Richie Faulkner has given Guitar World an update on the new Judas Priest album, and the guitarist promises that the metal gods’ new material “sounds fantastic.”
“The future for Priest is looking quite bright at the moment,” Faulkner states.
“Obviously, we faced some challenges with schedules due to the pandemic,” the guitarist tells Guitar World’s Greg Prato. “We wanted to keep it the same dynamic as [2018’s] Firepower, as we all got together, played the songs in pre-production before recording them. Obviously, we haven’t been able to do that in the last 18 months because of the pandemic.
“So, we’ve got a ton of stuff written and a ton of songs almost ready to go. We just need to get together and start playing them together and ‘trimming the fat,’ as they say.
“You get a sense of that when you play them together – you get a feeling for ‘we need an extra bit here’ or ‘we need to trim that bit there.’ Just to sharpen those songs up and give them the last 20 percent.
“So, once we are able to do that, we can get in a room together, play them, trim the fat, and record them, we will. But we’ve got a bunch of songs that are pretty ready to go and they sound fantastic. We just want to put them down properly and release them to the world. So, I can’t give you a date, but as soon as we can, we’ll get in there and start work on that.”
Priest bassist Ian Hill recently told US newspaper The Morning Call (via Loudwire) that the British metal legends have enough new material for two new albums, with Faulkner and Glenn Tipton pooling their ideas.
“They sort of formulate songs out of those ideas and when they have sort of a rough working track, myself and Scott [Travis, drums] get a copy of that and we'll put our bass lines and drum patterns down and we'll go from there,” he said.
The bassist admits it's been “a messy process” working in this manner, and expressed his eagerness get back into a room with his bandmates.
“It's much easier and it's more real doing it that way, as well,” he said. “You pick up off everybody's vibe anyway. So it's preferable to do it face-to-face, when we're all together.”
