On October 16, British heavy metal legends SAXON will release their 21st studio album, "Battering Ram", in North America via UDR Music. The official video for the CD's title track can be seen below. In this no-nonsense, sharp clip, Biff and the boys are captured at Backstage Studios in Derbyshire, U.K, throwing down a thunderous performance. "Battering Ram" is available for pre-order now via iTunes, with "Battering Ram" as the instant grat track. Coming soon, "Battering Ram" will be available for pre-order via Amazon and various formats will include CD in ecolbook, 180 gram vinyl, limited edition boxset (containing CD, vinyl and a bonus CD with the band performance of their "Denim & Leather" tour "Saxon Over Sweden 2011", featuring 18 tracks)."Battering Ram" track listing:01. Battering Ram02. The Devil's Footprint03. Queen Of Hearts04. Destroyer05. Hard And Fast06. Eye Of The Storm07. Stand Your Ground08. Top Of The World09. To The End10. Kingdom Of The CrossSpeaking to the "Metal Hammer Magazine Show"about the musical direction of SAXON's follow-up to 2013's "Sacrifice", the band's frontman, Biff Byford, said: "Some of it is quite brutal, but there's quite a lot of melodic stuff on there as well. Every SAXON album is different to the one before because we like to entertain people and we don't really like to write the same song all the time.""The Devil's Footprint" recounts a tale from the 1600s while the CD's title cut is "a bit like 'Heavy Metal Thunder', just a new version," Biff told The Rockpit. "It's about the audience raging at the barriers." Regarding "The Devil's Footprint", Biff said: "[It] is a legend of a couple hundred years ago [when] people woke up with fresh snow and they saw hoof prints on the roof across the lake and they followed it for many miles and it couldn't be explained." As for some of the other tracks on the CD, Biff said: "I'm doing another song about, well I used to be a big chess player, I used to play a lot of chess but not so much these days. So I wrote a song called 'Queen Of Hearts', which is a little bit, 'Alice In Wonderland'-y, a little bit chess-y game. So, a little bit deeper lyrics. ""Battering Ram" was once again helmed by acclaimed British producer Andy Sneap (MEGADETH, EXODUS, TESTAMENT, ACCEPT). "I co-produced, more or less, 15 albums with SAXON, so I know how to record," Biff told The Rockpit. "You just have to have a great team a great engineer and a great band. On this one, I thought I'd give Andy a chance to do everything with the band himself. Obviously, I'm in control of the overall executive duty-type thing."Regarding the songwriting process for "Battering Ram", Biff said: "It's a little bit different on this one. We've not written as many songs together on this album. Me and Nibbs [SAXON bassist Timothy 'Nibbs' Carter] have written a few things together, so it's a little bit different than the last, but we're all working together. Doug [Scarratt, guitar] and Paul [Quinn, guitar] have come up with some stuff, and so we can get it on the album as well. A lot of the heavy stuff comes from Nibbs anyway the actual guitar licks." In celebration of the release of "Battering Ram", SAXON will play select dates with MOTÖRHEAD, and others with ARMORED SAINT, in the U.S. beginning August 19.
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