Out of Phoenix, Arizona there’s a considerable amount of buzz building for budding metal band Ded. It’s a similar approach that was happening about a decade ago when Five Finger Death Punch was just coming out. If Ded can even come close to the integrity and career that those guys have had, they’re in good shape. There’s a good reason that the groundswell for Ded is so big – it’s because these guys are awesome. Listen through the debut song that the band just released called “FMFY”, and you’ll get it. “It was supposed to be really gnarly and heavy,” said Ded lead man Joe Cotela when talking with Alternative Addiction. “We were doing it for ourselves with the biggest intentions of playing a couple of dive bars around Phoenix. We just liked what we were doing and then it got away from us and now we’re doing all of this cool shit with it.” So why do music this heavy? The simple answer is because that’s the stuff that Cotela and the rest of the guys from Ded like to perform. Besides, they’ve done just about everything else in the alternative/rock genre. “I’ve done everything,” said Cotela on his personal background in music. “My first band was like a lot of other guys’ – it was pop punk. Then I started a band that was like the Deftones, then Every Time I Die, then mainstream rock/Papa Roach. Then, with this we wanted to go super-heavy. We wanted to try influences from Pantera and Slipknot all the way to Bring Me the Horizon.” Ded started out being just something fun that the guys wanted to do but things shifted to a more professional approach when a couple of songs were recorded. One song that got the band into it and then another that caught the ear of producer John Feldmann. “It was a song called ‘Feel How I Feel’ – which I don’t know if it’s going to make the album,” started Cotela on the song that did it for the band. “We were just having fun in the studio with that one. You can feel the raw lack of concern for anything in the studio when you hear it. To me, it might sound a little too derivative of certain things, but maybe it will come out one day. There are a lot of songs like that we did early on. The songs got into some industry people’s hands and then it ended up being a situation where everyone wanted it released correctly on a label. We just kept recording, and there are about two years of recordings that we did that you can hear us kind of honing in on our sound.” I think it was a song called “Architecture of Sound”, that’s going to be on our full-length album that’s coming out in the Spring. That song opens really hard. It has an awesome intro and that’s the song that got the attention from Feldmann.” Right now, the lone song that Ded has released is “FMFY.” Its not the band’s debut single, it’s the band’s debut song. It’s a solid introduction to band sonically and it’s a solid introduction to their attitude too. “It’s not exactly a first single,” started Cotela. “We hadn’t released a song to the public yet and we’ve been a band for two and a half years. We’ve been doing everything behind the scenes. We wanted to release something heavy with a bold statement. We were stoked to put it out. People react to it at shows because it’s heavy and they get into it. It’s written from the perspective of Rusty from HBO’s True Detective. Its written with his inner dialogue and his monologues in mind where he talks about humanity. That resonated with me in a lot of ways. The song is about holding yourself and other people accountable for the things you do and they do that aren’t right. A lot of music is one-sided, I wanted to make a song about being the best that you can be as well.” Listen to FMFY on Spotify now.