ROB HALFORD Is 'Ready To Jump Into The Next JUDAS PRIEST Record'

JUDAS PRIEST singer Rob Halford tells Billboard.com that the band is so energized by the sessions for its 17th studio album, "Redeemer Of Souls" — which sold around 32,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 6 on The Billboard 200 chart — that he's already "ready to jump into the next JUDAS PRIEST record."

"There's a sense that there's another great metal song to write, another great metal album to put together, another great tour to go out on," says Halford. "It's the hunger. If you've still got that, that serves a series of purposes and reasons why you still do it. Maybe we're chasing the elusive finale, but right now I feel like it's amazing to think what might come next from PRIEST."

Speaking to the "Trunk Nation" show, which airs on SiriusXM's Hair Nation, singer Rob Halford stated about "Redeemer Of Souls": "When we finished [the] 'Epitaph' [tour], we just got so buzzed from the fans and the reaction wherever we went. Just to put the 'Epitaph' tour together, which was we tried to put a song from every record into the show, and we were living in the life of JUDAS PRIEST, all those decades, in one show, night after night on the world trek, and I think that really did something to us internally; as musicians, it should do when you tour. So we realized that this next record really had to be really strong, full of energy, because it's relentless, the tracks are relentless. The energy that you feel off 'Redeemer Of Souls' is replicated in that direction time and time and time again."

Asked what the band was looking to achieve artistically on this record, Halford told VH1.com: "We never ever sit down and kind of premeditate what we're going to do. That's the great purity of PRIEST's music. It does come from the heart. We just sit down with a bunch of guitars and the riffs start cranking and we put the vocal melodies together and so on. So it comes from a very pure source. I think this was an opportunity after 'Nostradamus', our first concept record, which we had an amazing time putting together, but enough time had passed from it to kind of want to reaffirm who we are, which is a classic British heavy metal band. So with that thought in mind the metal started roaring and we feel that all of these songs from 'Redeemer Of Souls' reemphasize that statement about what this band is trying to be in the heavy metal world."

Regarding his lyrical approach on "Redeemer Of Souls", Halford told Radio.com: "We've been humorously talking about the fact that this record has dragons, it has Vikings, it has aliens, it has zombies, it has a little bit of a religious statement to make. So, those are all the elements that have been in metal for a long time, but I've always felt that, you know, you can make some parallels. PRIEST has always been in the real world as much as we’ve been in the fantasy world. And there are not that many degrees of separation in some instances.