NEW Diamond Head album is finally finished!
Well folks it’s been a long time coming, but after 20 months of work, the new Diamond Head album is finally finished. Bri and I started writing riffs in January 2017, continuing intermittently between touring and life commitments over the next couple of months until we presented them to the rest of the band to get Abbz, Karl and Dean’s input into the arrangements. We started tracking Karl’s drum in July at Circle Studios, Birmingham. Karl was a monster and set the whole album down in just two days, one day ahead of schedule. Next up we tracked the guitars, bass and initial vocals over a number of weekends, according to band availability, at Vigo Studios, Walsall with our good friend Adam Beddow, who also recorded all instruments and vocals for the last album, Diamond Head.
The main vocals were recorded a few months later, mostly at Vigo and also at my own studio in West London. While it’s hard to discuss the songs in any detail now, before the name of album and tracks have been officially released, what I can say is that the whole album has, for the bigger part, a linking theme that I explored through the lyrics. One song is dedicated to one my musical heroes, Chris Cornell, and another is inspired by one of my favourite movies, Dune.
After tracking the vocals I produced the entire album in my studio over a period of around nine of months around other work and band commitments. The main challenge I faced was to produce an album that adhered to what we called ‘The Diamond Head Brief’ during the writing of the last album - to encapsulate the original style of writing of Lighting to the Nations and Borrowed Time - but which also represents the character of the current lineup of the band, which we affectionately call Diamond Head 2.0. Basically, expect a hurricane of riffs and stupidly high vocals!
On the last album I made the experimental move of adding orchestration to All The Reasons and Silence, and was relieved to watch those two tracks become fan favourites. Based on that enthusiastic reception, I added orchestral arrangements to two tracks on this new album as well and we have experimented with pushing the limits of “The Brief” of this new Diamond Head 2.0 album.
On completion of my mixing this record, I took the album once more to John Davis at the prestigious Metropolis Studios in Chiswick for mastering on September 18. Its been a long tough process in getting this one finished, but now finally this new record is out of my hands, and I can’t wait for it to land in yours!
Stay tuned on the Diamond Head website and social media for release dates and touring news.
