EXODUS Guitarist GARY HOLT: Next Album Will 'Blow People's Minds'

The German edition of Metal Hammer magazine conducted an interview with guitarist Gary Holt of San Francisco Bay Area thrashers EXODUS at this year's installment of the Graspop Metal Meeting, which was held on June 26-28, 2009 on the festival grounds of the Boeretang in Dessel, Belgium.

When asked about EXODUS' plans for a new studio album, Holt said, "Hopefully we're hitting the studio around November 1 with Mr. Sneap [British producer Andy Sneap; MEGADETH, NEVERMORE, ARCH ENEMY]. It's gonna be sick. We have four [songs] recorded [and left over] from the last session [for 2007's 'The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A'], and I've got, like, nine [other tracks] I'm working on, and Lee [Altus, guitar] has a bunch of stuff. But this next album is gonna blow people's minds."

Regarding the upcoming CD's musical direction, Holt said, "There's a couple of twists on this. I try not to repeat every album. I mean, we did 'Tempo Of The Damned' [2004], [which was] a little more old-school, and we did 'Shovel Headed Kill Machine' [2005], which was really brutal and fast, and then 'The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A' [2007], [which] was, like, longer and more epic songs. So this album's gonna have some different stuff to it. Maybe a little more dual-guitar stuff, 'cause I've been playing with Lee for quite awhile now — a little more dual-guitar harmony shred stuff. "

Watch Metal Hammer's interview with Gary Holt at this location.

A new two-minute trailer for "Assorted Atrocities", the forthcoming EXODUS three-disc DVD/CD set, can be viewed below. Due late summer, the package will contain the band's July 2008 performance at Germany's Wacken Open Air festival, plus a 105-minute documentary following the band through the last five years of touring as well as about 45 minutes of bonus footage, with photo galleries and all of the group's promotional videos. The set will consist of two DVDs plus an audio CD of the Wacken performance.

EXODUS will perform its classic debut album, "Bonded By Blood", in its entirety each night of the band's Thrash Domination 2009 tour in Japan in September. Also appearing on the bill are KREATOR, TESTAMENT and HEATHEN.

British extreme metal drumming legend Nick Barker (CRADLE OF FILTH, TESTAMENT, DIMMU BORGIR, BRUJERIA, ATROCITY) filled in for EXODUS' Tom Hunting during the band's recent European tour with OVERKILL.

In a recent interview with Away-Team, EXODUS drummer Tom Hunting stated about the band's decision to re-record its seminal 1985 debut album, "Bonded By Blood", and release it under the title "Let There Be Blood", "Well, that is something that we had talked about with our former manager, who runs a record label also, and at the time we were doing that, when we agreed to do that was before we even recorded 'The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A', but it was something, you know, we wanted to put those songs out there...not...not as a competition with 'Bonded By Blood', the original, but just more like a companion record and to kind of show what the band sounds like now and what they could expect to hear those songs to sound like live now because it's with the current lineup. And, I mean, we're happy with it. It came out great and we didn't spend a lot of time on it like we did on 'Atrocity' because, you know, we like to spend more time on the new material obviously, plus we should know them songs, we've been playing them for, fucking, twenty-seven years now or something crazy. I really do this, my personal...I really do this for the creation of the new music. I like when a riff is first spat out to me, to the time we record it, you know, it's like building a sandwich."