California thrash metal pioneers DARK ANGEL have officially reunited and entered the studio to start recording their highly anticipated new album.
Yesterday (July 25), DARK ANGEL shared a video message from drummer Gene Hoglan from the studio, where he said: “Hey, everybody. It’s your big buddy Gene here, and I just wanna let you know that I just finished the drums to the new DARK ANGEL record. It’s coming.”
This past May, in an interview with “Rocking With Jam Man,” Hoglan talked about the experience of creating new DARK ANGEL music over 30 years after the release of the band’s last album, 1991’s Time Does Not Heal.
He said: “Well, that’s one thing. It’s like we had a choice. I had an entire DARK ANGEL album written that was ready to start getting recorded after the Time Does Not Heal record, and circumstances occurred where the band just had to dissolve. So, I had a bunch of material written. And when [DARK ANGEL guitarist] Jim Durkin and myself — Jim is no longer with us, but when we put DARK ANGEL back together and we started talking about, like, ‘What do we wanna do for the future? Do we wanna write some new material?’
“And ‘I’ve got some ideas, Gene, and you probably have some ideas.’ And I have a number of songs that I sent to Jim. And when Jim heard that — I sent it to him on a CD — he freaked out and he was, like, ‘My God, here’s our new album. This is gonna be our next record. Hell yeah.’ And he got really excited about that material. But I was, like, ‘Hey, Jim, tell you what. I feel really strongly about my writing chops, and the songs I’m hearing from you right now are crushing. So how about we just write new stuff, get together and start writing new material?’ And so we kind of went that route.”
“For my elements of what I wanted DARK ANGEL to sound like, Jim Durkin is a huge influence on my writing style. So I wanted this to have a lot of the Jim Durkin influence on it. In terms of riffs, there’s not as many from Jim as we were hoping for, but Jim‘s entire presence is all over the new DARK ANGEL material that I’ve been working on. And he’s a huge guitar influence on me, as well as a lot of people. So, there’s definitely gonna be a pretty hardy Jim Durkin influence. And I just wanna write a kick-a*s metal album. So what I’ve tried to do is not go back 35 years or 37 years or whatever, Darkness Descends or even We Have Arrived, those early albums, or Leave Scars or Time Does Not Heal, I’ve not tried to duplicate anything from any of those albums, but I tried to put myself in the mindset of what if DARK ANGEL just kept writing albums for the last 30-whatever years, 32, 33 years, where would we be at now? And so that has been my approach on the new DARK ANGEL material.”
Durkin, an original member of DARK ANGEL, passed away on March 8, 2023, at the age of 58. He played on the band’s first three albums—1985’s We Have Arrived, 1986’s Darkness Descends, and 1989’s Leave Scars—before leaving the group in 1989. When DARK ANGEL reformed in 2013, he rejoined and had been performing with them intermittently ever since.
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