Lamb back with record that ‘rules’
Frontman proud of latest release, made shortly after he finished a 500-page memoir
“I wasn’t really worried about making records,” says Randy Blythe of the long, torturous path taken to Lamb of God’s latest album, VII: Sturm und Drang. “I had bigger fish to fry.”
No kidding. The frontman for the Richmond, Va., metal quintet — still the rightful American heirs to an underground-into-mainstream thrash legacy established by such exalted forebears as Slayer, Megadeth and Corrosion of Conformity — spent five weeks in a Czech prison in 2012 after being charged with manslaughter in the death of 19-year-old fan Daniel Nosek, who died from injuries sustained after allegedly being pushed from the stage at a Lamb show in Prague two years earlier.
Blythe was acquitted of those charges and escaped up to 10 further years in jail after returning to Prague to stand trial in 2013. The experience hung heavy over last year’s poignant Lamb of God tour-documentary-turned-unexpected-real-life-legal-drama As the Palaces Burn and the plain-spoken singer now hopes to have “really laid it to rest” with this past July’s release of a memoir entitled Dark Days.
“The final bit of it is done,” he says wearily from a book-tour stopover in New York ahead of the band’s gig with Slipknot and Bullet for My Valentine at the Molson Amphitheatre on Saturday. “This is exactly what happened and, hopefully, nobody will have any more questions. If they do, I’ll be, like: ‘Look, I wrote a 500page book about this.’ ”
Blythe stormed into the sessions for Sturm und Drang “the day after I finished my book,” emboldened by the fact that his bandmates of more than two decades had been woodshedding demos during his extended sabbatical.
For that reason, he considers this latest record — which debuted at No. 1 on Sound Scan’s Canadian Top 200 album-sales chart upon release on July 24 — “a real Lamb of God record” and a proud, personal favourite.
“People like different records,” he says. “‘I like Sacrament better than New American Gospel’ or ‘I like As the Palaces Burn better than Resolution’ or ‘I like Wrath better than whatever.’ That’s cool. But I don’t think, in a major way with our fans, we’ve ever put out a record where everybody just said, ‘That sucks.’
“I know bands that have done that, who just did not put out a good record, and I’m not saying that won’t happen to us. But I’m really, really hoping that it won’t. And with this record, even if every fan in the world said, ‘This record sucks,’ I’d be, like, ‘You’re out of your mind. This record rules. You’re all on drugs.’ Because I do feel that it rules. And I haven’t been able to say that about every single record.”