The Scream Queen recently interviewed GOATWHORE vocalist Ben Falgoust. An excerpt follows:

Carving Out The Eyes Of God was released last year (2009), how would you say this album has done compared to your previous ones?

"I think it was actually a really good step for us, I think we went into this record too a little different as far as our attitudes and everything. We didn't really care - we didn't go in thinking, 'Ok, we have to beat A Haunting Curse.' We weren't really one of these bands that wanted to be like, 'Oh this record's going to be better than the last record.' Like every cliche thing that's said by every band. We went in and we did a lot of stuff that we really liked and we incorporated things - ideas of things that we grew up on from thrash metal, to death metal, to you know - I mean, of course CELTIC FROST is a huge influence for Goatwhore, but beyond that I think we were expanded more, and the fact that Sammy [Duet, guitarist] and Zack [Simmons, drummer] now have been together jamming for a while.

Once you get two people, three people, four people all in a pocket together, you start to get that flow back again. When you shift members out, you change something, you change the whole layout of the band and everything, so everybody's got to fall into place again. And Zack [Simmons] and Sammy [Duet] work together really well and we have James [Harvey] now as well, I mean, he's - when we do the next record, it'll be his first record, but he blends in really well with Zack and Sammy with writing and everything.

We're working on some new stuff as well for the next record. So we just went after things that we were influenced by, things that we really enjoyed, and we kinda wrote for ourselves, in a way. Nothing against fans or anything, but it's not always trying to please everyone, you know? You've got to please yourself as well in this situation. The outcome actually - I think all of us were surprised at the outcome of the record, just like the production, all the songs came out and everything, and it got a lot of really good feedback. We didn't even expect the feedback that we got from it, so it turned out really well, overall.

We focused on a lot of things; like, there were a lot of times where with guitars with a lot of metal records nowadays, they're really like, mixed back, and drums and vocals are so up front, and we want it like traditional metal records, where the guitars attack and that's the reason why it was metal, because of the guitar tone and everything, so not so much that it buries everything else, but that it has this attacking thing and everything else kind of falls into with it. So, it's something we were really after when we went in.

The thing about it too, working with [Erik] Rutan already before that, we were all comfortable with each other and we knew how things were going to work. We were doing a lot of pre-production before we went in Carving Out the Eyes of God, which we never did before where we demoed songs and sent them ahead to Rutan. So, he kind of knew the material before we even entered the studio; so, as an engineer, he was familiar. We were coming in with almost like he was a member of the band, so there were a lot of things we changed and it kind of helped the whole production of doing the record."

To read the rest of the interview, click here.