Artillery: In Thrash We Trust
It’s somewhat fitting that Michael Stützer is a fast talker. The guitarist for Danish veterans ARTILLERY has been playing thrash since he was a teenager and he speaks like he plays; quickly and with boundless enthusiasm. Thirty-nine years since forming in a Copenhagen suburb, they’re about to release their new album X and Michael’s passion for it is infectious.
“It’s our tenth album, you can call it X or you can call it Ten, but we wanted to celebrate this milestone,” he says. “If you’d told me in the eighties I’d get to record ten albums and travel to over sixty different counties with this band, I’d never have believed it.”
We’ve heard it and X is a barnstormer. Eleven tracks of classic thrash played at deliriously high speeds, it’s another wildly enjoyable record from a perpetually underrated band. And while its predecessor The Face Of Fear wasn’t exactly laidback, X is a step up in terms of aggression. “I think this album is faster,” Michael says. “We like to get a lot of variation into our songs, we like the fast-heavy ones and we also like ballads, but with this one I think we pushed ourselves to play a very thrash album. There’s still the variation in there but if you like ARTILLERY at top speed, this is the one for you.”
ARTILLERY though are not mindless mosh-maniacs, intent on bludgeoning their instruments in pursuit of faster and heavier songs, X is a diverse album. There’s a crowd-pleasing neck-wrecker in In Thrash We Trust, which has already been released online and warmly received by the faithful. There’s Beggars In Black Suits, the warp-speed finisher whose cynical lyrics sit at odds with the joyfully energetic guitar histrionics. And there’s The Ghost Of Me, a semi-ballad that recalls ACCEPT and THE SCORPIONS at their lighters-in-the-air best.
Arguably the best of the bunch though is the opener Devil’s Symphony, which features some music that pre-dates ARTILLERY. It’s named after a band that Michael played in during his youth and in true classic metal style, it revolves around the devil himself. “We wanted a good opener, a fast, heavy metal song and Satanism is always an interesting topic. I find it fascinating that some people still believe in the devil. You have to ask yourself why people still believe in him and what that says about them. But it’s also fun to play and we had a good time recording it.”
Recording hasn’t been without challenges of course. The pandemic-induced shutdown of the music industry meant the sessions for X came with complications, especially when singer Michael Bastholm-Dahl got cut off from the rest of the band in southern Denmark, but perseverance has paid off. Not being able to play live however is clearly frustrating him. “We’re a live band, we like having the audience right there, seeing their faces and watching them react and livestreaming doesn’t give you that. We’ve played two socially distanced gigs with all the restrictions in them and everyone was sat down!” He laughs. “It was an experience, but you know, I can’t wait to start playing live again.”
“We were quite lucky in some ways as we’d just done a tour when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. We played in Asia, Singapore, Australia. We were lucky to enjoy that before it all closed.”
If there’s one theme that keeps coming up though, it’s how much he enjoys being in a band. The original incarnation of ARTILLERY split up in 1991 and aside from one brief reunion at the end of the nineties, it wasn’t until 2007 that they got back together. The lineup has changed over time, but ARTILLERY in 2021 are friends who love to play music together. And that’s why they’ve succeeded as the eternal underdogs of the thrash world. They might not shift as many units as the titans of the genre, but they have delivered consistently good albums for years and with their fortieth anniversary approaching, there’s no sign of slowing down.
That said, there is one thing that makes X feel bittersweet. It’s the first album they’ve recorded since the death of Michael’s brother Morten in 2019. We didn’t dwell on his passing much during the interview, but there was certainly a touch of melancholy when he answered the final question: what piece of advice would he give his younger self? “Just…enjoy yourself. This is not something you can take for granted and you have to work hard, but do have fun. Have lots of fun. You’ll get to write ten albums and play live in over sixty countries. You have to enjoy it because that’s the whole point, so don’t let things get you down and just enjoy it.”
X is out now via Metal Blade Records.
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