Kyle Thomes, from Exhorder "we are doing our very best to stay true to what this band is and I think people will be satisfied once it comes out, it's a dark and angry album that's for sure"

We all are fans of this band, since the first time we got confirmed about this interview, we start to enjoy it, then we discover a very kind person, so funny guy and you´ll know a lot of things about music, about the area of New Orleans, about the upcoming album of EXHORDER, about the next live gigs of TROUBLE, and the thousand projects that KYLE THOMAS is working on, after thirty-five years of career.

M: ¿When did you start playing music?

KYLE: I started playing music when I was in third grade and, by the time, I got into High-School when I started on the trumpet and then I started playing bass, once I started listening to stuff like OZZY OSBOURNE, BLACK SABBATH, AC/DC, JUDAS PRIEST, IRON MAIDEN, that sort of thing really spoke to me so I made a terrible decision to continue, haha, consequently ruined my financial life.

We always think that you guys need to reunite and need to play again. What came up now, what came to that conclusion?

The funny thing about this band in particular EXHORDER is we always connected very quickly to the audience, when we were teenagers just starting out as soon as we started, it was just like people were there always, and for whatever reason we just couldn’t seem to stay happy together, I guess, and it’s not an easy thing when you get five people who are strong-minded strong-willed and life happens, life gets in the way, people start having kids, creating other business opportunities for themselves and so, the door just keeps revolving with people in the band, people out the band, and I think it’s just the public demand for what we did starting back in the 80s that really just kind of kept us going well let’s give it another shot, so here we are in 2021, almost 2022, and still going strong after what I guess four years now, having put it back together so I guess the landscape of things changes a little bit here and there, but at the end of the day we’re still up there, playing the songs and that’s really the most important thing.

Who initiated everything during the restart of the band?

KYLE: this time around really it was Jason Vie Brooks that really pushed for it to happen Jason has been with us on and off since really since 1993, right before we called it quits back then, he was actually jamming with us and we were going to include him in the new lineup, and it fell apart again then for the second time and he came back into the fold when we had reunited in 2009 shortly after Frankie Sparcello passed away, we had Jorge Caicedo fill in on some shows and then Jason came back into the fold and then it fell apart again in 2011 and then around 2017 Jason had spoken with a guy named Simon Füllemann and Simon owned a management company called All Independent Service Alliance, so he and Jason had talked about EXHORDER and found out that Simon was very interested in EXHORDER and big fan, so Jason kind of put it in motion he dropped it in our ears and we were like “yeah sure let’s give it another try”.

What feeling was it to be on stage again after such a long time?

I’ve been in so many bands, I kind of just look at it like the stage is kind of like the bedroom you go to the bedroom when you’re tired, you go to the shower, go to the bathroom when you need a shower, or to use the toilet, so it’s kind of the same thing, I find my way back on the stages with a lot of different people, so the bands themselves are less of something that I go “wow I’m up here with so” and so unless of course, I’m doing a guest spot with somebody that I really like so then it gets exciting otherwise I don’t think that much of it when I’m out there I’m just up there kind of doing my job and the experience that I have with whoever is on the stage is always very special and the connectivity that you have with the audience is the most important thing but, if somebody put a gun to my head and said ¿how many people have you played on stage with? or ¿how many bands have you played on stage with? I don’t know…just tell my wife and children I love them then shoot me, haha.

¿How many other projects and bands are you have involved in right now?

Currently I have quite a few, I’ve got a couple of local bands that I play with, we just play cover songs, other people’s music too just to make a little money and have a little fun, so that keeps me busy a little bit when we’re not on tour but I’m still with TROUBLE as well as a quarter I’ve got a solo album, I’m writing and recording right now, I just recorded a song that Rick Rozz that played with DEATH on the “Leprosy” album, he and Lucky Erickson on drums had recorded some songs like 12 years ago and he sent a couple to me, and he said in addition to singing would you like to play bass on this, so I said sure, so we just did the first song last week we’re figuring out right now, what exactly we’re going to do with it, it’s not a band we’re just recording songs so, but it sounds really cool and it’s nice to work with Rick I really really enjoyed the “Leprosy” album when it came out so for me it’s like an honor to work with this guy for sure and the drummer Lucky he’s really good too, so in addition to that, I just did a guest spot on an album that’s going to be coming out probably early next year AORTA is the name of the project and a fella named Predrag Glogovac, he lives in Norway he put an album together, he played in some bands back in the 90s but I think he just had an urge to record an album so he assembled a team of different people that are, I guess, big name at what they do in some kind of way I’m one of the singers that he enlisted to sing, I sang on like four songs maybe and luckily one of the songs that I sang on there’s also it’s all of the singers on the album are singing on the song and Denis “Snake” Bélanger from VOIVOD is guesting on this one as well so for me that was to be on a song with “Snake”, I don’t know how much I’m supposed to even be talking about that stuff I’m probably not supposed to talk about it, haha.

