The time has arrived for legendary bay area thrash metal giants Testament to unleash new thunder to the masses with their thirteenth studio album, Titans Of Creation, which will be released on April 3 via Nuclear Blast. The band are also heading down under for this year’s Download Festival so we caught up frontman Chuck Billy to discuss the tour and the new songs.
Andrew: Thanks for your time, we are very excited to see you coming back to Australia!
Chuck: About time right? [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] When was the last time? It must have been about 6 years ago for Soundwave Festival right?
Chuck: Yeah 2014.
Andrew: Well there you go, so it’s been a while and good timing because you just announced the release of “Titans Of Creation” album as well.
Chuck: Yeah perfect timing!
Andrew: Awesome well let’s get into the touring side of things first before we get into the album. Obviously coming for Download Festival and a couple of sideshows, it’s been a while since you’ve been here so what are we expecting? Are you going to be playing a lot of new material or a bit of everything?
Chuck: On the Download we’ll probably be playing two new songs and definitely some classics. The last couple of tours we’ve been focusing on the newer record so I think it’s going to be a good set, when we came in 2014 we were still touring off of “The Dark Roots Of Earth” record so there’s lots of new music since we were there last at Soundwave.
Andrew: Festivals is obviously a different experience from the club shows and you are doing both types of shows this time so do you have a preference at all between the two or is it all the same to you?
Chuck: Na every show you give the best you can do but it’s always nicer for the fans to definitely give a longer show, a headline show where we can play an hour and a half or so rather than the…I don’t know what Download is giving us but I would imagine it’s 45 minutes or something, like 8 or 9 songs.
Andrew: Yeah and I guess with the festival and a shorter set, that must be quite difficult to compress a set down to that time constraint then.
Chuck: Yeah and that’s when we all kind of throw our opinions out there like, ‘No this song, no that one’. It’s difficult to put a short setlist together.
Andrew: Do you guys like to switch the setlist from show to show or do you like to keep the same thing for every gig?
Chuck: It depends, like if we’re on a long tour or a headline tour we like to keep it the same set, keep it consistent especially for longer tours. Sometimes on a shorter tour where we are opening or something like that we might switch up some songs sometimes. I know for this tour coming up in Europe we’re planning to switch up a couple of songs in the set just to change it up every now and then.
Andrew: Yeah I love when bands bust out some obscure stuff as well but it’s hard to go past some of those classics I guess. I mean those songs that you have been playing for many years now, do you still enjoy playing them as much as when you first started playing them?
Chuck: Yeah very much so and I think that’s kind of why they stay in the set because some of the songs are just built to be live songs and they just go over well live and they feel good to play live. It’s part of the show and that’s the hardest part is we’ve been playing a lot of them so like, ‘Yeah let’s play some new songs’. But the fans they still want to hear some of that stuff especially Australia where we haven’t been there since 2014 so we’ve got a lot of new stuff to play so it makes it even harder like, ‘Ok they haven’t heard this yet, we haven’t been here’, so we want to try to play some stuff that we know we haven’t played before because it wasn’t out yet!
Andrew: Well we are definitely looking forward to hearing some of the later stuff at these shows for sure but obviously you have a new album coming out in April. “Titans Of Creation” is a pretty cool title, where did that name come from?
Chuck: Well it was a name that I think just kind of “Poofed” into the air magically because we were tossing around title names for months, we had seen some of the artwork and the titles that we had just kind of didn’t fit. We were coming up with a bunch and not really happy with them but they were ok but we didn’t have anything better yet and then one day I think it was Eric [Peterson, guitars] that had thought of Titans Of Creation and it just kind of made sense and it really fit the artwork. It was kind of us being titans, we have been playing together for a long time and I feel at the later years we probably wrote some of our best records and best music, a lot of bands don’t get to do that when they have a long career, they tend to not keep up with their earlier and some of their better stuff so I don’t think that’s our case.
Andrew: Yeah I agree, I think your latest stuff has been absolutely on par with everything else you’ve done in the past. Even the album cover, it does remind me of some of those earlier Testament album covers as well.
Chuck: Yeah totally, it’s very colorful and to me it feels very positive and upbeat. When we first designed the cover it was actually kind of dark and it felt like, ‘Well this is kind of dark, I feel like we need to be more like in the universe and just more massive’. So he [Eliran Kantor, artist] went at it and he did a good job, came up with it and feeling really good.
Andrew: Yeah it looks very cool and I love how the blue stands out as well. There’s a lot of songs on here that I guess could be up for interpretation when you just look at the titles, was there an ongoing theme at all with some of the lyrics on these new songs?
