Above photo: Commerford on stage with Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello

What was it like setting yourself on fire in the Mountain Lion video?

“It was different… hot. [Laughs] I’m a thrill-seeker. I got set on fire, too, for the Supernatural video, but I had a full-body suit on. I’m good friends with one of the big Hollywood stunt coordinators, so he hooked me up with the fire guys. After the first video, I thought, ‘Well, I may as well go all the way.’ Wearing the suit, you almost don’t feel anything; you wait until you feel as though you’re gonna get burned, and then they put you out.

“For this video, without the suit, you get what they call a ‘skin burn.’ There’s only one guy in Hollywood who does a skin burn, and that’s who I worked with. They put this super-cold gel on you, everywhere fire might touch, and then they light you on fire.

“It’s a weird experience: You’re in the fire, you see the fire, and then you feel the fire. I’ve had a lot of injuries from biking, road rash and all that, so I didn’t think a skin burn could be that bad. You basically burn until you feel it burning you – it’s probably a second-degree burn. The guy who did it to me said that he’d never done it to anyone but a stunt man. That got me pretty psyched.”

Are you planning to play live with Future User?

“If there are opportunities, yeah; hopefully that’ll happen. I’ve gone to Coachella and have played there, so that would be cool. They have that tent where they play electronic music – the sound is insane! I remember driving away – I was probably 10 miles away from the festival – and I could still hear that electronic pitch banging.

“When we do play live, I want to tap into that super-low, super-gnarly sound. All of that music, be it Skrillex, Knife Party or Kill The Noise, it’s all in the key of G, which is the lowest note that a PA system can handle and still sound insane. It's the key of G and it's at 70 beats per minute. A lot of our music is right there; it’s patterned after dubstep but it’s not dubstep.”

What’s the status of Rage these days? You guys haven’t played a show since 2011.

“Our status is the same as it always was: You never know until you know. [Laughs] It’s like Batman waiting to see the Bat-Signal. Once in a while, the Rage light goes up in the sky, and we have to take care of business. It could be tomorrow; it could be 10 years from now. It’s not normally one person in the band putting that signal up; a lot of times it comes from outside the band. There could be a cause that’s important, so we’ll do a show, or it could be a place that we’ve never played, so we’ll be up for doing that. There’s no rules to how we operate.

“It’s a funny thing. We’ve been a band for over 20 years, and in that time I’ve seen other groups come and go. A band would come out of nowhere, sell 10 million records and just be huge. Two, three years later, where are they? No one knows who they are or remembers them. We never played those record company games – ‘You guys gotta keep making records, keep going on tour.’ We didn’t do any of that, and we’re probably bigger now than ever. If we made another record, it would be the biggest record we’ve ever made.”

Future User's #SteroidsOrHeroin will be released February 24. You can pre-order the album on iTunes.

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