So, Kyle what has it been for you in the last 12 to 18 months with covid and everything how have you taken the last year and a half?

Frustrating the toughest part was that we were two shows away from completing the tour with OVERKILL in the U.S. when lockdown happened and they called everybody shut it down said go home that was March of 2020, as you remember that was right when everything was really like worldwide “oh shit we’ve got problems” so with the touring shut down, we were really just hitting our stride over the last few years have played a lot of shows overseas and a couple of U.S. tours but what’s one more thing to slow this band down right? I mean we sit out for 27 years we come back and now we’ve got to sit out another year and a half as a coach, haha, I mean it looks like it’s opening back up some hope it’s for good to me at this point you just kind of have to rip off the band-aid and hope for the best, I’m not into the political side of it I’m really not but I think it’s time that the world is allowed to function again and let everybody take their chances, we all have a right to that.

Huge parts of Europe are back to normal like Hungary is completely open, I think you’re playing Budapest soon right?

With TROUBLE maybe next year, we might be doing a date there, we had a European tour booked that I think is actually supposed to be wrapping up right now, but we had to cancel it there were just too many there were too many question marks at the time, I’m glad to hear it I’m glad to hear that it seems like it’s opening up again though because we’d like to reschedule a tour over there and we’ve got some festival dates next year so we’re EXHORDER doing so far the only European dates next year are Alcatraz Hard Rock Festival and Brutal Assault.

Perfect we’ll come!

Really, it’s cool and then TROUBLE has some dates we’re doing Sweden Rock we’re doing some U.K. and Ireland dates and maybe a few dates in the European mainland as well so I think TROUBLE will be out probably about two weeks that’s not a very long run of course but for TROUBLE that’s a lot.

And do you write new material for EXHORDER as well?

Yes we’ve started doing some of the production for the album, we don’t all live in the same area so we tend to do most of our work, we fly over to Jason’s house in Ohio and we’ll stay with him for some time, for instance when we just did the Psycho Las Vegas Fest we got there august 4th and we just started working and the show wasn’t until August 20^th but we worked really hard for two weeks, just rehearsing, working on new material, working on the set and by the time we got to play that show, we were on fire, we were definitely well prepared so we’re gonna do the same thing for this tour probably about a week before we leave, we’re gonna start rehearsing and see if we can’t do get any more progress on this recording but this tour is gonna be fairly long I think it’s by the time we leave and by the time we get back, it’s going to be a full month.

It looks like you are active, more than in the 80s. How about those days?

We were young and inexperienced there weren’t a lot of tour opportunities for us back then for starters because we were a new band but when we did start by the time we released “Slaughter in the Vatican” our drummer Chris Nail was in college, so we really couldn’t go out on long trips without it being carefully planned so we ended up doing a really kind of small headlining tour of Europe in 1991 and that we really didn’t even tour the U.S. on “Slaughter in the Vatican” we just played regional shows here and there and then when the law came out we did a full U.S. tour and a European tour, but again it was tough because of Chris’s situation and I think if we had stayed together and persevered…I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t be as big as some of the bands that came up around us at the same time like SEPULTURA or TESTAMENT type bands I really believe that we could have been as big as any of them, but that we’ll never know because we took 27 years off so, at this point, we really feel blessed that every time we walk away and come back it always seems to be bigger than it was before, why? I don’t know, but I’m not going to argue with it, it’s a blessing to be efficient.

You have been late to the game, like death metal came up at that time already like thrash metal was just a short period of time.

