It’s now been roughly five years since influential thrash metal band Testament released their most recent album Titans Of Creation. They’ve gone on tour, released remasters of old records, and even received the keys to Albuquerque. Hell, guitarist Alex Skolnick nearly stood in for Megadeth’s Kiko Loureiro when the latter was still in that band.
But during a recent interview with Australia’s Wall Of Sound (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), Testament frontman Chuck Billy not only suggested that the album could be coming as soon as the end of the first quarter/beginning of second quarter 2025, but that it’s also going to be an absolute killer.
“It’s coming out really good. We worked on it for probably the last year or so with Chris [Dovas, TESTAMENT drummer], a lot with Chris. Eric [Peterson, Testament guitarist and main songwriter] and Chris got a lot done and came up with some killer stuff, man.”
That’s pretty exciting! It’s interesting to hear that Dovas, the newest member of Testament who joined full-time after Dave Lombardo quit the band, has as much input into the writing of this upcoming album. According to Billy, Dovas’ addition to the band has already paid dividends, claiming that the former Seven Spires drummer can stand toe to toe with thrash metal’s best men behind the kit.
“Well, I’ll give him props. He’s right up there with all those guys, man, because he’s coming in young, new-influence chops, too, and adding a different dimension to Testament. That’s why I’m excited about the writing, because he, I guess, inspired Eric enough to just write some pretty kick-ass, balls-out stuff, but a little bit around it of everything. So it was a really good writing session on this record… Eric had such a good writing session, he’s already talking about after this [European] tour with Anthrax and Kreator, starting [in] early [2025], they’re gonna get together and just start writing more songs. Just keep chugging forward. And [2025] is gonna be a little slow. We’re not going to Europe [this] year. We’re gonna just probably have one headlining tour at the end of the year, and that’s about it. Maybe a short run in America. We’ll see. So we have a window to do a lot of jamming. So hopefully we can get some more songs written and get ahead of another record.”
