EXODUS Guitarist On New Album: It's The Best Thing We've Done Since 'Bonded By Blood'

Peter Atkinson of KNAC.COM recently conducted an interview with guitarist Gary Holt of veteran San Francisco Bay Area thrashers EXODUS. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

KNAC.COM: There's gonna be a lot of thrash metal nostalgia on this tour [with MEGADETH and TESTAMENT]?

Holt: At first we didn't want to do that, because we've never considered ourselves a nostalgia band. We play a lot of classics live, "Bonded By Blood", "Strike of the Beast", "Piranha", "Toxic Waltz", crap like that, but we play a lot of new shit. We're usually very focused on our new record when we're out on tour. But for this tour we figured what the hell, why not just dust off the old stuff. We've got a new album coming out in a couple months and we can focus on that then and play a lot of new stuff when we go out to support that.

KNAC.COM: There's been a lot of buzz about "The Big Four" lately, since METALLICA, MEGADETH, SLAYER and ANTHRAX are playing together for the first time at some festivals in Europe. This tour's kinda like "The Big Fourth, Fifth and Sixth?"

Holt: (Laughs) Yeah, something like that. EXODUS and TESTAMENT were on that plateau just below "The Big Four." We sold a lot of records and had pretty good-sized audiences of our own back in the day, but they were definitely on another level. Being in "The Big Six" or the "Top 10" or whatever, it doesn't really matter. There's a whole lot of bands from when we came up that are long gone and forgotten. We're still chugging along and a lot of people still like us. That's pretty cool.

KNAC.COM: What's your take on these new re-thrash or retro-thrash bands that have been getting so much attention?

Holt: I'm a big supporter and a big fan of these young thrash bands. I do anything I can to help them out. Some of these young bands are enamored with 1985 with the look and sound and all. When they start out, they sound like thrash metal karaoke, like if you took your old KREATOR, EXODUS, TESTAMENT demos and threw them in a blender. But as they advance it becomes less based on their love of a particular music or band and more based on their desire to work on their craft as musicians. If they do that, they'll just naturally start evolving. And you've already seen that with bands like WARBRINGER and EVILE, they've been able to put their own stamp on it and that's important if you want to craft some kind of career out of it. They play longer, get better at it, they get more creative and start writing their own riffs. And that fact that people are digging it is great because it would be a lot tougher for old dogs like us if they didn't. The new fans that are getting into these new bands are becoming our fans as well, and that's good for everyone.

KNAC.COM: Since you've been around for both, does this new wave of thrash compare at all to the first wave back in the day?

Holt: There's no comparison. I think it's great that people are enjoying what we do and there's other bands making great records and there seems to be genuine excitement about the music, but then it was the birth of a genre. There was a whole movement, it was purely underground. You couldn't buy our crap or anything like it at Walmart or Hot Topic. It was dangerous and it was aggressive. It was a whole different vibe. A lot of these kids now, it's like they were born in the wrong era. In 2010, you see kids wearing the clothes that they saw us wearing in 1985. But that was our uniform back then, now it's like shopping for vintage clothes. You may like the look of vintage ball gowns, but it was a lot different when they actually wore them in Versailles. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's only one original. We were creating it. Us, METALLICA, SLAYER, ANTHRAX, MEGADETH, a bunch of other bands. You can't compare the two, but it's great that people are embracing the spirit of it.

KNAC.COM: To move on to your own stuff, is the new album supposed to be a continuation, counterpoint or companion to "Exhibit A"?

Holt: It's definitely a companion, but it's definitely different. It's super-fast, super-aggressive, but it's a little more melodic at times but really brutal and a little bit more back to the roots. Not back to 1985 "Bonded By Blood", but it's definitely got the catchy choruses of songs like "Fabulous Disaster". It's a little less progressive in a lot of ways, but it's also more progressive, if that makes any sense (laughs). This album is a masterpiece. People are going to shit when they hear this album, it's so good from front to back. People always say this sort of shit, but I'll say it anyway, I think it's the best thing we've done since "Bonded By Blood". It's awesome. I love all the albums that we've done, "Force of Habit"'s not my favorite, but out of the last three that we've done with this line-up, this one takes it to a new level.

KNAC.COM: I spoke with you after "Exhibit A" came out and you mentioned having four other songs already in the bag, did they end up making it onto "Exhibit B"?

Holt: Oh yeah. We recorded so much stuff for the last album that there wasn't enough room to put it all, so we picked the stuff that we thought would fit best on "Exhibit A" and saved the others for "Exhibit B". And it wasn't easy, it wasn't like these were crappy throwaway tracks, they were as good as anything on the last record. We just picked what we felt worked best as a cohesive record and kept these in the can so they were ready to go. Then we wrote new songs to go with them. And this album is very cohesive front to back as well. It doesn't focus on religion as much as the last one did, this one is more about violence, death and man's unhumanity to man. It's heavy as hell. There's a couple of epics on there, a couple of long ones, but there's a couple short, fast, vicious ones on it as well. EXODUS is a super-violent animal and we just want to feed, we're hungry. We put everything we got into this record.

Read the entire interview from KNAC.COM.

"Hammer And Life", a brand new song from EXODUS, is available for streaming on the band's MySpace page. The track comes off "Exhibit B: The Human Condition", which is scheduled for release in North America on May 18 via Nuclear Blast Records.