Napalm Death's EMBURY Discusses Upcoming BRUJERIA Album

U.K.'s Terrorizer magazine recently conducted an interview with NAPALM DEATH bassist Shane Embury, who also plays guitar for the long-running extreme metal project BRUJERIA (under the name "Hongo"). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Terrorizer: Where's the new [BRUJERIA] album at?

Embury: "Good question! The music's done, bar a couple of songs and Juan's [Brujo, vocals] working on the lyrics, so I'm hoping... it won't be out this year, but it'll be finished by the end of this year and out early next year, I'm not sure what label we'll put it out on, we might just release it ourselves.

"The whole scene's changing. Looking at it, we manage to do our own gigs, most of the shows we do we organise ourselves anyway and Brujo has a big connection down in the Spanish-speaking countries. We do stuff off our own backs and we're kinda thinking, 'Well, maybe we should do the album ourselves, sell it at gigs or on the net or whatever.' We'll see, but definitely it'll be finished by the end of this year. At least all the music's pretty much done now, it just took a while — that's a step in the right direction."

Terrorizer: What's it going to sound like?

Embury: "A mixture of the three albums. I didn't think there was enough fast stuff on the last one, Dino [Cazares, guitar] kinda leaned a bit too much towards the FEAR FACTORY side of things. So it's going to be a mixture; we're gonna get some fast, very grindy songs in there, but we also want mid-paced, slow, chunkier songs. Lyrically, Brujo will be talking about his usual cross-border shenanigans I'd imagine. We're also doing a cover of 'La Bamba', called 'La Bumba', so we've been working on that, trying to get the actual Mexican strings in there, so if that comes off, that'll sound pretty good. Brujo likes to do his cover versions. I think we're going to be able to put a lot more traditional-sounding instruments in there so it's not just heavy stuff, you know? It'd be nice to get some blastbeats with the accordion over the top. All being well, it's going to sound very BRUJERIA but quite extreme as well. And quite diverse, because we've got four singers now so we can get a different angle, each guy's got a different voice. We also have a female singer — she's going to be on there as well — so we'll have a few different tones."

Terrorizer: When did you start working on it?

Embury: "It's been a couple of years, but when Jeff [Walker, CARCASS] came into the band, me and him started working on riffs. We get together so infrequently, we've been talking and talking and talking and finally we managed to start recording stuff in the past couple of months. We've had the ideas for a long time, it was just a case of sitting down and going, 'Right, we're gonna do it now.' We tend to talk about it and it never materialises. We recorded twelve/thirteen songs, there's still a few songs to record, but we'd been talking about it for two or three years.

"The band didn't start playing live until 2003/2004, those were the first ever shows. Things take quite a while with us. It's quite bizarre, the band's been together nineteen years — we do things at our own pace I guess. Or at Brujo's own pace; I don't know!"

Read the entire interview at www.terrorizer.com.