Judas Priest bassist Ian Hill was a guest on the Primordial Radio podcast Binge Thinking and talked if it was difficult for the band to create new music without using old ideas.

"I'm sure it is. It's all between your ears — all those songs; there's about two hundred songs there”, said Hill. “And, yeah, I think it's what keeps a band recognizable. You start out with, in our case, Rob (Halford, vocals) and the four musicians, and we all have our own particular styles and sounds, and together, that is Judas Priest. And that will always stay the same — with a bit of different recording techniques, different guitars, amplifiers, whatever. But that basic, little primordial thing, that will always be there, and that will carry on until we drop. So, yeah, it will — it'll pop up now and again. It's not recognizable, of course. It might be to others, but it's not to ourselves. But it's always there. It must be subconscious. It's something we don't think of.

The bassist went on to say, “With every album, we've always tried to make it a little bit different and tried to improve. We're still learning, after all these years, we're still learning.

"So no, really, we don't dwell on the past," he added. "We don't think to ourselves, 'We need a song that's like this off the last album.' We just go ahead and see what comes out at the end of the day, and then run with it."

The North American leg of Judas Priest's Firepower tour, with support from Saxon and Black Star Riders, runs through May 1st before heading to Europe for the summer. North American dates are listed below.

April
10 - Casper, WY - Casper Events Center
11 - Loveland, CO - Budweiser Events Center
15 - Kent, WA - ShoWare Center
17 - Portland, OR - Veterans Memorial Coliseum
19 - San Francisco - The Warfield
22 - Los Angeles, CA - Microsoft Theater
24 - Phoenix, AZ - Comerica Theatre
26 - Tulsa, OK - BOK Center
28 - Dallas, TX - The Bomb Factory
29 - Sugarland, TX - Smart Financial Centre

May
1 - San Antonio, TX - Freeman Coliseum

Judas Priest debuted at #5 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with Firepower, marking the group’s highest charting album ever.

The album surpasses the group’s previous chart high, logged when 2014’s Redeemer Of Souls debuted and peaked at #6. In the UK, Firepower landed at #5, marking the band's highest ranking since British Steel in 1980.