Lord Tim, frontman for Australia's LORD, has issued the following update:

"Hey everyone,

Well, we finally finished our new album Ascendence and shipped it off to our respective labels in Japan and Australia this week!

For those who weren't keeping up with this thread on our discussion forum, we had basically three weeks to record, mix, master, and deliver this album to meet our release deadline, and that was completely from scratch, including all of the artwork and booklet layout!

That was some of the hardest, scariest work any of us have ever had to do. This album had to be a world class product, and something that most bands can take months or even years to finish and we had less than a month. Very scary stuff with absolutely NO margin for error!

But... we did it! And we didn't compromise on anything to get it done either. Some songs have literally hundreds of backing vocal tracks, dozens of guitar parts, orchestras, three guest vocalists, two guest guitarists (from all over the world) so it was pretty massive to say the least!

We'd like to give a big shout-out especially to Main Street Studios in Wollongong where we recorded the drums and vocals. They went above and beyond the call of duty, making our time in the studio productive and pleasant, getting some killer sounds (the drums sound fantastic) and giving us an unbeatable rate. Top guys and absolutely recommended by LORD. What we ended up taking from Main Street back to our own SLS Studios to continue working on it was pure gold!

So when is it out?

In Japan, we have a solid release date of August 22 (through Soundholic Records) and in Australia, we're still negotiating the exact date but it will definitely be out sometime in mid-August (though Modern Invasion Music). We're negotiating deals for the rest of the world right now too, so stay tuned!

And the big question - what does it sound like?

Any DUNGEON fans in the house? You won't be disappointed! If Dungeon were to continue instead of disbanding in 2005, this is the album we would have made next (for all intents and purposes, LORD is Dungeon: mark II anyway). It's got all of the things you enjoyed about Dungeon - fast songs, lots of big catchy choruses, solos galore, amazing drumming and heaps of diversity from song to song, since we're fans of all styles of metal.

In the lead up to the release of the album, we'll be uploading one song at a time for a couple of days to the LORD MySpace player, so keep checking back here regularly until you hear them all. We'd love to hear what you think so feel free to leave us a comment about them!

That's about it! Cheers for all of your support, everyone - it means the world to us! We hope you enjoy the album and we'll see you on tour very soon!"

Go to this location to check out the new song, 'Reborn'.