Metal Anarchy

During a recent appearance on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk,” Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian offered an update on the band’s new album. The guitarist is hoping to finish the recording process by the end of the year.

Ian said the following when asked how much progress the band have made:

“Not far. But we had a session here in L.A. Charlie [Benante], Frankie [Bello] and I tracked nine songs. I finished the guitars on those right before we went to New York, so I don’t know — sometime end of June; something like that. Frankie is currently in L.A. tracking bass on those nine songs. I’m going to the studio Friday… Since I’ve had time, like a month, to live with my guitar tracks, I’ve heard like lots of things that I think are very cool to kind of add. So I’m going in on Friday and spending a day doing some overdubs. [Jonathan] Donais is already working on solos back east at his home studio. And I am working on lyrics. So I think we’re well into it, let’s put it that way. There’s gonna be another recording session October, maybe November. Charlie’s got these two windows to get in, ’cause we have another four or five [songs] we want to track. We’re hoping, if things just stay on the very loose schedule we have, I’d like to think by Christmas, New Year’s, we’ll have most of this wrapped up. Maybe not mixed, but certainly all recorded by then.

My goal is to have three songs ready for [Joey Belladonna] to start on next month. Joey, it doesn’t take him very long. Once he kind of wraps his head around it and kind of runs it through his filter, he’s a fast worker. So once he starts, it doesn’t take long. It’s more, I think, the onus on me of being happy with the lyrics I’m writing. ‘Cause I actually had, like, three or four songs written months ago, and then I revisited them like a month ago and I threw ’em all in the garbage; I was, like, ‘This is crap.’ But I’m in a much better place with that now.”

He also added the following about the musical direction:

“Certainly of the nine [songs] we’ve tracked so far, and, of course, the rough kind of demos we have of some of the stuff we haven’t tracked with drums yet, from a riff point of view, it’s definitely — I mean it’s riffs with all capital letters. Like if you were going to write, you would write ‘riffs’ in all capitals with an exclamation point. The riffs are killer. It’s very riff-centric. There’s a lot of faster uptempo material, certainly.

I will say there is a song — I won’t say any titles yet, ’cause it’s still probably a working title — there’s definitely one song, it’s the fastest thing we’ve ever done. There’s another song that we haven’t recorded yet that’s also in the vein, more of a ‘Gung-Ho’ or a ‘Caught In A Mosh’. Because Charlie and I talk all the time. I said, ‘We still need something that’s like a three-and-a-half-minute just ripper. You know, something like that.’ And then we come up with something like that and I’m, like, ‘Hey, I forgot I’m 60 now, and now I have to play this song for the next three years.’ Just make my life harder.”

[via Blabbermouth]