Can CANNIBAL CORPSE Keep Playing For Another 30 Years? PAUL MAZURKIEWICZ Weighs In

In a new interview with Shawn Ratches of Laughingmonkeymusic, CANNIBAL CORPSE drummer and founding member Paul Mazurkiewicz was asked how long he thinks the band can keep going. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "As long as we're all healthy, then who knows how long we can take it. I wouldn't have ever thought when I started that I'd still be doing this still at 53 years old. So, how long can we take? You've just gotta look at it, at this point, day by day. You never know. If you stay healthy and you keep active and you keep doing it, it's just gonna come down to that — it's gonna come down to the health factor. Because everybody knows — the older you get, anything can go wrong at any given time, whether it's a disease or an injury or whatever that you just go, 'I can't do it anymore. No matter how much I practice and how much I do the right thing, it doesn't matter.' So we've gotta just take it day by day at this point. There's no denying — we're more at the end of our career than we are in the beginning. Can we go another 30 years? Well, I highly doubt it. I would be 83 doing this… That would be incredible [if we could still do it at that age], but I would have to almost think that would slightly be impossible. I guess it's possible — who knows? We don't know. Nobody's done it in that sense in the extreme form.

"When you had [THE ROLLING STONES drummer] Charlie Watts still doing it at 80 years old, that's amazing," he continued. "So the fact that he's still drumming and he's on stage at 80 is incredible. I just met Carmine Appice the other day, and he's 75. And the guy is still up there and playing and doing his thing — albeit it's not maybe extreme death metal, but still, he's up there playing drums…

"So, you never know. You take it day by day," he repeated. "As long as we're healthy and we're feeling good and everything is going good in those ways, then who's to say we can't last another 20 years. But who knows?"

CANNIBAL CORPSE's 15th studio album, "Violence Unimagined", was released in April via Metal Blade Records. Erik Rutan, one of the death metal's most acclaimed guitarists who is known for his time as part of MORBID ANGEL throughout the '90s and early 2000s, as well as handling vocals/guitars for HATE ETERNAL, lent his guitar as well as production skills to the effort, which was recorded at his Mana Recording in St. Petersburg, Florida. Rutan previously produced four CANNIBAL CORPSE albums (in addition to "Violence Unimagined"),alongside the likes of GOATWHORE, SOILENT GREEN and BELPHEGOR. Filling in live on guitar since 2019, in 2020 he became a full member, contributing to the writing process.

In a 2017 interview with Aesthetic Magazine, Mazurkiewicz stated about CANNIBAL CORPSE's longevity: "It's about the love of the music. We're very fortunate to start out 30 years ago and have success right off the bat where everything was going great. We all just love to play and write songs, and after fourteen records, we just want to keep moving forward and we feel like we always have, and the popularity just grows with the band. We love to create and write the perfect brutal death metal CANNIBAL CORPSE song and I think we obviously must have achieved that to have this sort of longevity."