The Undisputed Titans Of Thrash Metal Are Touring Australia In 2025

Bay Area legends TESTAMENT are set to lay waste to Australia in June 2025; their first headline tour since 2010. Since emerging from the San Francsico Bay Area TESTAMENT have delivered some of the greatest metal anthems of all time. Over The Wall, Practice What You Preach, Rise Up, Into The Pit, Brotherhood Of The Snake, Low, The New Order, First Strike Is Deadly… The list of absolute classics seems endless as they unleashed one crushing album after another.

With no shortage of critical acclaim, Testament remain one of the select few bands with two albums, (both The Legacy and The New Order) inducted into Decibel Magazine’s prestigious Hall Of Fame, alongside Metallica, Black Sabbath, and Motörhead.

Revolver Magazine included The New Order on their list of fourteen Thrash Albums You Need to Own. Guitar World recognised Practice What You Preach as one of the Top 10 Shred Albums of all time. Guitar World called Low as one of the Iconic Albums That Defined 1994. The Formation of Damnation won Best Album at Metal Hammer’s Golden Gods Awards. And released nearly 30 years after the band’s formation, Dark Roots of Earth became their highest-charting album yet! Chuck Billy talks to Hi Fi Way about their return to Australia.

Social media here in Australia for the Testament tour is off the hook. Are you blown away by the support so far?
Well, I apologise because I don’t follow a lot of social media, so I didn’t know it was blowing up. That’s good to hear. It’s been thirteen years since we’ve been there, so I’m glad that we’re going to get a lot of support when we come back.

Thirteen years is a long time, was it difficult make it happen?
Yeah, then Covid!

Are you still enjoying thee touring side of things just as much now than you ever have before?
We still enjoy what we do and we love being on tour. We’re all road dogs and this is what we’ve known for thirty eight years doing this touring on the road. We’ve got it down to where we love the thing about creating new music, getting out and playing it. So, I think when we come to Australia in 2025, our record hopefully should be out. I think Australia will probably be the first stop that gets the first of the live new material.

How is the new album tracking and is it close to completion?
It’s pretty much done after. We’re doing some work this week before we leave, and then when we get home in December we’ll finish up and then we start mixing in January. The record should be done mixed in, in the can sometime in January. I’m sure singles will be dropping shortly after that. I believe it’s probably going to be out before coming to Australia.

How would you describe the new Testament album?
Oh, well, there’s a lot going on because Chris, the new drummer, he’s been the band a few years now. Chris came to the band at twenty four years old, you know, he is twenty six years old now. So, of course Chris is brought up with a newer, I guess, not as deep as metal, he’s more with the newer style of what’s going on now and new bands he’s influenced by and listens to a lot of that. I think maybe him working with Eric a lot but bringing in this different flavour in the writing process really pushed and inspired Eric to really push and write some really good, strong, aggressive, new sounding Testament. I think it’s good we made a different record. It’s testament when you hear it, but you go, wow, it doesn’t sound like it’s just a bunch of like ten or eleven songs that sound the same.

It’s got a variety of writing styles from fast to slow to heavy. I don’t want say the word ballad, but as far as writing a slower song that was like our earlier thirty something years ago ballads, you know, it’s a real pretty song. I think we’re going to bring Floor from Nightwish in to sing with me on that song. It just has everything and again, the new style pushed me to my vocal limits and I’m still trying and doing stuff that I’m actually inspired of things that I’m hearing today in the new market of newer bands. So it’s got, I would have to say, I don’t want to say new Testament, but it’s fresh, it feels current, I guess maybe that’s a better word.

How was the band dynamic in the studio? Was that up there as one of the most exciting periods for you recording new music?
It’s always exciting, and we’re the kind of guys that go by our gut instinct. If we write a song and I go write the lyrics and come back with the melodies and the patterns, we’re pretty much locked in. When we do that, we’re not all at the same place, especially with time. Eric does his tracks at home. All the drums were done at one place, and I’ve came in and sang. So, it’s a lot of people coming and going doing their parts, but that doesn’t stop the writing process. Chris and Eric put on a lot of time one-on-one with the guitars and drums to really lock it down solid, which they did, and then just introduced it to the rest of us.

Were you blown away as the album started taking shape and thinking, wow, this is really bloody good?
Well, it had a new feeling to me. It just felt like, wow, this is a different Eric, you know, these riffs and it’s heavy and fast. Chris is killing it on the drums. All right, I better get my thinking hat on and as the vocals were written, tracked and then recorded and listened back, that’s when it kind of starts taking shape in life. It’s nice this time because we got to live with it, we would record it and go do a tour and live with it, listen to it. I guess over time we’re like, okay, I’m very happy with where we’re at with it. We just need to get home and tweak a couple little things, finish up some vocals and then we’re ready.

Is that hard to let it go at that point?
Yeah, we’ll know what parts we need and what’s missing. I think now with the records we’ve done over the last couple years, the formula is there, we know what to do. We’re trying to bring in somebody, another vocalist and also maybe on that slower song put some strings on it. So there’s some other things on this record and recording process that will be a little different that we haven’t done before.

Was Floor the obvious choice to sing vocals?
Yeah! She has a very big, clean, strong voice. Floor and I became friends years back when we did a tour together doing a Christmas orchestrated show. We did maybe ten of those shows across Europe and really got to know each other and friends, and her voice just blew me away, you know, and how powerful it is. When we wrote this, of course for me, I’m thinking Floor’s the first obvious choice. First, because I know her and she just did something on the Metal Allegiance record for Alex not too long ago. So, she’s the obvious choice. Let’s ask her first. We were surprised when she came back and said, yeah, of course, let me know and get the track. Right away, it’s like, all right, we;ve got Floor, she’s down.

With the Australian tour is it going to be a tough juggle balancing the set list with the old and new?
It always is. There are too many songs, but that’s the thing that sucks. But then that’s also a good thing because sometimes we’ll pick songs and go, yeah, this one sounds good. Let’s try this, and then we’ll get in the studio and for rehearsals before the tour we’ll be thinking this isn’t hitting as hard as we thought it would, or does it feel as good as it should live? Then it changes. It seems to always be the case because we just did the Legacy and New Order record in the summer and we just finished the tour in America, we kind of got that out of our system. Like, we’ll come over and next year and it will be just a medley of our history. We tend to lean on records from 2000 to current, like starting from The Gathering because I believe maybe that time was kind of a new rebirth for Testament and the sound of that record and the writing style was a start of a new Testament, I guess, as you will.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Tickets from https://metropolistouring.com/testament-2025/ or https://thephoenix.au/testament/