According to AFM Records, MASTERPLAN - featuring ex-HELLOWEEN guitarist Roland Grapow - are gearing up to film a video for the title track of their new album, Time To Be King. The shoot will take place next week in Hamburg, Germany. More details will be revealed soon.

Time To Be King was released on May 21st via AFM Records. The album has achieved the following first week chart positions:

Sweden - #15

Germany - #31

Switzerland - #45

Clips of six new tracks - 'Time To Be King', 'Blow Your Winds', 'Fiddle Of Time', 'Blue Europa', 'Lonely Winds Of War' and 'The Dark Road' - are now available on the official AFM Records MySpace page along with the full length version of the first single, 'Far From The End Of The World'. Go to this location to check out the songs.

Victor Entertainment released the album in Japan on May 19th with a bonus track.

'Far From The End Of The World' was released on April 16th via AFM. This advance release features a different mixing and master of three tracks by band leader guitarist Roland Grapow (ex-HELLOWEEN). The single features 'Far From The End Of The World' (single and album versions) and includes the bonus track 'Lonely Winds Of War'.

Time To Be King features the return of original Masterplan vocalist Jorn Lande (ARK, MILLENIUM), who was replaced for 2007's MKII by RIOT singer Mike DiMeo.

As previously reported, BW&BK; recently caught up with Grapow. An excerpt from the interview is below:

In BW&BK;’s previous interview with Grapow, he blamed Lande’s initial exit from the band on the singer’s view that Masterplan should have been bigger than they were after two albums. Asked what he believes convinced Lande to come back, Grapow chalks it up to having a new perspective from being on the outside.

“I think he just realized that he’s made so many albums as a solo artist, and not to be mean, but I don’t think he ever reached the same level with those albums as he did with Masterplan. A lot of people told him that his albums were great, but not as strong as Masterplan.”

With Lande’s return to the fold came a change attitude with regards to songwriting. The focus was on having fun with the music rather than trying to sell people on the idea that Masterplan is the be all and end all of metal.

“It’s not that we had crazy laughing parties or anything like that, but it was pretty relaxed,” says Grapow. “Sometimes we had very stressful recording situations in the past, but one of the agreements that we had with Jorn for this album was to give him the time he needed. When Jorn writes lyrics it takes a long time; he might spend the whole day on one song. He doesn’t really have the freedom to do that at home or on tour, but here in the studio he’d sit with the stuff, maybe ask me if he could say this or that in a song. I’d be like ‘No! It sounds stupid.’ Typical German (laughs). Jorn would work on the lyrics for one song from 11:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night, and then we’d start recording. Sometimes it didn’t work so we said, okay, fine, we’ll come back to it another time. Like maybe a month later. So it was very relaxed this time.”
“It’s three main guys doing the writing now,” Grapow adds. “Before it was Uli, Jorn and me, now it’s Jorn, me and our keyboardist Axel Mackenrott. He wrote four songs for this album, so he completely taken over for Uli now. It was real teamwork on the new album, and I was the car mechanic standing behind the whole thing (laughs).”

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