or simply another Suicide Commando show that had to hit with full force?

Johan: It certainly felt as a celebration, thinking back at it it still gives me goosebumps. Seeing the Agra Halle completely packed for our show (I was told maximum capacity of the Agra Halle is 10000 people), chanting along to the songs, seeing all those hands in the air … it simply was incredible and unforgettable.

WGT always had a special meaning for us. I think we meanwhile played there about 12 times, including the year the festival (almost) went bankrupt and we decided to play in total chaos.

Karo: After WGT, one more German anniversary show was announced for Oberhausen rather than turning the 40th anniversary into a large nostalgia tour. Was that selectiveness important to you? Do you prefer these anniversary shows to remain rare, almost ritual events, instead of becoming a routine celebration?

Johan: We’ll do a couple more anniversary shows, but mainly abroad (like the Netherlands, Spain …) but I explicitly wanted to keep these 40 years of Suicide Commando shows rare and special. So the one in Oberhausen will be the last special anniversary show, the other planned shows will be different.

Karo: Suicide Commando started with self released tapes in a very different underground, before streaming, social media, instant visibility and permanent digital noise. What do you miss from that earlier scene, and what do you definitely not want to romanticise about it?

Johan: What I certainly miss from those early times is the creativity you had to have to make music. Nowadays it became way too easy to make music, get yourself a decent pc and some software and next week you can have your first songs ready, and with the rise of AI it even became worse. So I certainly lack the innovation you had to have back in the old days, you had to be way more creative to make music, instruments costed a fortune and were extremely limited in their possibilities, so you basically were obliged to be innovative and creative. The music was definitely more experimental in those days.

What I don’t want to romanticise about it ? Well, buying a sampler that costed a fortune and just be able to sample 3 seconds of sound … 🙂

Karo: You had a serious knee injury and surgery years ago, and there was even a moment when pain forced you to stop a show. Yet Suicide Commando live performances still demand physical intensity, control and aggression. Has your relationship with your body on stage changed with age, injury and experience?

Johan: Of course I feel that age takes its toll, I’m not 25 anymore … and sure my live shows demanded concessions from my health, the knee injury and surgery was probably the biggest one, but I also remember ending up in hospital with bruised ribs during a tour which made it almost impossible to breath, or with a bruised foot or leg as I always prone to doing stupid things on stage …

But nonetheless it was all worth the sacrifices.

Karo: Your voice has always been one of the most recognisable weapons in Suicide Commando: harsh, venomous, direct, almost disciplinary. After forty years, do you still experience the voice as a weapon, or has it become something more complex, maybe a mask, a confession, or a survival mechanism?

Johan: To be honest, I never really saw myself as a “real” singer. I know my limitations as a singer, so I had to find ways to turn this disadvantage into an advantage and make it a weapon, with using an old pitch shifter (many people still think I’m using distortion or whatever) it perfectly worked out for me and my sound.

Karo: The new anniversary box set also treats Suicide Commando as a visual and physical archive, with vinyl, CD, photo book and certificate. In a digital era, why does the object still matter? Is it mainly for collectors, or does physical format preserve a kind of seriousness that streaming cannot carry?

Johan: I still think it’s important to myself to be able to hold something physically in your hands, and whether that is a tape, a vinyl or a CD doesn’t really matter, they all have/had their own flair. For me it’s not only about the music, also the package, the artwork, the lyrics … are part of the whole.

Karo: Many younger dark electro and aggrotech acts grew up with Suicide Commando as part of their musical DNA. Do you hear your influence in the current scene with pride, discomfort, distance, or surprise? Are there moments when you feel the genre has understood your legacy, and moments when it has misunderstood it?

Johan: I’ve always been proud of the legacy that Suicide Commando left behind. It started to get a bit annoying when this style became immensely popular after the success of the “mindstrip” and “axis of evil” albums in the early 2000’s. All of a sudden you got a lot of copycats and in a way Suicide Commando got the blame. But trends come and go, so I’m happy things calmed down again. Nothing against copycats, but I still prefer bands with an own identity, doing the thing they like, not because it is popular at that time or not.

Karo: Looking back across four decades, which part of Suicide Commando has remained most stubbornly unchanged: the anger, the discipline, the fascination with death, the need for control, or the refusal to become safe?

Johan: For sure the passion ! Music is my passion, music is my therapy, always been, always will!

Karo: If “Collective Suicide Vol. 1+2” gives listeners a near complete map of where Suicide Commando has been, what should remain unmapped? What part of the project still has to stay dangerous, private or unresolved for you to continue?

Johan: I’m in a luxury position where I can do whatever I want with Suicide Commando. My label gives me total freedom in what I do, so I’m a happy (old) man !

The passion will never die, so I simply can’t imagine a life without doing (my) music.

Side-Line also covered Suicide Commando’s ‘Collective Suicide Vol. 1+2’.