Horror-punk stalwart Wednesday 13 has confirmed to WMSC's "The Metal Teddy Bear Experience" that his upcoming studio album, "Necrophaze", is being produced and engineered by Michael Spreitzer of DEVILDRIVER. "Zeuss [Chris Harris] produced the last record," Wednesday 13 said (hear audio below). "He's mastering this record, so he's still involved. It was just basically a location thing. We just couldn't make it work. Zeuss is an East Coast guy, and most of us — well, just about all of us now, [except for] one person — are all West Coast. And this record was gonna take a lot longer to work than the last record, so we really had to make sure it was close to home and financially worked out. So, unfortunately, we couldn't work with Zeuss. But we got to work with Mike, and Mike is killer. And we got a great record out of it. I can't wait to hear it finished. I just finished up my last little bit of work on it yesterday, and I've handed it off, so now it's being mixed and all that. And then I'll listen to the mix and then hand it off to Zeuss, and then it gets handed off to the record label. And then we start talking about release dates, videos and all that good stuff." According to Wednesday 13, the follow-up to 2017's "Condolences" is "not a concept record — I didn't write a story around it or anything like that. Visually and sonically as well, I wanted to do something that was very '80s retro, with the imagery of the album," he explained. "There's two different artworks — one for the vinyl that's totally different than the artwork for the CD, which is something I like to do. I did two different types of artwork that I like from that genre — one more cartoon, one more realistic. And a different thing I did on this album is… If I could compare it to a movie, I'd compare it to 'Creepshow', which is one of my favorite horror films and one of the very first horror films I ever saw. But it was all these different stories. It wasn't really intertwined together — it was just four or five different stories — and that's kind of what a record is, when you think about it. So this record is… all the songs are the stories, and what I've done in between most of the songs — not every song, 'cause I didn't want it to be the same thing every time — but the way the record starts and flows, it sounds like a movie soundtrack. So when you listen to it, we're like that rock band that comes out in the back of the horror movies. That seemed to go hand in hand back in the '80s… Rock music and horror movies kind of went hand in hand, and I wanted to make the ultimate horror rock album that sounds like a soundtrack. And a lot of the things we're doing with it — which I can't unveil right now — it's really gonna be like an audio horror movie. And Roy Mayorga from STONE SOUR has been scoring everything to the music. So the band records the music, and then he's been adding all these different sounds. Basically, like you would score a movie, he's kind of scoring our music, which sounds funny when you say it — scoring music to our music. But that's really what we're doing — we're making this soundtrack. And so far it's turned out way beyond anything I thought it would be. And it's my favorite thing." "Necrophaze" is due later this year via Nuclear Blast. Prior to "Condolences", Zeuss worked with Wednesday 13 and guitarist Roman Surman on the 2010 MURDERDOLLS album "Women & Children Last". The "Condolences" artwork was created by Travis Smith (OPETH, KATATONIA, NEVERMORE).
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