The Italian emperors of Tech death metal "Hour Of Penance" are back again with another masterpiece! I had the chance to do an interview with Giulio (Guitars / Backing Vocals) about their new release REGICIDE.
-Let's start by a brief history of "Hour Of Penance".
G : Well it’s very hard to write a “brief” history of the band since everything started now back in 1999 and this year makes 15 year of the band career. Let’s just say Prosthetic Records just released our sixth album on May 12 worldwide and that we’re going to tour as much as we can to support the album . You can hear the whole album in full on spotify now or on youtube.
- Talk to me a little bit about the new release "REGICIDE"!
G : As i said above , our new and sixth album REGICIDE came out about two weeks ago now , and it’s getting a great feedback so far. We played already a couple of new songs on tour and our fans seems to be very into our new material. Unlikely our old albums.. Regicide features 14 brand new songs that we managed to write in less than a year.
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- What makes "regicide" different from your previous albums ?
G: First of all the songwriting , i think we were able to show our fans a different version of Hour of Penance this time without changing too much and staying true to our trademark. We have a new drummer and a new bass player on the album and both did a great job with their instruments , the drum sounds is the most organic and natural we’ve ever had and thanks to the clear production the Bass is not buried under the other instruments. While there’s still a good dose of blast beats we worked more on changing the tempos through the songs and we wrote 3 “slow” songs this time.
- What does "REGICIDE" lyrics deal with? Because from the title and the art work, we can obviously see that they're political!
G : The album art is a snapshot of our culture, where politicians and priests rule the country and control the population. The statue you can see in the middle of the cover art is the statue of Italy, mutilated and raped by those people. They also deal with spiritual growth and freedom of the self from all the boundaries that bind our minds to false dogmas and deceit.
- Who writes the songs?
G : I write the songs and record everything here in my home studio , guitars and drum machine. Then i pass the song when i think it sounds good enough with the structures too and the other guys start working on their parts. Paolo wrote all the lyrics alone this time , in the past i used to take care of that too.
- you just launched a teaser of the music video for "“Reforging The Crown", tell me more about it and its idea!
G : It’s an hard job to make a good death metal music video that somehow is also tied to the lyrics. James came up with the idea for the video which is now online on youtube and you can watch it at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LkEOqf8U-M
Based on the concept of the album, the video describes the predominance of evil on the church with the priest's nightmare.
After various scenes of obviuous presence of malice in the house of the preacher of Christ, the nightmare materializes crowning first and then killing the priest.
- The drum's techniques in "regicide" are very "striking" and stunning , I would like to know who/what inspired James.
G: James has a different background from us , he can play everything from Jazz to death metal , he knows a lot of techniques as he’s a teacher too , that definitely helped having a more organic drum parts this time as he really worked hard on the new songs.
- You're going to be soon on tour with Septicflesh , Fleshgod Apocalypse and Necronomicon. tell me more about this tour and your upcoming events!
G : It’s going to be fun for sure , we’re also touring in Canada this time for the first time , we’ve never been over there so we’re very excited to play in a new territory. As far as the other events we have booked.. we’re going to tour Australia with the mighty Cannibal Corpse in september and we’re planning to tour in Europe as well to support the new album.
- Thank you again for your time and is there anything else you would like to add ?
G : Thanks a lot for interviewing us ! To the readers.. tune in www.facebook.com/hourofpenance and get our new album REGICIDE !
