saxon
18:27 Tuesday, 21 November 2023
Not many bands can say they have made it to their 20th album in their careers, but Saxon are long past that. The British heavy metallers have just announced the arrival of their 24th studio effort, titled Hell, Fire And Damnation, which will land on January 19 via Silver Lining Music. The first taste of the music comes in the form of the album's title track, which can be streamed below.
"I've had that saying in my head since I was a small boy because my dad used to say it when he was upset," Saxon's frontman Biff Byford explains, regarding the album's title. "He used to say, ‘Hell, fire, and damnation, what's tha' been doing now?!' when I was ‘messing up his cabbage patch' or carving things into the kitchen table. It was a very ‘Yorkshire' saying back in the day."
"There's so much music out there about hell and the devil and the occult that I just thought it's about time somebody wrote one about the battle just between good and evil!" Biff adds. "You can't sing about the devil without singing about the good guy either, and the song basically says ‘make your choice'. We all have to make the choice, are we evil or are we good? The song's about that fight."
Hell, Fire And Damnation was produced by Andy Sneap (Judas Priest, Exodus, Accept) and Byford, with Sneap mixing and mastering. And Byford seems to be very happy about the final result: "I think this album's one of the best he's done sound-wise, and he's done a lot of albums. It has a really raw, vibrant sound… if you compress the total time making this album, it was four weeks tops… you can hear everything brilliantly, nothing's overcomplicated, and nothing's over-compressed. The guitar sounds are fucking immense, they're just great, raw guitar sounds. And we haven't done a lot of overdubbing on there, it's just playing. I really, really like it."
Hell, Fire And Damnation will be available in a variety of formats and pre-orders can be placed at this location.
