Still successfully supporting their latest studio album The Premonition as well as their live DVD/CD release Live Premonition, Greek metallers FIREWIND continue to make more and more friends on the road and stay busy through the Summer appearing at several festival events. Guitarist Gus G checks in with the following report:

“The past few months for us have been really great. We decided to do select shows and festivals in 2009, so that we can concentrate on writing new material. So in May we embarked on a six-date UK/Ireland tour together with STRATOVARIUS and EDEN'S CURSE. All gigs were great and we already miss our UK fans right now…but we’ll be back in UK and Ireland in 2010 that’s for sure! So, straight out of the final gig with Strato and into the festival mood we played a bunch of great festivals like Metal Days (Switzerland), Rock Hard (Germany), Graspop (Belgium) for the second year in a row and Tuska (Finland). Then we played a very special show in Greece (and the only one for the rest of the year). We played with the SCORPIONS and DOKKEN at Creta Festival which took place in the beautiful island of Crete. I’m sure all good tourists know where that is.

Not only did we use special pyro for that show, but I also ended up joining my idols, Scorpions, on stage and played “Rock You Like A Hurricane”!!! This was beyond my imagination and I sure wasn’t dreaming! I thank the Scorpions for being so nice to us and for the once-in-a-lifetime invitation to play with them, I’ll never forget it! We’re now ready to do the final three shows of the summer – Unirock in Turkey, Summer Breeze in Germany and finally Ilha do Ermal festival in Portugal. We’ll see u all out there!”

As previously stated, Firewind are currently working on a new studio album to be released early 2010 and here is the update from Gus regarding the upcoming recording session:

“So while we’ve been doing all these select shows this year, we concentrated mainly on writing new material. I can tell you right now that we have 12 great vocal songs and 2 instrumentals. While it’s too early to know what will end up on the album, all of us in the band are very pleased with the demos and pre-production we did and we are positive that we’re creating the best album of our career so far!

We’re planning to enter the studio this Autumn and looking into possibilities of who will be mixing our new album.

As for the material itself, I’d say it’s what our fans would expect from us. Powerful rock / metal anthems with cool riffs and memorable vocal lines from Apollo, but also some faster & more technical stuff is on there. We also wrote a very challenging instrumental song. It will have a fusion of styles and advanced playing from all of us. Needless to say the guitar will shred like never before! ;-)

Can’t wait? Neither can we!!!”

Upcoming Firewind festival shows:

July

19 - Istanbul, Turkey - Unirock Festival

August

14 - Dinkelsbühl, Germany - Summer Breeze Festival
29 - Vieira do Minho, Portugal - Festival Ilha do Ermal