Conor Sullivan

Conor Sullivan — American drummer — is part of Ice Nine Kills in the band's current line-up. The group's repertoire imposes on the drums a demand conventional metalcore does not have. Ice Nine Kills' tracks adapt specific horror films and change character several times within the same piece — orchestral opening, heavy riff, breakdown, wide melodic chorus, spoken passage. Each of those sections calls for a different rhythmic treatment, and it is the drums that mark the transitions. If they are not articulated with precision, the song sounds like a collage of unrelated parts. That difficulty is amplified live. The band stages each track with sets, costumes and effects, and the line-up has to perform technically exact material within a timed theatrical presentation — the opposite of the freedom a metal show normally allows. Sullivan holds that position in the period when Ice Nine Kills had already established itself as a phenomenon with a broad audience, after the two records of The Silver Scream series, and carries forward a format the band spent twenty years building.