Metal Assault's Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal recently caught up with HELLOWEEN guitarist Michael Weikath to talk about their new album, upcoming tours and more. The following is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Your new album, 7 Sinners, is going to release in October. How are you feeling at this point?

A: "It's got a brilliant sound. It's great stuff, really good and it took some effort to make because we've been recording on 432 hz instead of 440."

Q: I was just curious to know how you came up with the album title.

A: "We have one track on the record called 'Where The Sinners Go', which is a Deris track and I wrote one that's called 'The Sage, The Fool, The Sinner'. So we had a talk and said we're not going to change any of the two tracks we've done but with the term 'Sinner' instead may be we would call the full album something along the line of Sinner. Deris agreed to that. The demo tracks that I had on my iphone, I added in iTunes the artwork of the seven-point star, which is a heptagon or heptagram, whatever you want to call it. He liked that design too, and said it's looking good. We thought of somehow putting that on the album cover and call it 7 Sinners, like the 7 points of the star."

Read the complete interview at this location.

Helloween are set to release their 13th studio album, 7 Sinners, on November 9th in North America via The End Records. Audio samples for all tracks on the album are now available at this location.

If there is a golden thread throughout the more than 25 years of Helloween's history, 13 studio albums, countless headliner tours around the globe and more than 5 million records sold, then it is their special kind of attitude: don't take yourself too seriously and simply live statements like: "just have fun with the shit you're doing." Maybe it is exactly this easiness that allows Helloween to be one of the most constant bands of the genre while simultaneously being the one band who dares to experiment more than their musical peers. While some copycats would rather stick with the same old patterns, Andi Deris, Michael Weikath, Sascha Gerstner, Markus Großkopf and Dani Löble aren't afraid of taking risks - and are rightfully rewarded with success.

7 Sinners is definitively one of the fastest and hardest albums in the Helloween's history and it bursts with vitality. That might partly be due to the versatility of the various songwriters within the band, who over time have become so homogenous, that the 13 songs formed a unity on their own in the studio , but it may also be due to the fact that the album was recorded completely without a click track, which, considering the extreme speed of the songs is an impressive feat. Especially drummer Löble, who proves that his technique is at a world-class-level. Following his excellent inner clock, bass and drums drive tracks like 'Are You Metal?', 'Long Live The King' and 'Who Is Mr. Madman?' to dizzying tempos. 7 Sinners with its typically strong melodies and the tangible joy of playing, is a true metal album whose range reaches astonishing dimensions.

It has become a cliche for metal band's to tout their newest opus as their "fastest" or "heaviest" album ever made, but in Helloween's case, 7 Sinners is truly a return to form and is indeed their fastest and heaviest release in years. Helloween bass player Markus Grosskopf stated about the band's new material: "For all those out there who found our special best-of [CD] Unarmed to be too smooth and calm, I have great news: The new album will hit you right in the face! It's gonna be very heavy and contain all [the classic] Helloween trademarks! Some songs are very powerful and hymnic, others contain the fastest bass-drum patterns our drummer Dani [Löble] ever played, and this means a lot!"

7 Sinners tracklisting:

'Where The Sinners Go'

'Are You Metal?'

'Who is Mr. Madman?''

'Raise The Noise'

'World Of Fantasy'

'Long Live The King'

'The Smile Of The Sun'

'You Stupid Mankind'

'If A Mountain Could Talk'

'The Sage, The Fool, The Sinner'

'My Sacrifice'

'Not Yet Today'

'Far In The Future'