Last month, BUTCHER BABIES released the official music video for their latest single, “Yorktown”. The song, which features a guest solo from guitarist Andy James (FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH), was produced and co-written by Matt Good (FROM FIRST TO LAST). It is the third taste of the band’s forthcoming EP, tentatively due later this year via an as-yet-undisclosed record label. BUTCHER BABIES previously released the tracks “Bottom Of A Bottle” and “Sleeping With The Enemy”, both of which are also expected to appear on the EP.
BUTCHER BABIES guitarist Henry Flury told the “BODS Mayhem Hour” podcast that the songs for the EP have been done for a while. “We’ve been sitting on this stuff for a long, long time, and we kept it hidden,” he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “Before the pandemic happened, we had this whole rollout, and [we] had a plan. At that time, you could actually plan for things. Crazy enough, you could actually see the future and know what could possibly happen. Not like now where you don’t know what’s gonna happen week to week. So, yeah, we’ve been sitting on that, and then we had to basically push everything back. But it was okay, because no one was really doing anything anyway. I think it would have been a mistake to have released this stuff, and then the pandemic happens, and then you can’t do anything on it; it’s already out there. So it kind of was a blessing and a curse at the same time. But, yeah, we’ve been sitting on the songs for a while now.”
Regarding the songwriting process for BUTCHER BABIES‘ new material, Henry said: “The thing about this EP that was interesting is we went in with Matt Good to do these songs. And he was a much different-style producer than we worked with previously. And that was kind of the point — is to go in with somebody and really shake things up. Basically, the only idea that we brought to the table before we went into the studio with him was ‘Yorktown’, and that was really just a riff. And that was kind of it. Everything else was made up right on the spot. And that is something that we hadn’t done in a long time. So we were able to write right there in the studio, and we would bust out, like, a song a day. And that was kind of how we were working.
“We had ideas before where you just beat ’em into the ground and you can keep reworking ’em, and they just kind of get diluted,” he explained. “And more often than not, those ideas would kind of go away; they just don’t have a spark. There was really nothing there to begin with, and so you keep working on an idea, and then it just doesn’t really develop into anything. In the studio environment with Matt, we were able to basically start an idea, and, like, ‘Yeah. Okay. How about this? And then this chorus.’ And then — boom — we had a song. ‘Bottom Of A Bottle’ came super quick. I had a riff, and I was, like, ‘Okay, yeah, that riff works.’ It was kind of easy, a no-brainer. And then it just developed into a song, and — boom — by the end of the day, we had ‘Bottom Of A Bottle’. That was it. It was shocking. We were, like, ‘Holy shit. We have a song.’ And at that time, it had been a while since we had written anything.”
In July 2019, longtime BUTCHER BABIES bassist Jason Klein announced his departure from the band. He has since been replaced by Ricky Bonazza.
