Reunited San Francisco Bay Area thrashers VIO-LENCE are about to sign a deal with an as-yet-undisclosed record label to release a new EP. The news of VIO-LENCE's return to the studio was broken by guitarist Phil Demmel in a recent interview with the "Talk Toomey" podcast. Speaking about his plans for the coming months, Demmel said (hear audio below): "I'm writing a new VIO-LENCE record. We're about to sign a deal to do a five-song EP. So we'll see how that goes and when that can come out." Last month, VIO-LENCE parted ways with guitarist Ray Vegas. His temporary replacement for VIO-LENCE shows starting in late February will be former OVERKILL guitarist Bobby Gustafson. VIO-LENCE released three studio albums between 1988 and 1993. The group reunited soon after Demmel left MACHINE HEAD in late 2018. VIO-LENCE performed its first comeback concert in April 2019 at the Oakland Metro in Oakland, California and spent the last year playing select shows in the U.S. and Europe. The band's current touring lineup consists of Demmel, Gustafson, vocalist Sean Killian, drummer Perry Strickland and bassist Deen Dell. Although MACHINE HEAD frontman Robb Flynn was part of VIO-LENCE's classic incarnation and played on the band's debut album, "Eternal Nightmare", he wasn't contacted about doing the comeback shows. Demmel told Australia's Heavy magazine about VIO-LENCE's comeback: "This whole thing kind of started slow, right after I quit MACHINE HEAD and did a little bridge thing with SLAYER [filling in for Gary Holt]. Sean reached out about doing a couple of shows, and I was pretty floored, because he wasn't looking too good the last time I saw him. [Editor's note: Killian received a liver transplant in 2018.]… My only concern was Sean, and how he was physically. I think that all the other things could be put into place, but there's no VIO-LENCE without Sean Killian. [It was about] making sure that he was going to be good, and be able to pull it off. I didn't want to go out there and just kind of prop him up and have him just be going through some — not midlife crisis, but some sort of thing that he just wanted to do. I wanted it to be quality, because we've always put on a pretty quality product whenever we got together and jammed."
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