BLACK N' BLUE frontman Jaime St. James is featured in a new interview discussing the band's critically acclaimed comeback album, Hell Yeah!. An excerpt from the story is available below:

When you stack Hell Yeah! up against recent albums from artists that cut their teeth around the same time – BON JOVI, WARRANT and KEEL immediately come to mind – it’s more than mere charm. Their career was based on not trying to be like every other band on the scene at the time. Black N’ Blue made their biggest splash – according to the almighty MTV rating system – in 1984 with ‘Hold On To 18’ from the self-titled debut, releasing three more albums before finally calling it quits when their 1988 record In Heat fizzled.

“We’re a lot better than a lot of the bands that became bigger than us, which is a strange thing,” St. James agrees without missing a beat or naming names. “We signed to Geffen Records and they wanted to control us a little bit, so that kind of put a damper on everything. Other than that we did the best we could. When we got signed, we waited for months for (producer) Dieter Dierks because he had to finish the SCORPIONS’ Love At First Sting record. We waited and waited, and in the meantime we were offered the OZZY tour. We couldn’t take it because we didn’t have an album out, so RATT ended up getting the slot. There are all kinds of things that we did back in the day, decisions we made, that looking back on them now, I might have changed them. But, Black N’ Blue is what it is, and we’re a great band. That’s the bottom line.”

Diehard fans may consider Black N’ Blue’s lack of big time success a crime, but it can be blamed in large part on the fact the band never catered 100% to the glam rock scene they’d been lumped into by default. They had the pre-requisite look but their sound kept evolving, for better or worse. Their aggressive (for the time) debut, for example, was followed by the blatantly commercial Without Love a year later, followed in turn with an about face on the hammer-and-nails shredder Nasty Nasty, still their heaviest record to date.

“One of my favourite Black N’ Blue records is Without Love,” St. James admits. “Don’t get me wrong, I like heavy; one of my biggest vocal influences is Bon Scott (AC/DC). Without Love was more in the direction of my other love, which is the best vocalist in the world, Robin Zander (CHEAP TRICK). We wrote a bunch of songs for that record, and the label picked the ones that lent themselves to putting us in a more commercial direction. But, what it comes down to is that Black N’ Blue isn’t hair metal; the term didn’t even exist back then. We’re a metal band, and we’re hard rock. Hair metal? Forget it.”

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Black N’ Blue’s new album, Hell Yeah, was released May 13th via Frontier Records. The bonus track for the Japanese edition, entitled 'I Smell A Rat', is available for streaming below.

The Hell Yeah tracklisting is as follows:

'Monkey'

'Target'

'Hail Hail'

'Fool's Bleed'

'C'mon'

'Jaime's Got The Beer'

'Angry Drunk Son Of A Bitch'

'So Long; Trippin''

'Falling Down'

'Candy'

'Hell Yeah!'

'World Goes Round'