New Anthrax Could Come Next Year, According to Bassist Frank Bello
While Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante is out on tour with the current iteration of Pantera and Scott Ian’s busy with some Mr. Bungle dates, Anthrax is in the middle of working on their follow up to 2016’s For All Kings.
Recently, various members of the band have said that work’s been steady as she goes on the new record. While speaking with Ultimate Guitar, bassist Frank Bello gave yet another update on how the process has been going.
t”What Anthrax does these days, we do a bunch of songs together, like a bulk of the songs. I think we have eight or nine right now. And we’ll keep writing. I think that’s important. That’s how we did the last record, and it came out the way we wanted it to. We have a good bulk of songs right now that we know already. But we still wanna have a couple of more. So that’s the way we go. We’ll digest these for a while. I’ll do my bass next month. Then vocals will come on and we’ll have this locked up. And then we’ll start writing a few more songs. Then we’ll choose what’s best for the record and how the record goes. We’re hoping — I’m praying, ’cause it’s been a while, man — [to have the album out] next year. It’s been, I think, almost eight years from the last record. I wanna have a record out. We all do. I can’t wait to play new songs — all this stuff. I wanna go on tour. But it’s gotta be right.”
Given the fact that we’ve experienced a pandemic and the resulting lockdowns since the last Anthrax album, Bello was asked if they’d managed to use that time to begin prototyping the new music.
“We actually got together periodically. But during the pandemic, when everything was locked down — I live in New York; we were really locked down. It was really ridiculous when it first started. And everybody was doing their jamming over the Internet and all that. That’s great. I think that satisfied a lot of people. I thought that was great. That was fun. But with Anthrax, the three of us have to be in a room and looking at each other and vibing. And it’s spontaneous and it’s locked in. And you do it like this [via video], and I love this, but the latency — there’s a second delay. Imagine just jamming like that, it’s, like, ‘What’d you play there?’ And it stops the vibe. And all of a sudden you’re taking apart the song for no reason. It’s, like, ‘All right. This isn’t the way to do it. We have to get together.’ So that’s what we did. And I think it was a smart move because we won’t put out anything we don’t live. And it’s gotta be right. It’s gotta be exactly the record we’re coming out with. That’s who we are.”
So there you have it. If you’re waiting for new Anthrax album, you’ve got a while to go. Here’s hoping the new one will be a banger.