Chuck: Well when we first started working on the record, I think I was still in the ancient alien mode like on the “Brotherhood Of The Snake” record and I think the first song we wrote completely was “Children Of The Next Level” about the Heaven’s Gate cult. You know, waiting for a meteor to land to take off for the next level. So it kind of started there and I thought we would continue on that but I think I kind of took a turn, some of the songs on the record have a real Egyptian or Eastern sound. Songs like “Code Of Hammurabi” or “Ishtar’s Gate”, songs like that definitely have a different metal feel if you know what I mean, like a basic typical feeling. So it kind of strayed away a little bit from that, next thing you know we started writing more about serial killers and mass suicides and some cult stuff and it made the song’s identity stand more on their own. So I think it’s probably best that we did it this way, that we felt each song and approached it the way it felt or made me feel I guess.
Andrew: And you started off with “Night Of The Witch” as the first single and it’s a killer song, it’s really quite aggressive as well. Was there any particular reason you wanted this song to be the lead single from the album?
Chuck: Well it was always one that we really thought was good and heavy and the riffs were really rhythmic and almost mesmerizing, it just friggin’ pounded. You can see the pit start to do it’s thing [laughs]. I thought it would be interesting when we picked it that it might show another side of Testament because in that song Eric gets to sing the choruses and it’s definitely a different voice than mine but it added just another dimension and texture to the song and I thought it worked and I thought why not use one that’s a little different that maybe nobody has heard in a Testament record with Eric singing the chorus! So I thought it would be a good surprise in the song so we decided let’s just go with that one.
Andrew: Yeah I think this would definitely go down very well live. When you went in to write and record the album, and I don’t know if you do this on any of the albums at all but do you ever think about how the songs would actually translate to the live stage?
Chuck: Not really until I hear them…once they’re mixed and you hear it sounding like a record, that’s when you really start hearing the possibilities of the live show. Because when you’re doing a demo or got raw tracks, it’s so raw it’s too much in your face so you don’t get the vibe. So I think once the record was complete, that’s when we thought, ‘Ok this is going to be killer live’.
Andrew: I’m curious with the process of songwriting and the recording aspect of it as well, I know you guys have gone through some different members over the years but has the core element as far as what Testament does as far as writing and recording changed over the years or have you kept it the same since day one?
Chuck: No it’s changed a lot. I mean for the first 6 records when we were with Atlantic and at the end of the contract for those 6 records, Alex (Skolnick, guitars) and Louie (Clemente, ex-drums) were gone and I think at that point a lot of the songwriting was mainly on Eric. When Alex and the original guys came back in 2005, we were just touring but when we decided to write a record together, Eric really took control still of the writing process and Alex came in – Alex has always been good to analyse what we’re doing and then say, ‘Oh maybe you should try this’, or, ‘This chord doesn’t work with that very well’. So he always has some good ideas when it comes to putting it all together, help out a lot but I think the process now especially since we don’t live near each other – Alex is in New York and Gene [Hoglan, drums] is in San Diego and Eric is in Sacramento. Me and Steve [DiGiorgio, bass] are the only ones that live near each other so a lot of the writing is done with riffs and sending it by email and everybody working at their own studio at home and doing their thing with ideas.
We didn’t get to do a demo on this record which usually we try to get a demo done, we didn’t do one on this one or the last one. We just dove into the studio with a bunch of riffs and a bunch of ideas and a bunch of lyrics and just said, ‘Ok let’s go, let’s put it all together’ and that’s where it really started being created. So I think it’s a good process, I mean it’s not the best but when you go in the studio and sit there and bash your head around all day trying to write songs, I don’t know if that’s just the way it is. When we were younger, yeah we couldn’t wait to go to the studio and drink beer and smoke weed and hang out and jam, that was a cool place to go but now the studio is like, ‘I don’t wanna go there!’ Things have changed but we don’t really need to rehearse a lot because we play a lot of our songs when we go on tour, we just meet everybody up at the show like, ‘Alright we’ll see you at the next tour!’ Because we’re pretty fine tuned and then when we get there we’ll do soundcheck and we’re like ok, everything comes right back and the guys are very good musicians and we’re very fortunate that guys like that are playing on the record. It just makes it easy because they are just so talented and do a great job on it.
Andrew: Yeah it’s a killer lineup of musicians, Gene Hoglan just by himself is a phenomenal drummer but all of you guys have been killing it on the last few albums so I’m very much looking forward to hearing the rest of this album. Before I let you go do you have any last words for the Aussie fans before you come down to Australia for Download?
Chuck: Well I’ve been waiting 5 years seriously to get back there, I’ve got some friends and everybody has probably heard me doing an interview, they always ask me what’s my favorite place to go and I always say Australia. It reminds me because I’m from California, that the people are very friendly, very laid back, everybody is easy goers, no problem. And it’s just killer beaches, killer people, good memories when I went there for vacation so I look forward to getting back there, making new friends, get to play some music, it’s going to be awesome!
TESTAMENT TOUR DATES
Download Festival
Melbourne: Friday March 20 – Showgrounds
Sydney: Saturday March 21 – The Domain
Tickets at downloadfestival.com.au/tickets
Sideshow
Brisbane: Sun March 22 – The Triffid
Tickets: livenation.com.au
