The Grinding Wheel is the forthcoming studio album by the American thrash metal band Overkill, due for release on February 10, 2017. The album will feature 10 songs and the length of the entire album is approximately 60 minutes.
Overkill vocalist Bobby Ellsworth spoke in an interview with Noise Eyes. He has commented on their entire album, “The Grinding Wheel”.
He said:
“First and foremost, production. Andy [Sneap] has done some great work with different bands in the genre from Accept to Arch Enemy. He’s really the metal go-to guy.
But we wanted to use his abilities, but we wanted to use them with regard to how we saw the record being. One of the things we saw in modern metal is a guitar tone that doesn’t have a cohesive relationship with the drums. We wanted more organic drums to start with, and we wanted a guitar tone that came somewhere out of the high technology of the ’90s.
So it’s really kind of a throwback with regard to our thinking, so if you’re thinking a drum sounding like a drum and the guitars sounding more in the vein of ‘Horrorscope’ for us, where it wasn’t just top end, but top end and low end with a little bit of mids carved out of them. I think that’s the thing I noticed the most about it.
With regard to songwriting, we had done three records, ‘Ironbound,’ ‘The Electric Age’ and ‘White Devil Armory,’ that were for us, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. [Laughs] Or sisters! There’s something about them where there was a formula that we were, I think in our opinion, neglecting some of the other tools that we’ve accumulated over the years.
‘The Grinding Wheel’ is much more diverse. There’s an epic feel to some of the songs. There’s a sludgy, slower feel. There is ‘Our Finest Hour,’ which has been released, which could fit on one of those other three records but everything else doesn’t seem like it would fit on these records.
I think it’s a wider Overkill, but press play when you get it. I think that’s the best way for people to decide. Everybody has got to be a critic. That’s the idea of being a music fan. I’m a music fan, but I’m also a critic. I love or I hate, or it’s okay. It’d rather be loved or hated, not ‘Ah, it’s okay, whatever.'”
