“If a band says they recorded one show, you know they went in the studio and overdubbed stuff. Unless you’re playing with tracks, you’re not going to have a complete performance that’s perfection. Everything’s live! We picked out the best shows and the best performances,” says Prong frontman Tommy Victor, talking about his band’s new live album, Live And Uncleansed, which comes out on March 6th via Steamhammer.
Live And Uncleansed was recorded across several European shows during the summer of 2025. These concerts were part of the Cleansing 31st Anniversary Tour.
“Cleansing (released in 1994) pretty much made our career and keeps my career going; ‘Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck’. It’s the most popular record,” admits Victor. “I think it was the most fun to make. I have good memories about that whole experience. That was an exciting period. Going back and trying to play these songs, figuring out how to do it; rehearsing the songs was a challenge and I appreciate the record more now after doing this tour and these shows, celebrating 31 years. Now, it’s 32. I must say, looking back, it was the most successful recording and writing process. The band was on fire at that time. We had Raven (from Killing Joke) on bass, there was just a lot of excitement. Even before Cleansing came out, we had done a tour with The Bad Brains and it went over really well. We were playing some of the new songs and people were reacting to ‘em like they knew them already. It was a good period.”
As Tommy mentioned, Live And Uncleansed isn’t one show. It was recorded over seven nights in July and August 2025. That was a 15-date tour with stops in Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Belgium, and Netherlands. At the end of “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck”, Tommy says, “We love you Wacken!” That’s just one of the festivals on that run. Prong also played Brutal Assault, Alcatraz, Dynamo and Reload; in addition to a handful of club shows. The process of selecting which songs to include and then mixing them must have been so time-consuming.
“That’s very observant of you. It was an extremely long process. It would have been easier to record one show and go in the studio and fix that. It would have been way easier! Anybody who says we took the easy way out is incorrect, because it was exactly the way you described it. Actually, every show was recorded. I had to go through 14 shows. Some of them, I didn’t get that far. I had to be discriminating, cause I knew it was going to be a long process. If the quality of the recording was not that great, sometimes there was a little bit too much bleed-through. Just the way that club sounded, the acoustics weren’t that great. A show in Eindhoven at Dynamo was really good, but I didn’t like the way the recording sounded. So, there was that aspect of it. We narrowed it down to seven shows. Then it was selecting the performances, listening to every song and comparing it to whatever we had at the other shows.”
“Initially, the record was supposed to be longer. I thought that maybe we could pull out a double record, double vinyl. Olly from Steamhammer thought it would be better to just do one. The way we went with it was a joint decision, and I’m pretty happy with that. We played some new ones, and then there was a lot of the old stuff. We want to do another one down the line, with Rude Awakening songs. We were playing ‘Unfortunately’ on this last tour. We were doing Force Fed songs. It was a long set, over two hours. Especially going back to Germany, I wanted people to have their money’s worth. It was definitely a time-consuming process. The mix-down, finding the time to do that was another issue. Getting in the studio, the only thing we actually did fix was the Wacken performance, because we knew we wanted to use the video footage from Wacken for ‘Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck’. So, we had to manipulate it a little bit to fit into the time of that video. We made a couple of edits, but that was it. We did this long intro for that song, cause it’s the last song of the set. So, we had to chop that up a little bit.”
“Apart from that, the only thing that was challenging technically was the fact that I had decided to use all my original vocals on it. The sound engineer, Simon, who did the recording, said, ‘There’s no way you’re going to be able to use these vocals.’ When somebody says that to me, that means I’m going to try to do it. I was like, ‘They’re fine.’ He said, ‘You’re going to have a problem with bleed.’ Then, Joe, the engineer was able to – with gating – use the live vocals of all the performances. I didn’t do any vocal overdubs. Most live records, the singer goes in does it again. We didn’t do that. And that was challenging cause that live mic is picking up all kinds of crazy stuff. There’s some performances where I hit the mic; there’s all those challenges. So, that eliminated some of the choices. Maybe one song we played it perfectly, but the vocal was bad, so we couldn’t use that. Some songs, the vocal was really good, and then at one certain point I didn’t sing the beginning of a line, or something like that. We don’t play to a click track, so there’s no way of flying stuff in from other shows. It was just, ‘Oh man, that performance was so good, except for that one snare hit, or something like that.’ There are mistakes on the record, but it’s not like anything that’s crazy. Recording 14 shows, that was the way to do it. We did what you mentioned, those five festivals. And we did another festival, and two of the songs are from that; a smaller festival called Angeliter in Germany. I want to mention that. Great festival, almost on the Danish border. This unbelievably idyllic spot. Just a great little festival, people going crazy. By the time we went on, people were completely hammered; it was great.”
Joining Tommy in Prong on Live And Uncleansed are bassist Christopher Dean and drummer Tyler Joseph. They’ve both been a part of the band since 2023, but this is the first Prong release they’ve actually appeared on.
