Axisofmetal.com's Paul Ferritto has issued a new interview conducted with RAZOR guitar legend Dave Carlo. An excerpt follows:

Q: Razor is a band that has an immensely strong cult following. What do you guys attribute this to?

A: "The cult following is probably attributable to the style of music that we play. We stayed on the very extreme side of metal, nothing really pedestrian about Razor. The music is extreme, the lyrics are extreme and the style is very unique. I think those things, it’s for people that get it, they understand and they know what it’s about. They relate to it. So our music is out there. Some people, it moves them, other people aren’t moved by it. People that are moved by it are the cult following. Sometimes people hear our music and say ‘where did that come from? If I had known this had been out all along I would have loved to have gotten my hands on these CDs.’ it’s a story we hear over and over. Razor I think has been woefully underexposed for our career but we get that cult status because people that have learned of our band know about our history and they respect it."

Q: Even though your last full length CD was 1997 the band has been active since then, recently headlining the 2011 True Trash Fest in Osaka. How did this all come to fruition?

A: "Basically anything we did after I announced our retirement in 1992 came to us through offers to us that we weren’t really looking for. And that is how it has been. Even the Decibels album, I was completely retired from Razor and not even thinking about it and Bob Reid asked me to record it, so we did it. The music had already been written; it was supposed to be the follow up album to Open Hostility, but there was no lyrics yet written. So Bob spent 3 or 4 years putting lyrics over the music I had written and then we turned it into Decibels, and then with Bob’s involvement we got an arrangement made for a record company to release it for us and Decibels ended up coming out. Again, same thing with gigs. We ended up playing some festivals. We were in a prime slot on the Wacken Open Air Festival in 1999 in Germany, we were playing there and that again was by invitation. They came to us. Over the years we have received a lot of invitations to festivals. We did eventually play the Headbangers Open Air, which was 2009, in Germany as well. We played the Japanese True Thrash Fest in 2011. Again, offers come, we do some negotiating, if it looks like it’s a good looking promoter who knows how to promote a show and has a genuine love of the band and make an offer that is reasonable to us then we do a show. If we have people make us offers that are not reasonable to us we politely decline."

Read the full interview here.