How unhinged can things get at a Dillinger Escape Plan show? To find out, Google their name and “Virgin Megastore” for a video of gravity-defying singer Greg Puciato running full-bore atop the heads and shoulders of an in-store audience during the first few seconds of their set. Musically, they’ve managed to maintain that same intensity with their unique brand of mathematical metalcore as it evolved from the sheer bombast of their 1999 debut Calculating Infinity and an inspired collaboration with Mike Patton right up to their most diverse release, last year’s Ire Works. After numerous personnel changes — most recently the contentious departure of drummer Chris Pennie (for Coheed and Cambria, of all the uninspiring meal tickets) — they’re even better prepared to continue challenging the very sound that helped define their own genre. EYE WEEKLY spoke with guitarist and sole remaining founding member Ben Weinman during a rare day off.

Since you have a huge role in the management of the band as well as production, along with being the only original member, is there a sole ownership aspect to your role in the band now?
It’s definitely not like an ownership aspect, but certainly the core of the band creatively right now. And it’s kind of always been that way. Our old drummer Chris had a lot to do with helping form our style and things like that. But I’ve always been kind of the visionary of the band. It’s kind of continuing in the same fashion, it’s just a little more focused now because all the original members are out of the picture. It almost gives me a little more leeway to not have to worry about politics and just get stuff done.

In terms of the record itself, it seems like there’s a lot of attention put into the sequencing.
We’re not one of those bands that write singles and then fill the record in around them. We definitely like to make a record that you kind of have to hear the whole to get the idea of what we’re about.

“Mouth of Ghosts” is the most distinct song on the record, because it’s piano jazz. Where did that come from?
I’m always dabbling in other things and I wrote that on piano and was messing around with it. I performed some kind of variation on it at some improv thing that I did at John Zorn’s club [The Stone in New York City] a couple months before we went in to track the record. That’s probably the biggest change in how we approached songwriting on this record; there are a lot of things that were written without traditional instrumentation for Dillinger in mind. Like that song on piano and some stuff written predominantly using electronics and programming, and then we incorporate the band afterwards as opposed to the other way around.

I guess that’s why one review of the record said you guys were becoming the “Radiohead of Metalcore.” What are your thoughts on that?
[Laughs.] Radiohead are one of my favourite bands, so I’m not going to argue with that. It’s certainly an honour to be compared in that way. When I laugh it’s because of the metalcore part of the description, not the Radiohead part — that’s always been a funny word to me, I don’t know why. I mean, Radiohead are a band who are pretty much a blueprint for how to do it.

I saw your Conan O’Brien performance recently [where amps were upended and Greg sang from atop Conan’s desk]. Did you do that in the rehearsal?
We didn’t really perform to that degree in the rehearsal. We did warn them, because the main thing for them is that they capture anything exciting on camera. So we were just like, “Look, we’re probably going to be all over the place so be ready.” And they were cool. You know, “Conan’s a fan of rock and we just want it to be a good show so as long as nobody gets hurt and nothing breaks.” And we were like, “Well, we’ll do our best.”