SHAWN DROVER Wanted To Make 'Unrelenting Heavy Metal Record' After Split With MEGADETH

The latest episode of the "Mars Attacks" podcast features an interview with former MEGADETH and current ACT OF DEFIANCE drummer Shawn Drover. You can now listen to the chat using the audio player below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On whether he contributed musically to ACT OF DEFIANCE's debut album, "Birth And The Burial":

"I wrote half of the record. [Former MEGADETH and current ACT OF DEFIANCE guitarist] Chris [Broderick] wrote five songs and I wrote five songs. Once we left our previous band, that was kind of… We just said, 'Look, you write five tunes, I'll write five tunes. Let's send 'em as we go along and kind of see where we…' The only statement we really had with each other was to make sure that this was a hundred-percent, unrelenting heavy metal record, and we kind of went off based on that premise: to do it without compromise and to make these songs… We didn't think or cater to what other people might think, or what subgenre of metal we should make these tunes. None of that stuff had any bearing on what we were doing at all. We just locked ourselves away in our music rooms, and away we went writing the tunes, and what you hear with 'Birth And The Burial' is the end result of that."

On whether any of the material on "Birth And The Burial" is leftover music from previous years or if they are all brand-new ideas:

"Chris, obviously, being the accomplished player that he is, he has a recording studio in his house, so I'm sure he has accumulated riffs here and there. But I believe that 'Refrain And Re-Fracture' was something that he previously had, parts of it. But, by and large, this is all new stuff. I think I may have had one riff or two as well that I've had in the past, but pretty much most of it is all new riffs. Certainly on my end of it, the five songs that I wrote, most of it is all new stuff. Absolutely. And I wanted it to be — I wanted to have a fresh perspective on being creative and making new music, not entirely relying on something that I wrote five years ago, or fifteen years ago, whatever the case may be. It's pretty much fresh stuff. We really inspired each other to do that. Chris would send me something that he was working on, and sometimes that would trigger me going, 'Man, I really need to write a heavy tune like he's writing,' you know what I mean? A song that he wrote called 'Throwback' kind of inspired me a little bit to write a song called 'Thy Lord Belial', because his song is really brutal, and I wanted to have… That's a big part of who I am, too — the thrash metal element — so I wanted to make sure that I wrote a song that was equally as aggressive, but different from what he wrote."

In addition to Drover and Broderick, ACT OF DEFIANCE features ex-SCAR THE MARTYR singer Henry Derek Bonner and SHADOWS FALL's Matt Bachand (bass).

"Birth And The Burial" will be released on August 21 via Metal Blade Records. The CD was helmed by producer Chris "Zeuss" Harris, who has previously worked with ROB ZOMBIE, HATEBREED and SHADOWS FALL, among others.

Band photo credit: Stephanie Cabral

Interview (audio):