Canada's The Metal Voice recently spoke to Kick Axe co-founder and guitarist Larry Gillstrom about the bands new album, upcoming tour, the bands legacy and how the band was asked to write for other metal bands in the 80's such as Black Sabbath.
When asked who is in the band today
"Still the classic lineup that did three albums in the 80's, with the exception of the vocalist Daniel Nargang who's been singing with the band for 15 years now, longer than anyone else."
When asked if the band is planning on releasing new material
"We've been putting it off for various reasons. But we've been writing the material and wanting to do it for a long time. Daniel (Nargang) actually and myself we really worked hard over sort of the Covid period to come up with the material because we weren't playing anywhere at that time and and so we had the time to do that so we've recorded about six songs.
We wrote a dozen songs but we recorded six of them and most of them are getting close to being ready, there's still some tweaking and working to do but we have two that are ready. We have 'Blackout Crazy' which we just slowly release to test the water and just kind of feel things out because we haven't released anything in a while. We want to just get used to the process of doing this independently and so we need to feel our way through. 'Blackout Crazy' is one of our favorite songs to play live right now, it's three minutes long, it's a lot of fun. The video is mostly just fast edits of all the live material, live performance we've been doing over the last four or five years and so I think it captures the energy that the band still has and we thought that's the best one to lead with and show people that we have not mellowed out that we are still black out crazy."
When will the new album be released?
"Our intention, we can never tell what will happen but uh, I'm working on the video for the second song right now. The second song is in the can ready to go. We're
just trying to set a release date timing for the video and everything. It's going to be a fun video. I'm using a little bit of AI generated characters in it and so it should be fun. So that should be coming out in about three weeks and then somewhere around November (2023) we expect to have a five or six song EP with when we will produce some hard tangible product like CDs, vinyls and stuff like that to go with it. And all this is in preparation for our 2024 tour celebrating 40 years of Vices."
Tell us about the tour in 2024
"We've been friends with a lot of bands in Canada and they've been sort of touching base with us back and forth over the last year or so about putting something together. Killer Dwarfs, Sven Gali, several acts all want to do this sort of thing and we want to just kind of get together and have a strategy for how we're going to put together these things. But we're all into it and we're all committed so you'll probably see these sort of a larger scale two to three four group things going on in 2024 with some of the bands that I've mentioned and others."