Ilias “Nerevarine” Kytidis of Greece’s Rock Overdose recently conducted an interview with bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker of reactivated British extreme metal pioneers CARCASS. You can listen entire interview via audio player below.
Speaking about the recording sessions for CARCASS‘s comeback album, 2013’s “Surgical Steel”, Walker said: “It started out fun and then turned into complete torture. It took a lot longer than we expected. And gradually some of the fun that we had got squeezed out of the sessions. It just took too long working with Colin Richardson and the guy who was engineering it. I think in reality, ‘cause we weren’t doing it to tape, we were doing it digitally… in the old days when you caught it to tape, you had to make instant decisions. One of the main problems with modern technology and digital is, you can do many takes and just keep going and keep going and leave the decision making until later. It just took longer than we anticipated, I don’t know… it took months you know.”
Asked what the inspiration was for making a new CARCASS album, Walker said: “Carcass! We wanted to make it up for them so that’s what we did! You know, we’re inspired from playing live after we reformed. I think we just wanted to prove, we attempted at least, to try and prove something, that we can still cut it. I don’t know if we succeeded or not, that’s up to the listener. But you know… we felt we had another album in us, so we thought why not? We wanted to see what this stuff sounded like, and if it was any good we would pursue it. And we liked what we were coming up with, so we wanted to share it with other people.
“Surgical Remission / Surplus Steel”, a collection of previously unreleased and hard-to-find tracks from CARCASS, sold around 1,840 copies in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at position No. 27 on the Billboard Hard Rock chart. All the songs were recorded during the “Surgical Steel” sessions, which was produced by Colin Richardson and mixed/mastered by Andy Sneap.
“Surgical Remission / Surplus Steel” was made available on physical and digital formats via Nuclear Blast.
“Surgical Steel” sold around 8,500 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 41 on The Billboard 200 chart. The CD was released on September 16, 2013 in the U.K., September 13, 2013 in the rest of Europe and September 17, 2013 in North America via Nuclear Blast Records.
Interview (audio):
