Nuclear Blast has confirmed a July 27th European/31st North American street date for TESTAMENT's new album, Dark Roots Of Earth. The album was produced, mixed and mastered once again by the world renowned Andy Sneap (ARCH ENEMY, NEVERMORE, ACCEPT, EXODUS). Special bonus tracks were recorded, mixed and mastered by Juan Urteaga (HEATHEN, VILE, SADUS) at his Trident Studios.

Check out the artwork painted by Eliran Kantor (SODOM, ATHEIST, SIGH) below:

Dark Roots Of The Earth will be issued in Europe as a regular CD, CD digi + DVD, CD box set, double vinyl and double picture disc vinyl.

CD tracklisting:

'Rise Up'

'Native Blood'

'Dark Roots Of Earth'

'True American Hate'

'A Day In The Death'

'Cold Embrace'

'Man Kills Mankind'

'Throne Of Thorns'

'Last Stand For Independence'

CD/DVD tracklisting:

'Rise Up'

'Native Blood'

'Dark Roots Of Earth'

'True American Hate'

'A Day In The Death'

'Cold Embrace'

'Man Kills Mankind'

'Throne Of Thorns'

'Last Stand For Independence'

Bonus:

'Dragon Attack' (QUEEN cover)

'Animal Magnetism' (SCORPIONS cover)

'Powerslave' (IRON MAIDEN cover)

'Throne Of Thornes (extended version)

Plus Bonus DVD

Vinyl tracklisting:

Side A:

'Rise Up'

'Native Blood'

'Dark Roots Of Earth'

Side B:

'True American Hate'

'A Day In The Death'

'Cold Embrace'

Side C:

'Man Kills Mankind'

'Throne Of Thorns'

'Last Stand For Independence'

Side D (Bonus):

'Dragon Attack' (Queen cover)

'Animal Magnetism' (Scorpions cover)

'Powerslave' (Iron Maiden cover)

Testament vocalist Chuck Billy discussed The Dark Roots Of Earth with BraveWords.com recently. The tattooed frontman revealed that it was guitarist Eric Peterson who came up with the title. “It came pretty quick because we were at it for months working on the record, then when we decided we were going to try to fulfil a deadline and get a record out this year, it all just snowballed. That came out first and it sounded really good.”

As far as personal significance of The Dark Roots Of Earth, Chuck offered the following, “Being Native American, it has a different meaning for me - being grounded and set in tune with the earth. But we’ve always been a band that’s touched on stories of the earth or Nostradamus predictions, things like that on all our records. So it was kind of fitting; I’m big into the planet. When I first heard it, I dug it.”

Lyrically the new material deals with “things that happen every day. There’s a lot of things having to do with the earth, war of course. It’s odd that some of the songs I wrote have a lot of earth vibes in them, and then finding out the title of the record after as I was writing about that anyhow, everything just kind of fell into that. We’re still working; we have seven songs complete with vocals. All the music’s recorded. Eric just got back from London and finished all the guitar tracks. Drums are all done; Gene Hoglan (who sat behind the kit on Demonic in 1997) played drums on it.”

In addition to the mighty Gene Hoglan (DEATH, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD, FEAR FACTORY), Chris Adler from LAMB OF GOD is playing drums on a couple of songs. “When we decided we were going to meet a deadline, it was like, okay, who’s playing drums? That was the first thing. So we put some feelers out there and a couple drummers got back to us. Chris actually was one of the first, but he was doing a Lamb Of God record so the scheduling wasn’t working. So we gave him a couple of tracks that he could do for us while he was doing his record. It worked out well, he had fun with it.”