The Damned Things (Fall Out Boy, Anthrax, Every Time I Die, etc.) have spoken more about their upcoming new album “High Crimes” in a recent issue of Kerrang!. The group confirmed the record will arrive on April 26th with Nuclear Blast at least handling the UK release of it. Recording sessions for the album took place with producer Jay Ruston (Stone Sour, Anthrax) with ten songs having been recorded.
Amid the interview the band’s guitarist Joe Trohman (also of Fall Out Boy) addressed Alakline Trio‘s Dan Andriano stepping in on bass following the departures of Josh Newton and Rob Caggiano from The Damned Things. Of that, Trohman stated:
“Dan‘s great! He brings monster bass playing, and if we do more Damned Things he’ll bring more songwriting. But he’s also such a good guy; he’s so calm and collected, funny and cool, and he fits in really well.
Originally I was going to play bass on the whole record, but he came in and re-played what I had done but added things—because he’s a bass player!
We did his stuff over the course of two days, and he nailed it. It sounded way better, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the thing we’re missing, we’re missing a real bass player.’ He’s an amazing musician and a great guy.”
When asked about his favorite tracks on the album, Trohman commented:
“Probably earlier on when I came up with the track listing, I originally wanted to open the record with this song called ‘Storm Charmer‘ because it was really slow and ominous, which is probably a bad idea [laughs].
I think I love ‘Cells‘—that is one of my favorite songs on the record. ‘Cells‘, ‘Omen‘ and ‘Carry A Brick‘ are some of my favorites.
Honestly, I’ve been sitting with the demos for newly two years and I still haven’t got sick of any of it. I don’t listen to it in a self-serving way, I’ll listen to them and think, ‘When am I going to hate them?’
And every time I listen to them, I really like all these songs. It’s the first time I’ve listened to a record and found there’s not a lot I would change.
With making anything, I could tweak it forever, but I think with this one, my mentality was just: go in, write these songs and when they’re done, they’re done. Don’t overthink anything.
Hopefully by approaching it in a ‘Let’s make them sound really cool and not tweak them forever’ stance, then they would be the rawest possible version.
I thought the last record was definitely a little flippant in production, and I just wanted to pull back on that.”
