MORBID ANGEL Cancels European Summer Festival Appearances

Death metal veterans MORBID ANGEL have been forced to cancel their European summer festival appearances slated for late July and August due to "unfortunate and last-minute unforeseen problems with a passport for one of the members of the band."

MORBID ANGEL's management, World Management, said in a statement: "In well over thirty years, we have never had an incident like this, nor have we ever canceled shows in our past. We have been advised by the U.S. State Department / passport agency that a new passport will not be forthcoming in time for any of the upcoming festivals.

"MORBID ANGEL are extremely unhappy about this loss of shows and want to apologize to all the fans, promoters, and vendors in Europe! We are working to have this issue remedied for the future and are looking forward to coming back to Europe and playing for all of our fans in November!"

MORBID ANGEL recently completed work on a new studio album, tentatively due in the fall via UDR Music. The disc was recorded at Mana Recording in St. Petersburg, Florida with producer — and former MORBID ANGEL guitarist — Erik Rutan. The LP will mark the band's first release with drummer Scott Fuller (ANNIHILATED, ex-ABYSMAL DAWN) who joined MORBID ANGEL last year following the departure of Tim Yeung. It will also be MORBID ANGEL's first album to feature bassist/vocalist Steve Tucker since 2003's "Heretic".

Tucker told "The Metal Magdalene With Jet" show about MORBID ANGEL's approach on the upcoming album: "It was really just about writing music — it was just about writing a MORBID ANGEL album. Nobody said, 'Hey, we wanna go in this direction,' nobody said anything. I mean, there's obvious things there. I've said it before — I'm a death metal guy, so, for me, it's gonna be a death metal album; if I'm on it, it's death metal. So it was just about making a MORBID ANGEL album. It was really about coming in with something new, something fresh, but yet it still being MORBID ANGEL. Really, honestly, we didn't approach this any differently than any of the other albums I was involved in except for maybe [1998's] 'Formulas Fatal To The Flesh', which 'Formulas', Trey wrote all the music, all the lyrics and things like that. But this was done more similar to maybe [2000's] 'Gateways To Annihilation', where everybody had their contribution. Trey wrote a bunch of songs, I wrote songs, Scotty contributed some ideas. There was a lot of back-and-forth. In the end, it has to become a MORBID ANGEL song. And at this point, I feel that it's very much a MORBID ANGEL album."

MORBID ANGEL in January announced the addition of Dan Vadim Von (guitarist/frontman of the American death metal band VADIMVON) to the band's lineup on second guitar. He joined the group as the replacement for Norwegian guitarist Destructhor (a.k.a. Thor Anders Myhren),who left the band a year and a half ago.