Yeah timing was bad for us, I mean think about it, we started this event started getting put together in late 1985 and I joined in 1986 and I was the last one to join so really at the time you had SLAYER, METALLICA, MEGADETH, EXODUS, CELTIC FROST and then you know crossover bands like C.O.C. or D.R.I., all these bands were already in motion and they were the ones that’s kind of set the tone for us, but we started writing the songs on “Slaughter in the Vatican” most of those were written in either 1985 or 1986 some of them in 1987 and one in 1988, but for the most part by the time it came out in 90 these songs were old in our opinion, like these were old songs but they were just fresh and new to the world so by the time we got out and started finally getting to where we wanted to be, like you said thrash was kind of coming down and death metal was coming up, so it was weird and not to mention we’re not a pure thrash band we’ve got so many different elements about us especially from the punk side that we never were just a true metal band so i think back then that all mattered a lot more than it does now, I think now it’s a lot easier for people to explore different genres and there’s so many genres, back then it was just heavy metal and then it was glam metal or thrash metal, and then there was black metal don’t forget that too, and then you start getting the sub genres like nu metal and doom metal it’s like I don’t know why everything needs to have a shelf to be put on, I don’t understand that I really feel like we could go on tour with a band like EXODUS fit in just fine and I think we could also go on tour with a band like MELVINS and fit in just fine, so to me it’s you know if it’s in the 70s i think they had it right because you could go see a tour with the ROLLING STONES, LYNYRD SKYNRD, FLEETWOOD MAC and EARTH, WIND AND FIRE and nobody had a problem with it, but you know there’s I think now everything’s just gotten to be too classified and I think a lot of people as a result tend to maybe get a little less open-minded about music.

How would you describe the music that you’re writing now?

Well for example we’re very careful to construct songs that make sense for EXHORDER so we’re probably going back to a little bit more mean and angry but with three or four of us really are contributing to the writing on this album, so it’s going to have some different flavor than it’s had before with me being the only one of the original members left, but these guys have been in this band for so long and every single one of them was a fan of this band before they got in so, that really makes a huge difference I think understanding what an EXHORDER song needs to be, versus what a TROUBLE song needs to be for me is huge I don’t want to do too much of a deviation from what we do, it’s good to do things differently and I think we did that with “Mourn The Southern Skies” we came out with sonically, the sound is exactly the album that we always wanted and there is a handful of the music on that album that is old school type EXHORDER but there was a lot too that was a bit of a departure for what we or I shouldn’t say a departure from what we do, but a departure from what people know that we do there was nothing uncommon for us when we played shows back in the 80s and 90s to break out into funk jams or blues jams, and a lot of times we would do covers and remakes of stuff that wasn’t even like what we were doing because we are such fans of music in general and never really felt like we belonged to one category so to answer your question the new EXHORDER stuff is definitely EXHORDER stuff just don’t expect “Slaughter in the Vatican” part two, it’s never gonna happen it wasn’t gonna happen with anybody that was in the band before so it’s not gonna now, but we are doing our very best to stay true to what this band is and I think people will be satisfied once it comes out it’s a dark and angry album that’s for sure.

About the city where you live, it’s very musical, not just metal, it’s famous because of that, so you can breathe that air in the area?

You’re correct, when we were small children and long before I was a child you can go all the way back to they call Louise New Orleans the Birthplace of Jazz, jazz really got popularized in Chicago but it was the musicians from the south that grew frustrated, I think that they couldn’t make it happen here so they went to Chicago, there’s a better business opportunity but so much of the jazz root and heritage is here in New Orleans, so think about that in Mississippi delta blues so you got jazz and blues right out the gates, well then you start getting into the 50s and 60s and there was a lot of pop on the radio then that was very successful some of them ended up being one-hit wonders but a lot of them had some longevity like FATS DOMINO, IRMA THOMAS, CLARENCE “FROGMAN” HENRY these people they all had hits and they may not all be household names FATS DOMINO is pretty household name but there’s a lot of top 40 radio hit that came out of Louisiana, and that influenced the next generation which would have been DR. JOHN, THE METERS, THE NEVILLE BROTHERS and so forth and then it keeps evolving today you’ve got GALACTIC, KERMIT RUFFINS there’s always a traditional Louisiana or New Orleans thing here that’s still legitimate and loved worldwide now that doesn’t mean that it’s as big everywhere else but it still has a strong influence, so for us growing up as children and these songs are some of the first songs you learn in your life and they stick with you and as I learned how to play trumpet first I got a lot that kind of structure in my fundamental upbringing of music so by the time I started playing bass when I was a teenager really getting locked into that groove, you get four or five teenagers that are born and raised in Louisiana and they start writing music together it’s gonna sound a little bit like traditional New Orleans music perhaps maybe just played by the devil’s band.

