Been 7 years too long…with axman Gary Holt’s commitments to Slayer, the Exodus attack lay dormant until 2021 provided an opportunity for new music and it was certainly worth the wait. Persona Non Grata is Exodus as angry as it’s ever been with Holt etching mean riffs and Zetro singing with great vitriol. This is pure thrash metal as it is meant to be played and stands as one of the best of their career and achieves the #13 spot on our list!

Holt spoke with BraveWords about Persona Non Grata in a feature story; an excerpt below:

BraveWords: Any particular Persona Non Grata that you are referring to, or are you just referring to everyone on the planet?

Holt: "Just kind of everybody. It's a song I like to leave open-ended because I think it could mean something different to everyone who listens to it. It could be your boss, your ex-wife, your ex-husband, your former best friend, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, it could be anybody. It is to you what it is to you. I like to leave that open to interpretation."

BraveWords: As a guitar player, how do you try to keep things interesting without repeating or stepping on your own toes?

Holt: "You know it's a fine line you have to walk because anything I do as a guitar player, a riff writer, it's gonna have my stamp on it, and when something has your stamp it's going to carry a familiarity with it. It's going to sound like you. But, it's also trying to take it and explore your ideas, and take it to new places. That's what we've always tried to do, that's why our more recent albums became more progressive. This one kind of steps back from the progressive side. Like Exodus meets King Crimson, although there's elements of that too. When it comes down to it, I just love writing riffs. And when you truly love doing something and it's authentic and genuine and you're not faking it - like that feeling that you have to write a fast song because everybody complains that we don't - well we're always writing fast songs. It would probably benefit us more if we did a couple of albums where we didn't because then, like a lot of other bands I won't name, they do one fast song and the whole world loses their shit, like, 'They're back!', you know? We play fast all the time. So it's kind of taken for granted, when we push the beats per minute to obscene levels. Someone else will play something that's like mid-tempo to me and they get more credit for going fast. It's funny. I love writing riffs. It's one of my passions, I do it even when I don't have a guitar around. I’ve been doing it long enough, I know the fretboard, and I'll write a riff with just an idea and no guitar handy. I've written down the tab, using the notes on my phone, without a guitar around just because something is cool and I want to remember that for later when I actually have a guitar."

BraveWords: The spotlight for the most part is on you, but Zetro is just this fucking maniac on this record, his voice. Is he trying to keep up with you or is there a back and forth relationship when it comes to the singer and the lead guitar player, working together?

Holt: “It's a tonne of back and forth. On the last album, at the start I was on tour with Slayer so we had to do everything with dropbox and phone conversations with 8-10 hour time differences. It made it difficult. Whereas when you're together in one room you translate an idea to him and then walk in the other room and do it. And then you find out whether it works or not. And on this album, not only were we together, we isolated ourselves up in the mountains together. We were able to demo stuff together and work on it and go over phrasings before it ever actually went full tilt. Then when he did, he had such good command of the songs that he was just able to fucking go for it, and I mean he just kills it on this album. It's amazing."

BravePicks 2021 Top 30