BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE's MATT TUCK On 'Gravity' Album: We Wanted To 'Push Ourselves Creatively'

HardDrive Radio's Lou Brutus conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Matt Tuck of Welsh metallers BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE backstage at this past weekend's Rock On The Range festival in Columbus, Ohio. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On having to wait for the release of BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE's new album, "Gravity":

Matt: "Yeah, it's kind of frustrating. We finished it in December, so the buildup for us, it's not anything unusual this length of time — six months or so — it's not that long for us, really. But it is the more frustrating part of the process of being in a band, 'cause for us now, we've lived with it for a while. So we just want people to hear it, we just wanna get out there, we wanna play the new stuff and get people psyched up on it. 'Cause it's a killer record."

On BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE's current lineup:

Matt: "It's the best version that BULLET's ever been. We're such a tight live act now. We're all great friends. Everyone's just in the same mindset and here for the right reasons. We just wanna play. We wanna be together and play live music and write songs as long as we can. It's happy days, man."

On the response to "Over It", the first single from "Gravity":

Matt: "It's been great. With any new song, it takes a bit of time for people to kind of embed it into their musical repertoire, but now it's been out there for, like, six, seven weeks or so, the video's been out, we've been playing it live at every show we've been doing since then, and it's incredible. The reaction today, you'll see it for yourself, it's just gonna go off. It's just got such an infectious groove, that song, that it's just hard to not nod your head and jump up and down. It's a good track."

On the latest BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE single, "Letting You Go":

Matt: "it's probably the most experimental track we've ever done musically. It's incorporating a lot of electronic production, which we've never really indulged in before. But it's a killer, killer track. It's just a song that has '2018' written all over it. It's just very contemporary, very modern, very catchy, very up to date. It's a big one."

On exploring new musical territory on "Gravity":

Matt: "We kind of made a decision to take this album in a bit more of a different, contemporary, anthemic direction rather than displaying what we're capable of as musicians. We've done five albums of that, and we just felt the time is right to do something a little bit differently, push ourselves creatively, push ourselves musically and kind of focus on the songwriting aspect of it rather than everyone's individual chops."

"Gravity" will be released on June 29 through BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE's new label home, Search And Destroy, the imprint launched in 2014 by Spinefarm and international artist management company Raw Power Management. The follow-up to 2015's "Venom" marks BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE's full-length recording debut with new drummer Jason Bowld (PITCHSHIFTER, AXEWOUND),who has been touring with the group for the past two years, and bassist Jamie Mathias (formerly of REVOKER),who joined the band after the last disc was completed.