VENOM Frontman Discusses Forthcoming Album 'Hell'

Paul Travers of Suite 101 recently conducted an interview with VENOM frontman Conrad "Cronos" Lant about the group's forthcoming album, "Hell". An excerpt from the chat follows.

Suite 101: How's the new album sounding?

Cronos: "It's f***ing awesome. It's a step up from 'Metal Black' because for 'Metal Black' what I wanted to do was just re-establish VENOM the way VENOM have always been. We took a lot of bad advice over the years when we did the album 'Calm Before The Storm', management got this producer guy in who'd worked with WHITESNAKE and bands like that and it was just like, WRONG! It's easy to say that now, it wasn't easy to say that in 1987 when we were just wide-eyed kids, willing to work with these people. But VENOM have always done their best work when we listened to ourselves. Nobody helped us do 'Welcome To Hell' and 'Black Metal' and 'At War With Satan' and those are the albums that people hear as VENOM's greats. We know what to do anyway, we just need to believe in ourselves more and get rid of these people who don't know anything about this kind of music, basically."

Suite 101: So "Hell" is a bit more musically advanced?

Cronos: "Well, the things we didn't want to take a chance with on 'Metal Black', we have on this album. The riffs aren't as basic, we've played around with it a bit more. It's just as heavy as f***. Rage (new VENOM guitarist) is good, he knows about experimenting. It was a bit more difficult to do experimental stuff with the old guitarist because he's the kind of guy who plugs his gear in and says 'well there it is'. He'd say 'why change it?' whereas Rage will just do it. 'Let's try a different amplifier, let's try a different environment, let's record some tracks on a stage...' "

Suite 101: A case of thinking outside the box, you mean?

Cronos: "Totally, and VENOM have always done that. We recorded all our own graveyard scenes on 'Buried Alive', put the microphone in the box and shovelled the muck on top of the box to get the sound effects. It's a bit more fun than working with some producers where they want metal in a box. They turn up and they get the same sound and there's so many metal albums coming out nowadays that have all had the same producer and all f***ing sound the same. Every song has the same guitar sound, the same drum sound and those vocals that go from screamed to clean and back again. It's just formatted sh*t and people should listen to themselves, get deep into where they're coming from and just do their own ideas."

Read more at Suite 101.