What brought you into metals and personally what was your first touch with metal?

The first heavy music I can remember hearing that really resonated with me, of course, my first musical memory is “Come together” by THE BEATLES and towards that point in THE BEATLES career they were starting to experiment with a heavier sound so it may not be distorted guitar heavy but that’s the first thing that really grabbed me and I felt it and made me want to shake my ass you know so after that I was born in 1970 so I was small child in the 70s but my sisters usually brought home cool music and we listened to the radio in the car and so you know LED ZEPPELIN and BAD COMPANY of course, then my sister liked a lot of disco too and I remember the disco man, it’s like I liked a lot of disco and some people laugh at it today was like man that’s you got to be a real musician to play disco that’s no joke you know so I had a wide spectrum of stuff then I heard KISS and saw KISS on TV and I was like I have to do that, I want to do that, then I saw “Tommy” at the movie theater when I was a kid, THE WHO movie these things all like really had a major impact on me, KISS was my first real favorite band KISS and QUEEN my brother had gotten a QUEEN record for Christmas one year and I got Walt Disney’s Greatest Hits and I was mad because I thought I was a baby so the next year he brought my brother another QUEEN album and brought me KISS “Love Gun” and I wasn’t sure why I really liked that album cover but I did, so the KISS songs really resonated with me but I liked music in general across the board I want to say probably until I was about 12 years old when my brother brought home OZZY OSBOURNE “Diary of a Madman” and I was like I wanted to hate it so bad because my brother liked it, haha, but I after a while I’m like “I love it” so then I was like well I’ve heard of BLACK SABBATH my sisters didn’t listen to BLACK SABBATH but I had heard of black sabbath so I was like well this OZZY guy sang in BLACK SABBATH so then I started checking out BLACK SABBATH I was like whoa in an AC/DC, JUDAS PRIEST, IRON MAIDEN and eventually TWISTED SISTER, RATT, QUEENSRYCHE and then when I started hearing SLAYER and METALLICA, MERCYFUL FATE and CELTIC FROST, EXODUS like I’m kind of over this metal here and this metal is speaking to me more and then my brother really got into punk rock and he was trying to turn me onto like DEAD KENNEDYS and SEX PISTOLS and stuff like that CIRCLE JERKS and I was like “ah that’s kind of cool but no, it’s not heavy metal” well then I heard “Animosity” by C.O.C. and “Dealing with it!” by D.R.I. and I was like wait that’s punk well that sounds like punk metal and that’s what my brother said it’s like it’s not that different man, so then then bands like DEAD KENNEDYS and BAD BRAINS and all these other bands started making sense to me and I think once the punk crossover and metal intimate thing happened for me I think that’s when I really finally started throwing away my need to have a music that’s labeled like after that it’s like once you start once you start hanging around with punk rock people and understand the mindset I think it changes you forever, it did for me, in a good way.

It’s awesome, all your influences, your voice is very particular for thrash metal you can recognize EXHORDER immediately, where did you get your voice style?

