A four-minute report from San Francisco Bay Area's KPIX 5 on DEATH ANGEL's first Grammy nomination, for the title track of the band's ninth album, "Humanicide", can be seen below. DEATH ANGEL guitarist Rob Cavestany, who co-founded the band with his cousins as a teenager in 1982 and who co-produced "Humanicide", told Grammy.com that he almost couldn't believe it when he first learned DEATH ANGEL was nominated for a Grammy. "I was in my bunk on our tour bus," he said. "It was literally like 5:30 in the morning and I was just starting to fall asleep because I'm quite the night owl and I also get insomnia. Mark [Osegueda], our singer, got the news from a friend. She texted him and said, 'In about 15 minutes, they're going to release the information, but I just want you to know you're nominated.' He had woken up to go to the bathroom and he saw his texts blowing up, and was like, 'What the hell?!' He came right over to my bunk and just started shaking me, 'Rob, Rob, wake up!' At the very first I thought something terrible had happened. I could just see his face with the glow of his phone. He's like, 'Look at this text. We're nominated for a Grammy!' Then we shook each other and we're shaking hands and laughing. Then I just laid there going, 'Am I dreaming?'" Asked what he thinks coalesced in the world to make this Grammy nod happen now, almost four decades after DEATH ANGEL's formation, Cavestany said: "I guess it's a number of factors. I wouldn't say 'Humanicide' is our best song, though it is one of my favorite of ours. But we also have a lot other fucking killer songs and killer records that could have been in this position. It was more of a combination of everything over the last year. This album came out about six months ago, but before that, as we were approaching the album, we ramped up everything; our work ethic, our whole strategy. We kind of had to clean house. We had a different booking agent; we got a new management team — and we're self-managed now, basically. Within the band, we've defined each person's strong points and their forte and what we handle between me and Mark and Ted [Aguilar], and the other secret weapon is Ted's wife [Tricia Aguilar]. She's the person who's not in the band that's helping us. She's an amazing, brilliant woman who is very, very well versed in marketing and promotion. Also, we started to up our [stage] production, we got a new light guy. We invested a lot of money and time into what we're doing here. We have a team that is studying social media and our visibility exploded massively, like by the thousands. We don’t do anything weird or conform into some thing that's not us, but we're trying to use the weapons of choice properly." The 62nd annual Grammy Awards will be held on on January 26 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Released last May via Nuclear Blast, "Humanicide" saw DEATH ANGEL returning to producer and friend Jason Suecof (DEICIDE, TRIVIUM) of Audiohammer studios for the recording and mixing, along with the mastering of the legendary Ted Jensen (SLIPKNOT, PANTERA) of Sterling Sound, who added the final touches and brought it all to life, with artist Brent Elliott White (LAMB OF GOD, MEGADETH) providing the ominous cover artwork.
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