Voivod, the progressive thrash metal band from Quebec, Canada, has just released its 13th album, “Target Earth”, via Century Media Records. The full album is currently being streamed for free listening at Loudwire.com.
The album is the first to feature no input from the band’s original guitarist, Denis “Piggy” D’Amour, who died of cancer at the age of 45 in August of 2005.
Voivod released its 11th album, “Katorz”, the following year, which featured all of D’Amour’s guitar parts for the album that he had recorded before his death, which were retrieved from his laptop.
When the band officially reunited in 2008 with Daniel Mongrain from Martyr as the new guitarist, Voivod had no intention of writing new music. The band’s 12th album, “Infini” from 2009, featured the last of the unreleased material that was extracted from D’Amour’s computer.
As drummer Michel “Away” Langevin stated in a recent interview, however, the band began to feel confident about the prospects of recording new material after a couple of years of touring.
Langevin said that Mongrain (“Chewy”, as he is known in the band) and original bassist Blacky (who had been out of the band since 1991’s “Angel Rat” album) began to record demos of new material in early 2010, which were an encouraging first step.
The demo material “was a trigger for us to do a lot of improvisation sessions that we recorded”, he said, “and many parts from the new album are pulled from these sessions”.
One other interesting bit of information was also gathered from this interview with Langevin, and that is that the band has been working with documentary film maker Sam Dunn for the past five years on putting together a film about the band as it hits its 30th anniversary.
Dunn, a fellow Canadian himself, is best known for such documentaries as “Iron Maiden: Flight 666”, “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey”, and “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage”. He did an interview last year with Examiner about a project that he was working on about the history of extreme metal.
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