BW&BK; spoke to EXODUS mainman/guitarist Gary Holt recently about a number topics including their new album, The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A, a thrash extravaganza for their varied fan-base young and old. Of note, Holt's song-writing prowess sees more punishing journeys of lengthy proportions with a number of tracks exceeding previous limits. Addressing the fact that the album is epic, Holt explains.

"As far as the length goes - we didn't know the actual times of anything until we tracked them," Holt admits. "We didn't put any limits on it. We didn't set out to do anything like 'we're gonna make sure this is different than Shovelhead Kill Machine.' We just write songs - the same process, but we just took some different paths. As far as the songs not feeling long, that's the ultimate compliment. It should be some brutal journey that takes you some place. I'll throw on CDs in my car and I'll hear a song that seems really long and it's only four and half minutes - the song should suck you in and you should forget all about time and space and all that and just want to kill somebody (laughs). We tried to add layers and stuff to create a little more atmosphere and a little more feeling of darkness. That foreboding vibe. We certainly felt we couldn't out-machine gun Shovelhead Kill Machine. That album was pretty much like a Gatling gun. It was a hail of gun-fire at you. This one at times is more like a biological weapon."

You seem to have a dominate handle on the writing these days.

"On this album I wrote most of the material and I wrote most of the lyrics. The songs we have set aside for the next album, Rob (Dukes - singer) wrote half the lyrics on those. Lee (Altus - guitar) wrote one of the songs in its entirety which was one of the best of the lot. And he's working on three more. Everyone knows that when I get on a roll I write at a very frenzied pace. It's not uncommon for them to leave rehearsal and I stay behind and the next day there's another song waiting. It's not an issue of not giving people input, it's an issue of me being on a roll and why slow it down. But the real beauty between this album and the last was that I did have a solid band there the entire time. Even if I did write a whole song, everything as bounced by them and they would make suggestions and I was open to anything.

Talk to us about the long-awaited return of original drummer Tom Hunting.

"That was just one of things - behind the scenes Paul (Bostaph) and the whole band knew that if Tom could take care of his anxiety issues his job would be there. We're talking about a guy who is arguably the best friend I've had since I was 16/17 years old. After we completed touring for Shovelhead we returned from Europe and Tom had called. You could hear a spark in his voice again. So we started talking all the time and he asked me if I wanted to jam, so loaded up an amp and drove up to his place which is an hour and a half north of me in the mountains - cause I live three hours north of San Francisco now. I was literally driving through the snow to get to his place. So we got together and started jamming and it was like he never went away. Until Tom left the band in 1989, he was the only drummer I had ever played with in my life. To me it was weird for a drummer to be right-handed. The kit looked backwards and it sounded backwards. That's just the way everything sound in Exodus was the way Tom played. The result was that we had this unspoken musical language, because his drumming style is what I heard in my head with every riff I ever wrote. Just having him back was a huge boost to all of us. From the moment we got into the studio he did every song on this album and the other four for the next in five days. He was just pounding. It was amazing."

Although you've yet to really kick into touring gear in support of The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A, you've already put together ideas for the follow-up.

"We have to find the time to complete the rest of the songs, which admittedly I've been a bit lazy on 'cause typically you don't feel like getting into that process again for a coupla years. We're talking about completing it and having it out around the end of this year. We'll probably record it in pieces when time allows, between tours."