“That’s right, yeah. Dean was really good. He was the one worried about a lot of things. Every show, his bass was very consistent; and Tyler was very consistent. It was mainly me we had to worry about – if my guitar playing was sloppy or the vocals weren’t right. Those guys are dialed in, they were really good through the whole thing. No problems there at all. We rehearsed a lot too. We did a good amount of rehearsing over a period of time to get all these songs down. Especially for me, ‘Not Of This Earth’, which is on Cleansing, and ‘Sublime’. We did those songs back in the day live, but we dumped them pretty fast. We were doing a lot of opening shows. We were doing half hour sets back in the Cleansing era; maybe we’d get a 45-minute set. ‘Not Of This Earth’ and ‘Sublime’ were not really appropriate, so I sort of forgot. ‘Home Rule’ was another one that we really didn’t play that much. Plus, the two B-sides… Tyler looked through all of them and he said we never did ‘Corpus Delicti’ live. That’s possibly true, I don’t remember. So, that was a new one, and ‘Inheritance’. I don’t remember doing ‘Inheritance’ live back in the day. So, the B-sides from Cleansing that didn’t make the record, they’re on this record. I had five songs to learn, sing, and play – that was challenging. Especially ‘Not Of This Earth’, the guitar part is just completely in a different rhythm than the vocals; that’s a struggle, that one. We rehearsed our asses off! We did a lot of work on it. The band was tight. Somebody asked why we didn’t use any live recordings from the show in New York? It didn’t come out good. We did a recording of the first show before we went over to Europe. We played this club called The Amityville Music Hall. Half the show didn’t get recorded, which was unfortunate. And the rest of it was unusable for numerous reasons.”
“Inheritance” also appeared on the Airheads movie soundtrack in 1994.
“The thing that’s crazy is, for so many years I didn’t watch movies. I was so anti-pop culture, I wasn’t paying attention to anything. I completely forgot about that movie. Later on, I started watching The Sopranos with Steve Buscemi, and I thought he was great in Fargo. He’s one of my favorite actors, he’s amazing. Then someone said, ‘You know he’s in Airheads.’ What? Really! I had no idea. As a big Steve Buscemi fan, I had no idea we were on the soundtrack to one of his movies. But that was cool. We were on a couple of movies. ‘Whose Fist Is This Anyway’ was in Black Dog, it’s the opening song in that. Our songs from that era were in a lot of stuff. That’s what I mean, that record kept me going financially for a while.”
Looking at the setlist for Live And Uncleansed, there’s nothing from Beg To Differ, nothing from Prove You Wrong. But that’s understandable, cause Live And Uncleansed is all about the 31st anniversary of Cleansing, and also, Prong did release 100% Live in 2002, which contained songs from those two albums.
“Yeah, that came into consideration,” recalls Tommy. “There’s also this live bootleg called Unleashed In The West, we put that out ourselves (in 2014). This is a pretty cheapo thing to do, but two of the live versions from that, we put on the Age Of Defiance EP to fill that out. But ‘Another Worldly Device’ has been around awhile. And ‘Rude Awakening’, so we didn’t want to do those again. ‘Beg To Differ’, of course we wanted to include that on this, if it was a double record, we would have been able to do that. Another live record will be released eventually, who knows when? But I’d like to do more of the Rude Awakening songs on the next one, and Force Fed, Beg To Differ, maybe even some deeper cuts, not just the classic ones. Maybe a Beg To Differ tour would be a thing to do down the line. Play that whole record in E tuning, which is the original tuning; we started doing that on the last tour. Everyone is tuned down now. When you play stuff in E, it’s like woah – that sounds like a bunch of mosquitos. But that’s the way it was recorded back then. We didn’t know there was any lower tunings, everything was E. Slayer went down to E Flat, that’s what made Slayer sound so heavy. E Flat is a good tuning for thrash. The new record that we’re putting out has a lot of E Flat songs.”
The currently untitled new record will serve as the follow-up to State Of Emergency from 2023.
“All the songs are written, and most of it’s recorded,” reveals Tommy. “We’re almost finished with it. That’s what I’m working on now. A lot of the songs were written over the last two years, now we’ve got to pick and choose how many will be on the record. But we recorded a whole bunch and it’s all done, pretty much. It goes all over the place. There’s a good amount of thrash on it. There’s a good amount of New York crossover style on it. Then there’s an industrial metal vibe. Playing ‘Senseless Abuse’ from Force Fed, and ‘Freezer Burn’, then playing ‘Not Of This Earth’ and ‘Sublime’ on this last tour, this is what came out of that. A lot of the songs were written while rehearsing for this tour. I’d come up with a riff in the Cleansing mode, and then another one in the Force Fed mode. It’s sort of a combo of those two styles.”
As far as a potential release date goes…
“We’re on Napalm now. I’m shooting for October.”
Lyrically, what is the new album about?
“It’s along the same lines of State Of Emergency. It’s current and dystopian, that kind of vibe. Some of it’s, we’re Prong and we’re proud. It’s not as blatant as that, sort of like a ‘We Stand Alone’ type of lyric. It could apply to anybody, sports teams or whatever. Kind of like a ‘Home Rule’ type of vibe, similar to Cleansing. A little vague, less lengthy lyrics. That was bothering me, the way I was going lyrically on the last bunch of Prong records; there was too many words. I thought it was getting too complicated. I sort of stripped it down a little bit, on some of the songs. We have one song – we’ll see if it makes it – it’s seven minutes long and there’s four verses in it. There’s a song on Power Of The Damager called ‘The Banishment’ – that has so many lyrics, it’s impossible to remember them. It’s not quite as bad as that, but it’s almost in that realm. It’s pretty wordy, but we may cut it down. There’s a couple of songs on this record that, I don’t know if they’ll make it, but they tip their hat to a couple of bands I really love, like Chrome.”
On the live front, Prong is going back to Europe for five shows in March in Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands. Currently, there’s only one US show scheduled, at The Milwaukee Metal Fest on June 6th. Will there be any more live shows in 2026?
“Yeah, we’re trying to work on it. We’re up for a handful of tours right now.”
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