That’s a good problem to have right, haha, the funny thing about singing from me is that I never ever wanted to be a singer, not one day did I ever go “I think I’d like to be a singer” I was a bass player and I was playing along with IRON MAIDEN and BLACK SABBATH records I would put on the first five IRON MAIDEN records and just play along with them on bass, on this bass right here (Kyle shows to us) I still have it, this is still the same my first bass I still use it to write and record my songs but I think what happened was I was singing back up at practice and playing parties and stuff with these guys and I take a song just to give the singer a break and people started turning going “hey wow like here let’s give you a microphone and let’s take that bass” and that made me angry because I was a bass player, then I started getting to the point where people would only offer me a spot in a band if it was for singing and so I said well screw it I’ll do this until I get another bass gig I’ll just do this for a little while and then I ended up meeting the other guys who we would eventually form EXHORDER with at a punk rock show at a D.R.I. show in 1986 and I went and jammed with them and that was it and I was like “okay we started playing shows and now we got like 500 kids coming to see us play I’m like well I guess I’m a singer now”, haha, so when the school year started back up I went and talked to the choral director and asked if I could join the chorus and he sat me down with a piano and I followed the notes he’s like “yeah you’re good, let’s do this” so I joined the chorus at school it just kind of like just to help me get a little better at being the singer of EXHORDER and it turned out by the time I graduated my senior year of high school my classmates voted me outstanding singer of the year and then the next year I sang Beethoven’s ninth symphony with the New Orleans Symphony for two sold out shows here at the Orpheum Theater and if you’ve never been to the symphony it’s an experience to be on stage with 60 something other people and not one electric instrument and it’s the most intense heavy experience that I’ve ever had musically in my life, I’ll never forget it, I’m grateful I did it because it really did it took me a while, I want to say it may have even taken me 10 years after that before I really started figuring out how to take that choral singing and the rock singing and put them together, but I’m glad I finally put it together because the things that I’m capable of doing now versus what I was doing when I was a young teenager or a young man, that’s I’m light years ahead of where I was then and that’s not fair because if I sang like this then I’d probably be rich, haha.

Would you ever do that again, sing it like a Beethoven symphony?

Yeah, I would, in fact, the guy who is now the choral director at the high school I went to was actually the piano player for the chorus the years that I was in it, so but we were classmates so we talked a little bit here and there, especially since I’m a vocal instructor and he instructs the chorus I bounce ideas off of him here and there and I actually went and sang with them at a college basketball game and we sang the national anthem, and I hadn’t sung in a choral situation like that since I was in college, so that was a really cool experience but and I was going to start singing with them more often but I just didn’t really have the time at the time I’d like to maybe get back to that at some point, but that’s I’ve got so much going on right now I’m avoiding phone calls and emails right now because I don’t have nicknames that I’m supposed to.

Do you actually have a good metal scene in New Orleans?

Yeah it’s I think people are a lot more spoiled than they were when we were young, when we were young people were so hungry for it that you didn’t even have to be a terribly good band and you’d have a few hundred people come see it just because people enjoyed going to the show and I think the whole do-it-yourself grassroots thing back then was really like “wow we actually are doing this ourselves and it feels big” but now a lot of people don’t want to leave their house unless it’s like a national act or one of the bigger bands and it’s harder now for younger bands to really build, I would hate to be a band starting out right now it’s just so difficult to start out as a new act right now, so for me if I didn’t have these old bands that have legacy names already I doubt seriously I’d be doing a whole lot of touring because it’s just too hard to do without a lot of financial backing and for an old man like me, if I don’t have a bunk to lay in when I’m touring then I’m going to be a very unhappy person, young bands can’t afford to tour like that it’s just not the budget so it’s incredible there are some clubs here in New Orleans where there’s a strong local following there is.

When I go on YouTube there are so many bands I’ve never heard of but play so great music, it’s like infinite, I can’t even keep up remembering the band names, so it’s so much competition?

Yeah I get people ask me all the time “you heard of this man?” no, “you heard of this man?” no, “what do you mean they’re huge” it doesn’t mean I’ve heard of them and when we go play the festivals, it’s crazy like if I go play festivals with TROUBLE there’s usually a good five or six bands on the bill that I’m like I need to go see this band I’ve been looking to see this band and then like when I play the festivals with EXHORDER I look and I’m like I’ve heard of this band, and I’ve heard of this band, and the rest I don’t know and I that’s no knocks against those bands I’m not trying to you know disparage them in any way but for me I really stopped listening to the style of music that I play, probably I really haven’t listened to much thrash since the 90s I just really didn’t stay with it as a fan and doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it, like if I’m on tour and there’s a good band playing I enjoy it but at 51 years old I guess it just doesn’t speak to me as a music listener the way it used to, so I guess in a in a way that’s kind of good because I think if I listen to a lot of thrash then that influence would probably come through in the thrash that I write so I would rather that my thrash that I write have influences from things that aren’t particularly similar to it, I think it helps to me, it helps fans, sound different from each other.

Your music had influenced a lot of bands, some groups like you and C.O.C., the early days of the SEPULTURA and PANTERA also, why you didn´t get bigger?

