Noisecreep recently caught up with Doomriders frontman Nate Newton for a chat about their long-awaited sophomore full-length, the followup to their critically-accliamed debut, 'Black Thunder.' Though it's been nearly four years since 'Black Thunder' was released, the band has been anything but idle -- they've released two studio splits (with Coliseum and Disfear), as well as a live double LP split (with Boris), and they've done their fair share of touring. Lately, though, the band has been flying under the radar. "We kinda made a conscious decision to keep it quiet for a little while," Newton explains. "We were like 'alright, we've gotta just stop [touring] and write a record.'"

Newton, who also plays bass in seminal Boston hardcore band Converge, explains the difficulty of balancing his and his fellow Doomriders' various commitments. "I'd be on tour with Converge, come home, and already have a Doomriders tour booked. In addition to that, our drummer, [JR Conners (Cave In)], and his wife had a daughter last year. So, obviously, he doesn't have the same kind of free time that he did before. So we just decided 'ok, let's stop playing out for a little while and actually write a new record. And we'll record it and once we have a release date we'll start touring again.' And so that's the plan."

"The album is gonna be titled 'Darkness Come Alive,'" Newton tips us off. As for how 'Darkness Come Alive' compares to 'Black Thunder'? "It's not as [much of a] 'party record,'" he explains, "[but] it's similar in that it was written by the same people, pretty much, so it's gonna sound like us, obviously. There's dueling guitars and lots of harmonizing, you know. It's a punk metal record. It doesn't have quite as much of the 'fun' vibe, I guess. It's a little more serious. I don't know if that was on purpose or what, it just kinda came out that way. I think we've had a lot of time to mature as a band, you know, from playing together on the road a lot. We've learned how to play music with each other, whereas 'Black Thunder' was more us just throwing ideas out and recording them. I feel like there's a lot more chemistry on this record, than the first record."

The 'vibe' is not the only area where the two records differ. "'Black Thunder' we recorded live to tape and this one we multi-tracked," says Newton, "mostly because of time constraints, and everyone having jobs that they couldn't take a lot of time off from. When we recorded 'Black Thunder,' for some reason everyone was in a situation where they could say, 'ok, I don't have to work for two weeks, let's work on this,' whereas this one was like, 'ok, I've gotta work-- I can come in from this time to this time and then I've gotta leave,' so, that's pretty much why [we decided to multi-track it.]"

Despite the different approach in the studio, Newton is quite happy with how the record turned out. "It sounds pretty savage, man, I'm excited about it."

No official release date has been set for 'Darkness Come Alive,' but according to Newton it should be out around June or July.

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