BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE's MATT TUCK Explains 'Venom' Album Title

Ireland's Overdrive recently conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Matt Tuck of Welsh metallers BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Overdrive: First off, let's talk about the new album and why you choose the title "Venom". I know that it's the sixth track on the album, but was it a case of when you wrote the track, you instantly knew it was going to be the title track for the album?

Matt: No, not at all. It was just more that things were kind of a coincidence. You see, before we actually decided on the name of the album, that song was already written and completely finished. With this album, we actually started with the artwork first, because we have had a pain in the arse in the past with doing the artwork, as we had always left it to the last minute. So this time around, we tried to do things completely different the way we approached the design process. We knew that we wanted to have snakes on the cover and also seeing as it is out fifth album, we wanted to have the "V" in there to represent the number five and then obviously the use of the "V" represents "valentine." When we looked at the idea and then made the connection that we had snakes on the cover, who have venom and we also had the song "Venom", it just seemed all too good to be true and had to be done, so that's how it all came about.

Overdrive: From a lyrical perspective, where were you drawing your influences from when writing for the album?

Matt: On this one specifically, I really wanted to write very dark lyrics, because the music that we were writing was very heavy and very aggressive, so I had to match that with the lyrics and subject matter. I didn't want anything fictional, uplifting or happy: not that we have done that much before, but I really wanted to turn it up a notch in the intensity levels and tap into stuff from my past that still gets me angry and fired up. I wanted to capture the feeling of all of those things that really affected my life when I was growing up, because these days I'm a grown man and happily married. So, the process for me to go right back to those periods in my life and capture the intensity really paid off.

Overdrive: When did you start writing for the album, or are there lyrics there from years ago that you just resurrected for this album?

Matt: We started writing for the album at about July of last year and we had various ideas saved on phones and laptops etc, when we were on tour. So when we finished the "Temper Temper" touring cycle, around April 2014, we started going through all of the stuff we had and then started writing very seriously with the music first, then I would sit down and write the lyrics over the soundtrack. If anything needs adjusting after that, then we did it collectively or in the studio, depending on what sounded the best to us all.

Read the entire interview at Overdrive.