Kevin Page of MetalReview.com recently caught up with BOLT THROWER frontman Karl Willetts. The following is a brief excerpt from the interview:

KP: Are you working on new material yet?

KW: "Well, yeah, it's a good job you called and it looks like we are going to be pretty much writing the album now. Baz already has a few riffs ready to go. We bandied a few ideas around last night, so hopefully we'll have a new album out by the end of the year to follow up the success we had with the last album and push on from there."

KP: Have you decided on where to record and who will produce?

KW: "We are definitely going to go back to Sable Rose Studios where we recorded our last album. It's like a second home to us really, we feel quite comfortable there. Andy Faulkner (producer) is pretty much part of the band really."

KP: What would you say was different about your last album, Those Once Loyal, than previous releases?

KW: "All the songs are probably better structured. The bass sound is better. Overall, the way that the songs fit together, the production. The songs were re-written so many times by Baz. He wrote an album, scrapped it all and tore out the bits he liked and wrote it again. It took a lot of time. Then when we went in the studio we really took our time. It paid off."

KP: It's strange you say that, since it was very calculated and thought out, but I felt that this album brought back the more "looser" feel that you had on For Victory.

KW: "A lot of people have likened it to our albums in 1994-1995. It's pretty much on par with 4th Crusade and For Victory. For me, coming back into the band, I worked on my vocal style. We took all the elements which we knew were successful on previous albums and poured them all together. We had a long time between albums that we pretty much knew the pressure was on for us to not come up with a generic Bolt Thrower sounding album."

KP: What made you want to rejoin the band after leaving for so many years?

KW: "After a pretty disastrous US tour in 1994-95, I wanted to go back to the university for three years. Got my degree in Cultural Studies, which is very nice, but absolutely useless for getting a job. Then I got married, mortgage, blah, blah, blah. Had a normal job for about 4-5 years, that didn't suit me whatsoever. I was working in insurance and kinda resented it. I came back in 1998 to do the Mercenary album because they asked me to. They asked me to rejoin the band, but my head was in a different place and I couldn't commit 100% to doing it. I'm always going to be the first choice for the vocalist of Bolt Thrower. It's kinda my job really. So with that thought, it really didn't take me much thinking to grab it and be welcomed back with open arms. It's rare in life to get two chances to do something that you enjoy."

To read the entire interview go to this location.