Venom Inc. frontman Tony “Demolition Man” Dolan has checked in with the following announcement:
“BMG has re-released Prime Evil, Tear Your Soul Apart, Temples Of Ice, and The Wastelands albums (from Venom) all on digital media. In the following months will be coming a new and exclusive box set of all my era materials. Exciting times after almost 30 years!!! AVE! Enjoy your weekend and eyes peeled for the coming tsunami!”
Dolan fronted UK extreme metallers Venom from 1988 – 1992, replacing original vocalist/bassist Cronos. He appears on Prime Evil (1989), Temples Of Ice (1991), The Waste Lands (1992), and the Tear Your Soul Apart EP (1990).
In April 2015, in anticipation of an M-pire Of Evil show – the new band featuring Dolan and original Venom guitarist Jeff “Mantas” Dunn – at the Keep It True Festival in Germany, the organizers asked the duo if they would play some Venom songs with original drummer Abaddon. Mantas and Abaddon hadn’t spoken since 1998. They agreed to do an unrehearsed set, which was the relaunch of the 1988–1992 Venom line-up under the name Venom Inc.
It was reported in January that Venom Inc. has entered the studio to record their new album. The follow up to their 2017 debut release Avé will once more be released on Nuclear Blast Records. The recording is being done between England, Portugal, and America, and it will have guitarist Jeff “Mantas” Dunn at the helm as producer once again.
During a recent appearance on the Heavy Demons Radio Show, Dunn provided a progress report on the new Venom Inc. album: “So far, we have 24 brand new songs, and they are all at the first preliminary mix stage. But we need to get the vocals done. Tony (‘Demolition Man’ Dolan) usually comes to Portugal to do vocals in my studio, but with all the restrictions at the moment (due to the COVID-19 pandemic), it’s just not possible. So we’re just gonna have to wait.”
Elaborating further, Dunn said, “The tracks are sounding great. Dare I say this, it sounds better than Avé. I think it does. Obviously, we don’t have any release date for it at the moment. It’s pointless saying to people, ‘Oh, yeah, it’ll be out in the spring. Yeah, it’ll be out in the summer.’ We just don’t know — we really don’t know. At the moment, The UK looks like it’s possibly locked down until March, so nobody’s going anywhere. And Portugal have shut their borders to a lot of countries, so getting in and out of places is just so difficult at the moment. So it may come down to Tony having to find a studio somewhere in London or whatever. I really don’t know.”
“Like what we did with Avé, I had a lot of the lyrics written for that album already, and then when Tony came over, then any gaps that were there, we filled them in together. We tend to work on the vocals and the phrasing and all that kind of stuff together. So maybe it’ll just be down to Tony this time. I don’t know. We’ll have to see how the restriction situation goes. We’ll have to keep a close eye on it and see what happens.”
The new, currently untitled album marks the second recording under the name Venom Inc., while guitarist Mantas and frontman Demolition Man have a long history as recording artists together in Venom, M:Pire Of Evil and Mantas solo projects. It also marks the recording debut on a major label for multi-instrumentalist, Venom Inc. drummer Jeramie “War Machine” Kling (also of Massacre) who joined the band in 2018.
The Demolition Man era albums are also finally available for streaming via Spotify.
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