CATHEDRAL's Lee Dorrian us featured in a new interview with Brendan Crabb at Australia-based Loud Magazine. An excerpt is available below:

The band will return to our shores for the first time in more than a decade for Soundwave 2012. As for the Australian shows themselves (Dorrian reveals there are a few side shows in the works, but can’t confirm any details), fans can expect a little bit of everything.

“It’s hard to say as we don’t know how long we have for a set,” he says. “But I guess we’ll play a bit of everything; we have nine albums and a lot of EPs, so we have quite a lot of places to take material from. We’ll play stuff from the first album, the last album, and everything in between. I don’t like to use the term ‘greatest hits’, because it’s not like that at all, but plenty of different stuff with a few rarities as well.”

The Australian gigs aside, Cathedral’s final act will also include the release of their studio swansong, The Last Spire. Unlike its predecessor, 2010’s mammoth The Guessing Game, the band will be even more involved with the project to ensure their final musical statement leaves as sizeable an impact as possible.

“We’re planning to begin recording in April,” Dorrian explains. “We want it out next year, because as of next year the band will be no more. We’re working on material at the moment. When we get back from Australia we’ll have a good, solid month to fine-tune the songs. We’ll hopefully have it released in September/October of 2012. I’m going to see our artist Dave Patchett this weekend - he does all our album covers – and just sit with him and go through all of the concepts for the album cover.”

Where does he envision their last recording heading stylistically?

“Musically, I would say The Guessing Game was more of a summarisation of everything we had done. The Last Spire is more like our final stamp, really. I think it’ll be a lot heavier and more doom-influenced than anything else we’ve done in recent years. But there will also be keyboards, and hopefully it’ll be a really progressive doom record. I don’t want to give away too much, but it’ll probably be a little heavier. We’ll be much more hands-on with the production. This is our last one, so we want to go out with a bang and pretty much do it ourselves because we can.

“The last two albums (with producer Warren Riker) turned out great. We’ve had producers in the past, (where) we would have some out there ideas, and some producers would just shrug their shoulders or laugh. Warren was great, (but) we want to make the last statement ourselves, like we did with the first album. A lot of people thought we were crazy to make an album like (1991’s) Forest of Equilibrium. People asked us what we were doing. It was going against the grain of what was going on at the time. So we’ll finish the way we started.”

Click here for the complete interview.

On October 25th, Rise Above Records released a double-disc live Cathedral album, Anniversary. The cover art for the UK and North American editions can be seen below respectively:

A deluxe Anniversary set comes in a clamshell box with 2CD gatefold LP replica's, 40-page booklet containing man behind the scenes photos and a gig poter replica. This edition is strictly limited to one pressing. Further details at Nuclear Blast Records and Rise Above Records.