NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) legends DIAMOND HEAD have commenced work on the songwriting process for the follow-up to last year’s “The Coffin Train” album.
“For the past six months, that’s all I’ve done almost — just keep working on new ideas and revitalizing old ideas,” guitarist Brian Tatler told MetalAsylum.net in a new interview (see video below). “Sometimes I’ve had a riff for years but it’s never made it into a song, or I’ve always thought I liked that riff but it hasn’t had a chorus maybe — it didn’t get to the final stage where we get vocals on it, and things like that.
“I’ve been doing a lot of preparation for the next album, and I think already I’ve got some great ideas, and I think people will like it,” he continued.
As for the musical direction of the new DIAMOND HEAD material, Brian said: “We’ve done the same thing — it’s ‘stick to the brief.’ We’re trying to make a DIAMOND HEAD album and not go too far in any weird direction. We always use that brief as a way of just keeping it together and not offending anybody.”
Added singer Rasmus Bom Andersen: “We’re not trying to go out on any tangents; we’re just trying to make sure that we echo what is the core part of DIAMOND HEAD and the DIAMOND HEAD sound. Although we are trying to push things a little bit more. It’s 2020, so we’re trying to move things along a little bit without pushing it too much.”
Continued Brian: “The last album was very well received, so we think, okay, well, we can go slightly further. But also, I wanna do an even more powerful album than ‘The Coffin Train’. I’ve got it in mind the sort of record we should make. So I think it’s in hand.”
Asked if fans should expect to see a new DIAMOND HEAD album in 2021, Rasmus said: “We’ll see what the story is gonna be with lockdown. We don’t know when we can get together and actually function as a band again in a writing scenario. So we have to wait and see what happens. But we’re doing all the legwork that we can to get most of the pre-production on the go before we start to work together and we can go outside again and it’s not a nuclear holocaust and all that.”
“The Coffin Train” was recorded at Vigo Studios in Walsall, Circle Studios in Birmingham and Raw Sound Studio in London, and is the second DIAMOND HEAD album to feature Rasmus Bom Andersen, who joined the band in 2014.
Formed in 1976 under the riff-rolling leadership of Tatler, DIAMOND HEAD would quickly establish themselves as a vanguard of the exploding New Wave Of British Heavy Metal scene. With their genre-defining debut album “Lightning To The Nations”, DIAMOND HEAD has influenced and opened gates for many metal bands.
Tatler has repeatedly expressed his gratitude over the years to METALLICA, who have covered four DIAMOND HEAD songs and kept the band in the spotlight.
He said in a 2011 interview: “Without METALLICA, we wouldn’t be going now. We split in 1985 when everything dried up, and we wouldn’t have reformed without them. They’re like DIAMOND HEAD‘s support system — they breathed new life into the band by namechecking us hundreds of times and covering our songs.”
The publishing royalties generated from METALLICA‘s versions of DIAMOND HEAD tracks like “Am I Evil” have kept Tatler afloat. “I don’t know what I would have done without that,” he said. “We never made money in the early days. I was on the dole after we finished — I had nothing left and I was living at home with my parents. I probably wouldn’t have my own house now.”