Yeah, I mean everything over time I think evolves and changes some and back then, there was so much happening so quickly it was like lightning in a bottle they say, think about it in a very short period of time you had albums like “Ride the Lightning”, “Hell Awaits”, “Bonded by Blood”, “Morbid Tails” and these all came out like almost all at the same time, so the growth of this type of music happened very quickly and exploded and I’m glad to see today that there’s been a resurgence of interest and if there wasn’t then I wouldn’t be up here playing these songs and talking about the upcoming album that I have with you guys so for how long I don’t know, the music is trends and fashion and stuff are cyclical for sure, but at the end of the day here we go, we just IRON MAIDEN just released an album that did better on the charts for them ever, it’s like you think about how hard they toured for “Powerslave” and they were on the road for like what 18 months or something crazy like that and to think that this album came out and got a better chart position than that one did and they’ve never had a top 40 radio hit, how does a band play to a hundred thousand people with no top 40 hit that’s incredible just it’s testament to how many people truly love metal right.

We’re positively surprised about the metal scene, a bit harder each time, 30 years later and you have such a massive metal scene and young people pick it up, how do you say come to that picking up the same style as METALLICA like 30 years ago it’s just fascinating.

Yeah I think one of the things that we’ve noticed especially at the European festivals the last few years is how many young people are there, not just not just people bringing their children but people in their late teens and early 20s and that’s how that’s how music survives when everybody at the show is my age that tells me I’ve got about three or four good years left of this, but with young kids I mean like you’re saying with the young band you were just talking about last weekend uh we went to go see some bands play some friends of ours and one of the opening bands the son of some of some of my friends he’s playing drums in and he’s 18 the other guys like in their early 20s they’re called HERACLEON and they were great it’s like a three-piece thrash band, kind of in the, I guess, in the old school SEPULTURA vibe but they were kids and they were killing it with energy and the passion that we had when we were first starting, it was to me, it was such a sight for sore eyes to watch young men really getting after it hard in a genre that isn’t necessarily speaking to a lot of people in their generation but it’s speaking to more than it has in a while so that’s a good thing.

Complete interview with KYLE THOMAS

One definite question what was the craziest story you can share from a touring experience?

Man, okay one that I can say without possibly getting sued, haha, if you’re going to ask me the craziest tour story I have it has to be the tour that EXHORDER got kicked off of 1992 we were touring with ENTOMBED and DEAD HORSE and RIPPING CORPSE did the first leg of that tour and then DEAD HORSE did the back end of that tour and we were friends already with DEAD HORSE for a long time so and we were all pretty rowdy they’re from Texas we’re from Louisiana so right there we’re already kindred spirits and so we’re just getting shit-faced every night on this tour and then traveling to the next show, traveling to the next show well we played a show I want to say it was it was in California somewhere like Los Angeles or Riverside or somewhere and I walked into the backstage area and it was like a circus going on in there and people were taking apples and oranges and standing from one end of the room the other and there was a hole in the wall where there used to be like a clock or something so everybody’s throwing the produce at this hole trying to get the produce into the hole and it’s flattened all over the place and sometimes somebody make it in it’s like I mean people were taking popcorn and throwing on the ground and just grinding the popcorn into the carpet and just really breaking things nothing nice and nothing cool but I guess at the time rowdy young men having fun in a rock and roll mindset it just kind of got away everybody got carried away so I can’t say for sure who exactly did it but somebody took a shit on a plate nice and then somebody took a fork and stuck the fork into the turd on the plate so that the fork was just standing like this in the turd and then somebody took a metal bowl that had salad in it dumped the salad out and covered the dish so there’s a plate with a bowl and when people walk in the room they’d lift it and go pate just it’s really disgusting and I don’t know how, true this is but I just saw a CORPSEGRINDER from CANNIBAL CORPSE at Psycho Las Vegas and we were sitting at the bar talking and he swears up and down I don’t remember this and I think he’s wrong but he swears he’s not wrong he swears it was me lifting the bull saying pate, haha, in any event what happened was the cleaning lady for the venue walked into the room and she looked at the room and the whole place just went silent we felt bad instantly and she started getting teary-eyed and she’s walking around just looking at everything like and we realized oh no she’s the one that has to clean this up and as she’s walking out the room she sees the bowl and she lifts the bowl and sees the turd with the fork in it, and she just looked at it set the bowl back down walked out the room and just started gently crying, so the next day we got kicked off the tour, so you don’t get here and that’s all our fault, I always joke around and say yeah kicked off the tour and they’ll be like oh no that was y’all too so we were all accountable for it there’s no doubt about it, but we were the ones that got punished for and I’m glad DEAD HORSE didn’t get thrown off also but they were kind of looking to kick us off that tour at first anyway and it wasn’t the guys in the band within tomb that we had a problem with we got along nicely with them uh but their management and us did not get along uh at first our crew in them did not get along but that wasn’t their fault or our fault that was miscommunication between our label and their management and things that were supposed to happen that didn’t happen and there was a time when we had a reputation for being difficult to deal with, so I guess on that tour we were probably pretty difficult to deal with so.

