CRIMINAL guitarist/singer Anton Reisenegger has issued the following update:

"Heyho, let's go!

So here it is, I finally got around to posting a demo track to our MySpace, hope you like it! It is not very compressed, so you might have to turn it up (which you should do anyways when it comes to Criminal!). We had a bit of an argument about this with our bass player Danny, who engineered and mixed the demo, and he was completely against over-compressing it just to make it as loud as possible, a pretty common controversy nowadays (Death Magnetic anyone?).

The song in question is 'The Infidel', and it's about – you probably guessed it – religious dogmas and intolerance, and the right to stand up for the fact that THERE IS NO GOD. Musically speaking, it's pretty straight-forward thrash/death with some obvious SLAYER influences, but I feel it has enough of our own ideas to make it really original and 100% Criminal!

Anyways, this is just one little appetizer, as the material for the record is incredibly varied, ranging from really technical stuff with odd time signatures, to crushing groove monsters, to all-out death metal and everything in between, so be prepared for one hell of a rollercoaster ride! We might post another demo track within the coming weeks or months just to give you a broader idea of what the new album is going to sound like, but we don't want to give too much away either.

After doing some pre-production over the last couple months, we will officially start tracking the album this weekend, beginning with the drums as usual. Since we're not doing it in a commercial studio, but at Danny's home studio instead, we're going to take a bit more time for the recording than we spent on the last couple albums, which will hopefully allow us to be more creative and put some more color and fresh ideas in there.

The album should be released around March 2009 through Massacre Records, and it will come with a bonus DVD, the contents of which we're going to announce once they're 100% confirmed. We'll keep posting updates about the progress in the studio and other details about the album, so stay tuned!

On a different front, I was up in Sheffield recently working with one of the best drummers in extreme metal on a project which should also hopefully surface in 2009, but I'm afraid I can't give away more at the moment. Speaking of side projects, Rod is busy putting together ideas for his first solo album (which I think he should have done ages ago!), Zac is involved in a prog/death metal band called THE AGONIST, and Dan is always working on his wonderful melodic rock band TAKOMA STAR.

So that's it for now, see you soon!

Metal fucking metal!"