Anthrax Should Finish Recording New Album By End Of ’23
Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian was recently a guest of SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” and talked about how far along the band was in recording their next studio album, saying, “Not far. But we had a session here in L.A. Charlie (drummer; Benante), Frankie (bassist; Bello) and I tracked nine songs. I finished the guitars on those right before we went to New York, so I don’t know — sometime end of June; something like that. Frankie is currently in L.A. tracking bass on those nine songs. I’m going to the studio Friday… Since I’ve had time, like a month, to live with my guitar tracks, I’ve heard like lots of things that I think are very cool to kind of add. So I’m going in on Friday and spending a day doing some overdubs. Donais (guitarist) is already working on solos back east at his home studio. And I am working on lyrics. So I think we’re well into it, let’s put it that way. There’s gonna be another recording session October, maybe November. Charlie’s got these two windows to get in, ’cause we have another four or five we want to track. We’re hoping, if things just stay on the very loose schedule we have, I’d like to think by Christmas, New Year’s, we’ll have most of this wrapped up. Maybe not mixed, but certainly all recorded by then.”
Scott continued, “My goal is to have three songs ready for (Anthrax singer Joey Belladonna) to start on next month. Joey, it doesn’t take him very long. Once he kind of wraps his head around it and kind of runs it through his filter, he’s a fast worker. So once he starts, it doesn’t take long. It’s more, I think, the onus on me of being happy with the lyrics I’m writing. ‘Cause I actually had, like, three or four songs written months ago, and then I revisited them like a month ago and I threw ’em all in the garbage; I was, like, ‘This is crap.’ But I’m in a much better place with that now.”
And here’s what you can expect as far as musical direction, “Certainly of the nine [songs] we’ve tracked so far, and, of course, the rough kind of demos we have of some of the stuff we haven’t tracked with drums yet, from a riff point of view, it’s definitely — I mean it’s riffs with all capital letters. Like if you were going to write, you would write ‘riffs’ in all capitals with an exclamation point. The riffs are killer. It’s very riff-centric. There’s a lot of faster uptempo material, certainly.”
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Scott added, “I will say there is a song — I won’t say any titles yet, ’cause it’s still probably a working title — there’s definitely one song, it’s the fastest thing we’ve ever done. There’s another song that we haven’t recorded yet that’s also in the vein, more of a ‘Gung-Ho’ or a ‘Caught In A Mosh’. Because Charlie and I talk all the time. I said, ‘We still need something that’s like a three-and-a-half-minute just ripper. You know, something like that.’ And then we come up with something like that and I’m, like, ‘Hey, I forgot I’m 60 now, and now I have to play this song for the next three years.’ Just make my life harder.”
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Scott was a guest of Full Metal Jackie’s nationally syndicated radio show back in July ’21 and said, “We’ve been at it for a little while now. We actually started writing in ’19 — pre-COVID — and kind of stepped away from things when COVID happened. We were all separate and apart and we would kind of revisit some of the demos, but we weren’t actively working on it.”
Looks like we’ll have a new Anthrax album sooner than later. Great news, ain’t it?