Right now, you’re the manager of EXHORDER, don´t you?

Yeah everything at the moment comes through me and then I get with the guys and we sit down kind of in a meeting situation not unlike what we’re doing right here, yep and we discuss our options and we vote on things in a democratic fashion, as things come to us we discuss them and we’ll say yes no and majority rules, so we’re booked through Continental Touring in the U.S. and Decibel Touring in Europe so that’s where the touring and festival questions are funneled through, but ultimately that comes back to me and then we vote on it

It’s like you have the control you don’t have any management stuff?

We did have management for a while but we currently do not so, really since I want to say since the beginning of the early part of last year I’ve been an acting manager but like I said I do rely heavily on the input from the team, so but we do it all ourselves I run the merch in the U.S., I’ve licensed it out in Europe, I deal with the booking agents, I deal with like you guys I do the scheduling for interviews and stuff, so I’m a man with many hats and I don’t know I think working for free builds character.

I wonder if the band is going to play next year in South America.

I would love to be honest with you, Moyses Kolesne from KRISIUN, when we are tour, started talking to us about a festival there is a Setembro Negro Festival is that festival down there in Brazil that he was telling us about and we started talking to our booking agent about it and he said would y’all like to go and do South American dates it’s like yes we’ve never played Central America or South America so we’ve always had a strong following in countries south of us so why we’ve never been there I don’t know, but I’d like to, so nothing booked right now but I’m definitely gonna start pushing for that because I think it could really be a surprisingly magical experience to play for people who’ve been supporting us for 30 something years and just haven’t had an opportunity to hang out with us live.

Great and KRISIUN that would be awesome you two touring South America together.

We shared a bus with KRISIUN and KATAKLYSM for nearly a month and I really love all of those guys very much, we all got along very well we’re all about the same age, give or take a few years and we all enjoy kind of the same things in life so it’s tough when you put a lot of people that don’t know each other onto a bus you don’t always know what you’re gonna get but that was one of the most pleasant tour experiences I ever had with some of the best people I maybe will ever know.

It was absolutely great talking to you and looking forward to the new EXHORDER album and the other projects.

Yeah man I’m so stoked to be able to, I said as soon as the pandemic hit I said well I tell you what if there are any bands that don’t have a whole lot of songs written by the time this thing’s over then they were wasting their time because I had so much time to myself in this room right here I’ve probably written I probably either finished writing or started and finished writing I don’t know probably close to 20 30 songs just since lockdown and that’s not to say that they’re all going to be used but I have at least got that many you know that are either finished or almost finished so I tried to make the best of the situation, that’s all you can do.

When does the next album come out do you have a date in mind?

I wish I could say yes but at this point, we’ve got probably about nine or ten songs that we’re working on constructing still some of them are finished some are still in construction problem is as we’re working on them everybody I just finished a new one the other day and I know Marzy’s had like three or four new ones since we started recording the songs and Jason’s putting a couple more together so it’s like thousands at some point you’re gonna have to crawl the line and say all right this is this album and then at least now we’ve got a head start on the next one.

Exactly alright next year sometime.

I would say next year if not before summertime hopefully shortly after.

Looking forward to meeting you, enjoy the rest of the year man, and thanks for talking to us.

Yeah, it’s really been a pleasure the conversation was good it’s nice to talk with people who enjoy cutting up and laughing as much as I do.

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Official website: https://www.exhorder.com/