EYEHATEGOD's JIMMY BOWER: JOEY LACAZE 'Would Have Never Wanted Us To Quit Playing'

The Rock Pit recently conducted an interview with EYEHATEGOD guitarist and DOWN drummer Jimmy Bower. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Rock Pit: How has the new album come together? Is it completely finished or are you still working out the last few bits?

Jimmy: Just working out the last bits, but it should be out in April, and we're just excited, man. It came out really good. It's been 13 years, so it's a big deal for us to finally get this out.

The Rock Pit: From your perspective, how does it compare to the other albums?

Jimmy: I think it's different, but it's still EYEHATEGOD. It's just an evolution to me; it's evolved. We get feedback differently and play differently, but I don't know what to say about shit like that. [laughs] To me, it just sounds like new tunes, but somebody else might be, like, "Well it doesn't sound like this or that." I'm, like, "Alright man. Sorry!" [laughs]

The Rock Pit: You have the new drummer, Aaron Hill, who has taken over from Joey (LaCaze),who passed away this year. Obviously, it must be tough to get through something like that so how has Aaron fitted into the band so far?

Jimmy: He's been doing really good, man. He's getting there. Joey would have never wanted us to quit playing; we knew that for a fact. So as opposed to sitting around bummed out, we just got into a room pretty fast with Aaron and started learning as much as we could. We got 22 songs down, so we're stoked, man. It's good to be playing shows again. We miss Joey bigtime — we will always miss Joey — but we're also excited about the new chapter in the band.

The Rock Pit: Did [Aaron] play on the new record?

Jimmy: No. Joey did. We recorded it last year right after we got back from Australia, but it's taken us a year to get it all finished up and everything. That's another reason we are super excited about it too. But we've been writing too; we've already got two new songs and almost another one, so it's good, because the band has been the most active than we've ever been.

The Rock Pit: You must be happy for the band to be back and be strong again.

Jimmy: We felt like we were doing really good when Joey was still alive, because in 2008 we were doing a lot of touring and stuff like that, but I guess with this new chapter, we played in New York and Chicago and people are really supportive and cool and just happy that we continued on. So we've just been kinda taking that and using that as our fuel. That's cool, and we love this band; we don't know what to fucking do with ourselves when we're not in this band.

Read the entire interview at The Rock Pit.