Metal Assault's Aniruddh “Andrew” Bansal has issued a new interview with TESTAMENT guitarist Eric Peterson, in which he discusses the band's new album, Dark Roots Of Earth. An excerpt follows:

Q: How does it compare to the previous one in terms of the overall sound?

A: "It’s in the same vein, definitely. But if I have to compare it to any records, it would be a hybrid of The Gathering and The Ritual. What I mean by that is, musically it’s heavy like The Gathering. It’s really riff-heavy, it’s got a lot of melody to it, and it has the fast brutal stuff. Then it’s also got the slow heavy stuff. But vocally, and in terms of the way the songs are arranged, it’s like The Ritual. This record is a lot more melodic than anything we’ve done. The Ritual was like an easy-listening kind of Testament record, but super melodic. We had 'Return To Serenity', 'Electric Crown' and some really good songwriting, but the drums were kind of… too easy, you know. There were some really good songs on there, but it lacked the heaviness of The Gathering. So, I think with those two ideas put together, the most melodic and the heaviest side of Testament mixed all together, you have Dark Roots Of Earth."

Read the full interview at this location.

Nuclear Blast is offering up Testament's new single, 'True American Hate', as a free download below:

'True American Hate' is taken from Dark Roots Of Earth, which will be released by Nuclear Blast on July 27th in Europe and the 31st in North America. 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.

The lyric video for 'True American Hate' can be viewed below:

Dark Roots Of 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)

As far as personal significance of The Dark Roots Of Earth, singer Chuck Billy told BraveWords.com recently: “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."

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.”