Hans Rutten, drummer for THE GATHERING, has issued the following update:

"Hope you are all fine and well! We are currently mixing our new album The West Pole. It seems we need a bit more time to make this album something really outstanding, so we decided to postpone the release date a bit. The album will be in the shops first week of May.

As said before the album will also be available via our webshop around March, and we will ship the packages beginning of April. Of course we will have something extra, like always. Because of our 20th anniversary (it all started in 1989), people who buy a special The West Pole package (new album and exclusive t-shirt) will get the EP City From Above for free! Yes, it’s our birthday so it’s good to give something away. This EP includes some unreleased tracks that didn’t make it on The West Pole as well as the 13 minute epic instrumental title-track which we wrote for Arr. 2, a combination of dance and music which was performed in The Netherlands in 2008.

To fill the gap between now and the actual date, we will put some songs on our MySpace and the announcement of the names of the vocalists (beginning of March). I can give you some song titles from our new album The West Pole. Some titles are: 'When Trust Becomes Sound', 'Treasure', 'All You Are', 'You Promised Me A Symphony', 'The West Pole', 'Capital Of Nowhere', 'No Bird Call', 'Pale Traces', 'No One Spoke' and 'Constant Run'.

What’s more to say about The West Pole? On various songs we worked with a string ensemble, and we used some ‘exotic’ instruments like Stylophone, and a real Harmonium, a very old wooden keyboard instrument. René [Rutten, guitarist] produced the album (for the very first time). In fact, everything we could do ourselves, we did. What you get on The West Pole is more The Gathering than ever."