TESTAMENT Frontman On New Album: 'We Have About Five Or Six Songs Written So Far'

Justin Donnelly of The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with TESTAMENT frontman Chuck Billy. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

On the band's reunion tour:

"I think that we're beyond the reunion tour thing now, especially now that we've decided to do an album together now. It's simply a return to the original line-up, and that's now been cemented given that everyone's agreed to do the next album. A new album is definitely going to be happening this year. [Alex] Skolnick [guitar] and [Nick] Barker, who has been playing drums for us since last year, have been up in the Bay Area working on writing new material, so we are going to have an album out this year. We have about five or six songs written so far, with the aim of writing about fifteen songs in total. There's one song in particular at the moment that is right in the direction of 'The Gathering', but I would say that it takes it one level higher. I mean it is just a brutal thrash song. It's really, really good. It blew me away when I heard it. 'The Gathering' is one of my favourite TESTAMENT albums, and this one song had me saying to the other guys, 'Guys, if you could write ten more of those, we're going to smoke 'The Gathering' big time!' (Laughs) It would bring TESTAMENT up to a whole new level. Barker did such a great job on this song too. I can't tell you when we'll start recording, but I can tell you that Andy Sneap is going to mix the new album. We actually have time scheduled in April with him I believe. I mean he has a lot of projects on the go at the moment because he's so in demand, so that schedule could blow out a little bit. But we can afford to wait. He knows metal, and he knows exactly what TESTAMENT is trying to do."

On why it's taking so long to record the follow-up to 1999's "The Gathering":

"It's just tough because Skolnick lives in New York, [Greg] Christian [bass] used to live in New York before moving to California, Barker lives in the U.K., [Eric] Peterson [guitar] lives in Sacramento and I live in the Bay Area. So everyone's all over the place. That makes it really tough. It's not like everyone else's band where the band can get together at a local studio and rehearse for the night. It's not that simple, so it's something that needs to be coordinated carefully.'

On Billy's side project DUBLIN DEATH PATROL, which also includes ex-EXODUS/LEGACY co-lead vocalist Steve "Zetro" Souza, SACRED DOG/RAMPAGE/GUILT guitarist Andy Billy, RAMPAGE guitarist Greg Bustamante, OUT OF CONTROL guitarist Steve Robello, MACHINE HEAD/ex-VIO-LENCE guitarist Phil Demmel and LAAZ ROCKIT bassist Willy Langenhuizen:

"The group has been around a long time (as far back as 1997, when the group was given a thanks in the credits on TESTAMENT's 'Demonic' album),but its only really taken on a life of its own within the last year. We've been writing and recording in the last year, and we're currently mixing our debut album right now. The album is pretty close to being completed. We've had a couple of track on the band's MySpace page for a while, but you have to bear in mind that the THIN LIZZY track ('Cold Sweat') wasn't mixed before going up there. But hopefully we'll be able to put up a couple more songs in the near future, along with getting a couple of singles out there. They're being manufactured right now as we speak. We'll start sending them copies out to the press around the world real soon so they can check it out. DUBLIN DEATH PATROL is more of a fun project. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. People need to understand that it's just a bunch of guys that all come from the same town playing together. We've all been friends for like thirty-five years or more, all grown up together since third grade and continued to be friends ever since. It's kind of a unique situation. There are some guys in this band that did well within the business, and we have a lot of guys that played in the local Dublin scene here in the Bay Area when we were growing up. So we kind of have the best of both worlds. Our whole idea was joining those two groups together and making an album with the guys we all grew up listening to. It's just fun. We're hanging out, telling stories of the old days, and the old parties, and it's been really fun! (Laughs) At one point, we had no intentions of releasing the album we had recorded, but then we reached a point where we all thought the album sounded really good, and we took the whole thing a little more serious. So here we are. The album should be out around the start of April. I think we'll release the album ourselves on the DUBLIN DEATH PATROL website, and then if somebody wants to come along and pick it up, we'll see what happens next."

Read the entire interview at www.themetalforge.com.