The dust is nowhere near to settling on Annihilator’s latest record. Their self-titled album is guitarist / vocalist / founder Jeff Waters’ thirteenth, a back-to-basics thrash offering that has overshadowed the guest-star laden Metal outing from 2007. Between the trademark Waters riffs and solos, and Dave Padden's now familiar vocals, it is reminiscent of the oft overlooked Schizo Deluxe (2005) and Carnival Diablos (2001 – featuring singer Joe Comeau) albums in terms of energy and execution. Reactions from the Annihilator fanbase during the October / November 2010 European tour put the band at the top of its game, and quite possibly stronger than they’ve ever been in terms of the live show. Waters isn’t about to disagree, admitting he’s enjoying himself a lot more than last time around.

“This new album has actually been better received than the last one. It’s a good thing we had those guests on Metal because it was a mediocre album. Dave didn’t do his best singing, I didn’t do my best writing. There was some decent stuff on there, some good songs, but in general it’s on the bottom half of our albums. With those guests on it, our fans didn’t dig it as much as the Trivium fans or the Alexi Laiho fans, for example. There were these small groups of fans that checked us out because of them and that gave us a boost. The sales went up, and so did the sales of the older Annihilator stuff, which was important.”
“I sucked,” Padden says of the Metal album. “I had the worst time. That album took me two months to record and it should have taken me two weeks. Everything was just wrong, and then I’d stress out and my voice would get screwed. It just spiralled down from there.”

Waters continues: “It was all mental. I think he was kind of high off of the album we did before that, Schizo Deluxe, which I think has the best vocals out of all our albums. I think he came into Metal thinking, ‘Fuck, didn’t we do great together on the last album, this next one’ll be a piece o’ cake.’ Because of that the preparation wasn’t there. I’m guilty, too. I mean, ‘We are the army of one…’. Puh-lease (laughs). At the time I was writing it I was thinking that it was a good piece of work, I was really into it, but if you’re honest with yourself you can go back and rate your albums. You just do it and you hope it works. I bought every Slayer, Metallica, AC/DC, Priest and Maiden album but I don’t listen to all of them; I listen to certain records by them. It’s sort of like us. We’d love to be able to write albums that are perfect 10s every time but that’s not going to happen.”

Reactions to the new album have been mixed, with some fans still pining for another Never, Neverland, Alice In Hell, or even a Set The World On Fire. Get past the past and the new album is a solid record that outperforms Metal even though it’s lacking the high profile extra talent of its predecessor.

“It wasn’t like Dave and I sat down and said ‘Let’s really do a good album,’” say Waters. “You don’t think about it, you just do it, and it’s either going to work or it’s not. You can have those albums where the fans that know you love the record, and the record label doesn’t do any promotion for you. Schizo Deluxe was a good example of that. The new one is getting promotion and going nuts on the internet because we have some friends helping us out.”
“We’re lucky because things seem to have taken off from the Metal album,” he adds. “Things have been going up ever since, and that’s do anything because the label that put Metal out (SPV) went bankrupt six months later. We noticed because we were on tour with Trivium in the UK and they had 100 interviews over those three weeks. We had one. That was simply because SPV was having problems and they just couldn’t do it. We read that they were having these problems and knew that we had to get out, so we did and they went under soon after that.”

Annihilator have historically – at this point some might say “traditionally” – done a label jump every couple albums, often due to circumstances beyond their control. The new record is the band’s first with Earache, a veteran label that has gone to great lengths to keep the band visible. Beyond the well-promoted release and the expected catalogue re-issues, they went so far as to issue a free digital off-the-cuff compilation to coincide with Annihilator’s European tour.

“This time we were talking to Nuclear Blast and another label,” says Waters, “and at the end Earache came in and said they’d match Nuclear Blast, give us more in a few areas, so we took a gamble and went with them. They’ve got some good ideas. The thing that we’ve been lacking for quite a while is having a label come in that actually gets the interviews in the local newspapers, buys ads in the magazines, and gets us into those magazines. So Earache is doing the politics side of things, but we knew when we signed on that’s what we’d be getting.”

Earache’s influence doesn’t stretch to the North American market, however, leaving Annihilator with no realistic options with regards to a much wanted and much needed North American tour.

“The offers we’ve gotten are the most ridiculous things you’ve ever heard. Most of the labels, as you know, would rather sign five bands, own all their publishing, copyright, everything connected to the bands, and then send them on the road for two years. The bands make money, party, burn out after five or six years, lose their deal, die, and they’re fucked. Most of the big metal bands – Lamb Of God, Megadeth, Slayer, everybody – have said to us, ‘Once you get a proper deal in place come out with us…’ and I have to tell them that I really appreciate the chance, that as a fan it’s a dream offer, but I can’t do any of that stuff unless we have a label that’s willing to give us the money to do it and put albums on the shelves or at least make them available online."

Meaning Annihilator will devote their attention to Europe over the next year in the interest of keeping the current buzz going and paying the bills. It’s a crying shame the band is unable to hit Canada and the US, as witnessing Waters and Padden trading off guitar riffs and vocals is a jaw-dropping treat for the fans. Those that have seen said fireworks on the Live At Masters Of Rock DVD know what their missing.

“We cheated a bit at the beginning, we picked the easiest songs,” Padden says of standing toe-to-toe with Waters on the guitar front and singing simultaneously. “There are still a lot of songs I can’t even go near because they’re really hard to sing and play at the same time. I’m a lot more comfortable now than I was, though, because I don’t have to cheat. The new songs were written so we could actually do all of them live if we wanted to. They’re all do-able now. There have always been two guitar players in Annihilator anyway, so it’s not like it was a stretch for Jeff to write the songs with two guitars in mind.”

Asked if Waters has influenced his playing since the duo began tapping into their on-stage shred chemistry, Padden gives credit where it’s due, agreeing that it’s quite possible certain Waters-isms will make it into any playing he might do for his other band, Terror Syndrome.

“Nobody influences Jeff; he’s invented everything on guitar already (laughs). For sure. Just learning Annihilator songs has forced me to work on every weak spot I have. I imagine some of that might come through with Terror Syndrome somewhere, but I listen to a lot of different stuff than Jeff does. Ryan (van Poederooyen / drums) and I are going for a less old school sound, but on a technical level Annihilator will have an affect on me. Absolutely.”