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Official Death Source Says There Will Never be a Second Control Denied Album :(

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The spectre of Death looms large in metal 15 years after Chuck Schuldiner’s passing. Look no further than our recent interview with one-time Death drummer Richard Christy on The MetalSucks Podcast, which was one of our more popular episodes of late. Meanwhile the band’s official, posthumous Facebook page has nearly 1 million likes, and serves not just as a tribute to the great Schuldiner, but an outlet for the band’s estate to sell album reissues and other merchandise that fans eat up with ravenous abandon, and to keep us all informed of Death-related happenings.

Case in point: one fan took last week’s announcement of Death pint glasses for sale (heyo great holiday gift!) to ask about the status of Control Denied, the late-career project Schuldiner created to explore death metal’s more melodic side. Control Denied only ever released one album before Schuldiner became ill and eventually succumbed to cancer in 2001, but a second album, When Man and Machine Collide, had been partly recorded and has been the subject of rumors and speculation ever since. In 2010, Death’s estate attorney Eric Grief won back the album’s rights from their former label, Karmageddon Media, and plans were allegedly being made for the most recent lineup of Control Denied — Christy on drums, Shannon Hamm on guitars, Steve DiGiorgio on bass and Tim Aymar on vocals — to finish it up and release it to the public. Sadly, those plans never progressed beyond just that — plans — which, of course, didn’t stop fans from speculating and hoping in the ensuing six years.

But now it seems a fairly safe assumption that new Control Denied music will never see the light of day, at least in any official capacity. In response to the above fan’s question, an admin of the page who signed the note solely “E” — but who MetalSucks has confirmed via email is Greif — shut down any last bastion of hope:

The Jim Morris in question, of course, is the proprietor of the legendary Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida, with whom Chuck (and also every legendary death metal artist ever) collaborated on several albums.

While that’s unfortunate news, I’m inclined to think it’s better off this way: the last thing we need is some half-baked version of an album allegedly finished “just as Chuck would’ve wanted.” We have no fucking idea what he would’ve wanted, and some things are better just left alone.

And we’ll always have this to enjoy:

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