Municipal Waste Guitarist Says New Album Will Not Include Any Power Ballads

Thrash metal heroes Municipal Waste are currently putting the finishing touches on their upcoming fifth album. Noisecreep caught up with guitarist Ryan Waste on a day off from tracking. He spoke with us while on a food and beer run with his friends in the band Toxic Holocaust. "Let me know if you don't hear me OK. We're getting stuff for a BBQ later," laughs the axeman.

"For this new album, we recorded all of the drum tracks with Eric Rachel (Hatebreed, Symphony X) up at Trax East in N.J. He did such a great job with that and we ultimately decided that we're going to let him mix the album as well," says Ryan. For the guitar, bass and vocal tracks, Municipal Waste are keeping things local and working in their home base of Richmond, Va. "I'm working in a studio in my neighborhood called Minimum Wage with a good buddy of mine. We've never really brought a producer in to work with us. We're the kind of band that what you see is what you get. We know what we want to sound like and we don't need someone coming in to tell us what to do. We obviously need a great engineer, and we got that with Eric. We're really happy with the work he's been doing," says the guitarist.

Municipal Waste's songwriting process is a democratic one. "Tony has always written the majority of the lyrics, but our songwriting is always open to ideas from everyone in the band. I wrote one song in this new album and Phil has one too. Even we don't write a song start-to-finish, we still collaborate on song title ideas and things like that. Sometimes it'll take years for us to use one of them, but it's nice to have all of our input into that side of things."

Watch 'Sadistic Magician' From Municipal Waste

Earlier this year, the quartet announced that they were leaving Earache Records for a new deal with the folks at Nuclear Blast. Since this will be Municipal Waste's fifth studio album, Noisecreep jokingly asked Ryan if we could expect any surprises on it like a power ballad. "You know, we recorded the drum tracks at the same studio where Skid Row recorded '18 and Life.' Maybe some of that magic will rub off on us. No, the album is actually as fast as anything we've done in the past. I actually love the power ballad stuff, but you'll never see the Waste doing anything like that. I play in another band called Volture where I get to do some of the more melodic kind of stuff."

Municipal Waste's forthcoming fifth album will be in stores in early 2012 via Nuclear Blast.