OVERKILL is scheduled to enter the studio on Monday, September 14 to begin recording its new album for a tentative April 2021 release via Nuclear Blast.
Earlier today, OVERKILL drummer Jason Bittner posted a photo of some of the equipment he will be using during the recording sessions, and he included the following caption: “COVID won’t stop the new OVERKILL record from being made…..tracking starts a week from this Monday……holy shit that’s soon…..I’d like to send a HUGE shoutout to a few of my endorsers that know a time crunch and are still here for me during these rough times!!!”
Last month, Bittner said that OVERKILL had demoed 11 songs for the upcoming album. He told BODS Mayhem Hour about the songwriting process: “The way we normally do records is we work on everything ourselves, and then we take a week where we go down to New Jersey and everybody gets together. And we’ll work on, like, two songs a day and just bust it out for five or six days and then get everything together. But this one may be a little bit more of us getting it together from our homes and doing a lot more online discussion and stuff about things rather than us actually playing it. So, we’ll see.”
Asked if the 11 tracks are pretty much the ones that will make up the next OVERKILL album or if there will be more material written for the LP, Jason said: “My guess would be that what we have right now is what’s gonna be on the record. We’re generally not a band that writes extra songs. It’s kind of like you write what you need for the album and you write another one for Japan, [which] always needs an extra B-side. And that’s pretty much it. We don’t do that METALLICA thing of, ‘Let’s write 30 songs and pick 10 of the best ones.’ I think it’s definitely a better idea to just concentrate on doing 10 great songs rather than having six throwaways or whatever.”
This past June, OVERKILL singer Bobby “Blitz” Ellsworth told A&P Reacts about the musical direction of the band’s new songs: “I see it as a natural progression from ‘The Grinding Wheel’ [2017] and ‘The Wings Of War’ [2019]. It think when we had done the ‘Ironbound’ record [2010], it almost became like a trilogy in there — it was kind of like ‘Ironbound’, ‘The Electric Age’ [2012] and ‘White Devil Armory’ [2014], and they seemed to be the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost kind of a thing. I think we kind of broke the mold a little bit with ‘The Grinding Wheel’, and then I think a little bit more with ‘The Wings Of War’. And on this one, I see it way more. And what I mean by that is that we’ve used other tools from our toolshed in the past, and that’s the slow grind that is coupled with that fast gallop. So it feels like a natural progression, but maybe two records ahead of what ‘The Wings Of War’ is. And that’s probably as objective as I can be.”
OVERKILL has spent most of the last year touring in support of its 19th studio LP, “The Wings Of War”, which was released in February 2019.
Tracking begins very soon…..
Posted by Overkill on Saturday, September 5, 2020
