OBITUARY: New Audio Interview With DONALD TARDY

Evil Alex of Indo Radio Online recently conducted an interview with drummer Donald Tardy of Florida-based death metal veterans OBITUARY. You can now listen to the chat using the audio player below.

In an interview with Denmark's Metal Revolution, vocalist John Tardy was asked about OBITUARY's switch from Roadrunner Records to Candlelight Records and the band's current label status. "If it was up to us, we'd probably just be with the same record label all the time," he said. "Just like our music, me, Donald and Trevor [Peres, guitar], we don't change much on how we do things, we're kinda stuck in the way we do things, but with Roadrunner we kinda felt like they kinda run the game and it got so big and started paying attention to other bands, and it didn't have the time or resources for us. And that's fine, whatever, we'll go some place else."

He continued, "Candlelight was one of the labels we looked at at the time, and they were willing to sign the agreement that we wanted signed. We kinda hung on to what we wanted and they just said yes to it. In those terms, they were good for us, but fact is that they are not a very big record label, and there were lots of things they were supposed to be doing that they wound up not doing.

"In the long term, there were a few of those albums where they didn't press that many copies; it was, like, the album would come out, and all those copies would be gone, and when that happens, it takes another month to get them out on the shelves, you know.

"At the end of the day, I don't have any hard feelings towards Candlelight. Whatever happened, happened, but at the end of the day, we just don't feel like they did enough for us, so we've been kicking things around here. We have a couple of albums where we're really dying to do the albums ourselves, but just don't know if we have the time and resources to make that happen and the guys from Century Media actually came to Florida and visited us, and when we were on that last European tour they invited us over to their office on one of our off days and we hung out with them there. They are really a bunch of great guys, they really are into what they do, they really do like and care for their bands and do everything they can for them, so Century Media is gonna be a really good possibility for the next album of ours, you know, for them to maybe do that."

Regarding OBITUARY's plans for the next studio album, John said, "We took a few months off for the writing purposes and we just wound up doing more fishing and boating and stuff than the writing we were supposed to do, so the album we originally planned on, we really haven't done by now. It isn't anywhere near done. [laughs] So we still have a lot of work to do on it. We did manage to get a whole bunch done, and I know we've got like three songs, you know. The first three songs we finished are just absolutely awesome; I mean, they are just heavy and so cool, I'm really thrilled with the songs we've got. We've got most of the songs general ideas in place, but we do still have a lot of work to do. So now we're gonna be gone in September, we might be in Central America in October, or actually you know, in September and maybe in the beginning of November and at the end of November and December we're gonna be around Europe again, so trying to get the album done before the end of the year is just basically not gonna happen, which we're OK with. We're really not in any hurry to do it. It's not like we're sitting around saying, "Oh my god, we didn't get the album done." It doesn't really matter to us. It gets done when it gets done. After we get back from Europe and take a small break from all the touring, I'm sure we're gonna get back out here and start writing again and hopefully sometime, maybe around festival season, we can have that album finished up and think about some proper release date."

Interview (audio):