On May 5, the World Health Organization announced that Covid-19 was no longer a global health emergency which were welcoming news for groups that were not able to tour due to pandemic restrictions or the high cost of visas. Some other bands, like Death Angel, have been touring a lot: "We have some stuff 'till the end of the year and we don't know what's going on for next year. Right now we wanna get as much touring, 'cause I don't think our latest album, Humanicide, didn't get enough touring behind it" said Death Angel's guitarist, Ted Aguilar, who recently spoke about a myriad of topics with Vikram Chandrasekar of Tales From The Road.
"We played in Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore and it's just amazing to see all these metal fans out in these countries… We'd love to go to so many other countries but getting out there, the logistics and all the financial stuff is hard. It's like any other industry, you know, prices go up but your salaries stays the same. It is very expensive, it sucks but you know we have just everyone's on the same boat… we're just trying to find a way how could we still tour with prices going up and still be able to make it work financially. It's a lot of thinking, a lot of moving parts you have to deal with so I mean every year is different, it changes all the time so you got to figure out new strategies, what we did last year we can't do it this year because the landscape is totally different."
One of the ways to help a band, according to Ted, is by sharing what the band produces on their social pages. "Me and Rob [Cavestany, singer] kind of manage the band social pages. We do our best to try to put some content up. It's pretty hard when you're off the road, when you're on the road it's easier but when you're off the road you're just trying to figure out you know, what kind of content can we put up there that our fans like. You can't usually try to put the same thing over and over so you got to get creative."
When asked about the songwriting process, Ted went into detail saying: "When it comes down to writing it's all Rob. It starts with him. He comes up with a basic structured in him and we will get together and they hash it all out and they record it and when they get it to a point where oh yeah this is great, then they send it off to everyone else and Damien does his parts and Mark will listen to it and try to you know write lyrics and melodies, and I'll listen to it and I'll touch base with Rob what do you want me to do here, do you want me to play something here or do you want me to do something different, you know because Rob has a vision and you kind of want to see his vision. And as soon as the song comes together, we play it quite a few times then we could throw in our ideas… and Rob's really good at it 'yeah let's give it a try, 'so we try everything and it comes down to all right this is what works…"
As per the new album he mused: "There is a Death Angel album in the works, but we're slowly working on it…There's stuff there. We've just gotta work on 'em more and write more." as of when we can know more about it, "I don't wanna say it's gonna be next year 'cause you can't really predict the future"… "Until we're kind of definite and there's a date locked and we have no activity and we're going in at this time, then I could tell you a set date. We just don't know when we're gonna start recording. And we do have some songs, but we wanna write some more, but they're all in the infancy stages."
So while the band still works in the new album, you can sit down and watch the full interview below.
