Venom Unleash Their New Album Hell
Interview with Cronos of Black Metal Legends Venom on New Record
Mar 10, 2008
With the new Venom album Hell about to unleash, uh, hell in a store near you, frontman Cronos talks to Suite 101 about the follow-up to Metal Black.
Suite 101: How's the new album sounding?
Cronos: “It's f***ing awesome. It's a step up from Metal Black because for Metal Black what I wanted to do was just re-establish Venom the way Venom have always been. We took a lot of bad advice over the years – when we did the album Calm Before The Storm, management got this producer guy in who'd worked with Whitesnake and bands like that and it was just like, 'WRONG!'.
It's easy to say that now, it wasn't easy to say that in 1987 when we were just wide-eyed kids, willing to work with these people. But Venom have always done their best work when we listened to ourselves. Nobody helped us do Welcome To Hell and Black Metal and At War With Satan and those are the albums that people hear as Venom's greats. We know what to do anyway, we just need to believe in ourselves more and get rid of these people who don't know anything about this kind of music, basically."
New Venom Guitarist Rage
Suite 101: So Hell is a bit more musically advanced?
Cronos: "Well, the things we didn't want to take a chance with on Metal Black, we have on this album. The riffs aren't as basic, we've played around with it a bit more. It's just as heavy as f***. Rage (new Venom guitarist) is good, he knows about experimenting. It was a bit more difficult to do experimental stuff with the old guitarist because he's the kind of guy who plugs his gear in and says 'well there it is'. He'd say 'why change it?' whereas Rage will just do it. 'Let's try a different amplifier, let's try a different environment, let's record some tracks on a stage...' "
Suite 101: A case of thinking outside the box, you mean?
Cronos: "Totally, and Venom have always done that. We recorded all our own graveyard scenes on Buried Alive, put the microphone in the box and shovelled the muck on top of the box to get the sound effects. It's a bit more fun than working with some producers where they want metal in a box. They turn up and they get the same sound and there's so many metal albums coming out nowadays that have all had the same producer and all f***ing sound the same. Every song has the same guitar sound, the same drum sound and those vocals that go from screamed to clean and back again. It's just formatted sh*t and people should listen to themselves, get deep into where they're coming from and just do their own ideas."
'USA For Satan'
Suite 101: There's a song on there called 'USA For Satan'. Are you going political on us?
Cronos: "No, it's a joke. It's just Venom being controversial as ever. There's also a song called 'Hand Of God' – basically anything that goes wrong, do you blame God for it? When the lightning came and smashed all the tiles on my roof I was gonna go and take the bill to the church and see if the guy would pay it. 'Your boss has screwed up my roof. Pay for my f***ing roof, y' tw*t.' As usual with Venom it's all a little bit of tongue-in-cheek."
Hell is due for release on 2nd June 2008 through Universal/Sanctuary.
Click here for more from Cronos on Venom's influences and the black metal scene.
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