THE DEAD DAISIES — the hard rock “collective” founded by Australian musician and businessman David Lowy — will release its fifth album, “Holy Ground”, on January 22, 2021. The LP was recorded at La Fabrique Studios in the south of France with producer Ben Grosse. The follow-up to 2018’s “Burn It Down”, will be the band’s first to feature Glenn Hughes (DEEP PURPLE, BLACK COUNTRY COMMUNION), who joined the group last year as its new bassist and vocalist, replacing John Corabi (MÖTLEY CRÜE) and Marco Mendoza (THIN LIZZY).
In a new interview with Rock Titan, THE DEAD DAISIES guitarist Doug Aldrich discussed the band’s latest personnel shuffles, explaining (see video below): “When you make a change, obviously, you always have a possibility that you’re gonna alienate some fans, and some fans are gonna be super happy, and some won’t be. ‘Cause everyone loves Corabi. Corabi and Glenn are friends, and Marco and Glenn are friends. But the thing, I think, you don’t wanna do is just try and replace somebody with the same kind of a thing; I think it’s really good to mix it up a little bit. And that’s why I was really excited about Glenn, ’cause I knew that the sound of THE DAISIES‘ music is gonna alter a little bit, but we were gonna have Deen [Castronovo, drums] and David and I as a common thread. And then bringing Glenn in on top of that, it just worked out amazing.
“I’ll tell you what really helped, too, for us to jell,” he continued. “We went to the south of France to write and record the record, ‘Holy Ground’, last year. We were writing in the fall, and I’d go down to Glenn‘s and we’d do a bit of writing there, and he had some songs I helped him demo, so he could present those. Then we went to France, and we all sat down and put in our ideas, with the producer Ben Grosse, and put together the songs that we thought were gonna be the best ones. I think there was probably 15 songs at the first break, and then we went back in December and recorded 12, and that’s what you have on the album. It just turned out really well. The cool thing was we were locked in this French kind of — it was like a country home. The thing is I never even left the facility. We would sleep there, we would come down for breakfast and have breakfast, lunch and dinner together as a band and a team, and it really helped us jell and focus. It wouldn’t have been the same if we had done it in L.A. Now we’ve gone through the process, and we feel like a band already with Glenn, although we haven’t done any shows. So that’s the next step.”
Last month, THE DEAD DAISIES released a new digital EP, “The Lockdown Sessions”, via Steamhammer/SPV. The effort contains four acoustic tracks, all of them exclusive to this EP: “Unspoken”, “Righteous Days” and a cover version of the HUMBLE PIE classic “30 Days In The Hole”, along with a stripped back version of “Fortunate Son”, featuring Castronovo on lead vocals.
