Locomotive Records will release MEKONG DELTA’s Lurking Fear album on April 22, 2008. It is the first all-new studio album from the band since 1997.

This German band has based its career on elevating thrash into a progressive rock zone, thereby garnering a cult of hardcore fanatical fans that have kept the band’s mythology alive during a decade-long absence from the scene. Founded in 1985 by bassist/composer Ralf Hubert as a straight-ahead thrash band, Mekong Delta’s sound has morphed into a most unique and complex thrash-prog initiative.

Hubert has surrounded himself this time out with a bevy of pro players like never before. Uli Kusch mans the skins. The drummer has sat behind the set for the likes of HELLOWEEN, MASTERPLAN, SKINNER and HOLY MOSES. Guitarist Peter Lake (THEORY IN PRACTICE) and vocalist Leo Szigiel (SCANNER, CROWS, ANGEL DUST) round out the fearsome quartet.

“The new album can be seen as a fusion of everything we’ve done before”, Hubert says proudly.

The self-titled debut landed in ’87. The ’88 follow-up, The Music Of Erich Zann, started the drift towards technical awareness. (Back then, Hubert preferred pseudonyms for each band member.) After an ’89 EP, Tokkata, The Principle Of Doubt surfaced in ’90. Also that year came Dances Of Death.

Through it all, Hubert’s fascination with classical music was becoming more and more evident. Personnel changes preceded 1991’s Live At An Exhibition with Hubert becoming more and more known as an introverted perfectionist with a vision of, as he says, “attempting to arrange complex composition with rock instrumentation that as well could be interpreted by a classical orchestra.”

To this end, Mekong Delta covered 'Dance On The Volcano' by GENESIS on its 1992 Kaleidoscope album, replacing all keyboard passages with distorted guitars.

Visions Fugitive hit in 1994, Pictures At An Exhibition in 1997.

Then silence.

Last year’s The Principle Of Doubt (Ambitions) best-of package whetted the appetites of fans hungry for new Mekong Delta music. Now, with the release of Lurking Fear (first heard in Europe last year), Mekong Delta is primed and ready to re-establish itself on the map of Progressive Thrash.