In a new interview with DeWook Tour, ANTHRAX bassist Frank Bello, who is currently promoting his upcoming memoir, “Fathers, Brothers, And Sons: Surviving Anguish, Abandonment, And Anthrax”, was asked if there is one album in the band’s catalog that he would like to go back to and do differently if he had a chance to. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “When I got in the band, it was tunnel vision, man. It was a goal, and we had to do this. So, from ‘Spreading The Disease’… ‘Among The Living’ was the breakthrough; it was a good time in everybody’s life. And that became touring, record — that kind of thing — touring, record. And it was so busy — I mean, we were never home. So there would be so many tours. And every time we finished one tour, somebody would ask us to do another tour. And it was all good to be wanted. But one thing we always — we don’t regret, because it’s still a good record, but I just think some of those songs on ‘State Of Euphoria’, if we just had a little more time to bake them, to really sit [with them]… And I’m being really honest when I say this — we didn’t have enough time, as we do now. Obviously, it’s a different time. But we like to live songs. You play it in your stereo, you go in your car and you take rides and stuff like that. At that time, believe it or not, man, we were in the studio and there was another took booked already as we were in the studio. It was a deadline. And that baking period, I call it, where you just live with the songs, and maybe you take out a verse or a piece of a verse…
“Again, I listen to that record, I still love it, I love the time that it was,” he continued. “It was still very successful. It went gold immediately. It was all good. It was a very great time and all that. But you’re asking me if there’s one regret. I know that record didn’t have enough time to [go through] the process — the ANTHRAX process. And that’s really it.”
Back in 2018, when ANTHRAX released a 30th-anniversary, 2CD deluxe edition of “State Of Euphoria”, drummer Charlie Benante told Billboard about revisiting the period when the LP was recorded: “I took myself back to that time and going through all the motions and moods and pressure we all felt back then. You have to understand, we were only that band for maybe four years at that point. So believe me, man, it was a whirlwind trying to maintain a certain level of continuity between our first three records that we did and ‘State Of Euphoria’. If you compare our arc to what METALLICA, SLAYER and MEGADETH were doing as well back then, our records were all on the same wavelength. ‘Among The Living’ was our ‘Reign In Blood’, our ‘Master Of Puppets’, and those were all, I felt, our signature records. The ones that came out after that weren’t as strong, in my opinion. I don’t think ‘…And Justice For All’ is nearly as strong as ‘Puppets’, though I still love that record, and I don’t think ‘State Of Euphoria’ was as strong as ‘Among’.
“The momentum behind ‘Among The Living’ almost made you have to like our next record,” he said. “And I’m not saying that ‘State Of Euphoria’ was bad; all of us in the band felt that it was not finished. We could have used a little more time with it.”
“State Of Euphoria” was produced by ANTHRAX and Mark Dodson, includes fan favorites “Antisocial” and “Be All, End All”, and was certified gold a few months after release.
