Last week, Carcass announced via social media that their new album will be released on August 7th. We are now hearing additional details on the anticipated follow-up to 2013’s Surgical Steel as the group has revealed the title will be Torn Arteries. In a recent interview with Heavy, guitarist Bill Steer confirmed the news explaining how the name is derived from a demo tape the group’s founding drummer Ken Owen recorded when he was a teenager.
Steer expressed:
“He had a fictitious band called Torn Arteries and he recorded everything himself in his bedroom – guitar, and he’d actually bang on boxes and kind and scream into the mic. And the whole thing was so distorted, it kind of sounded super heavy, even though essentially you were listening to a guy with a Spanish guitar and a couple of boxes. I think Jeff [Walker] appreciates the connection to the past and the fact that it was another Ken Owen classic. So that was his choice, really, and it stuck.”
Later in the conversation, Steer revealed the sentiment behind the upcoming Torn Arteries is more of a tribute to the former drummer and his road to recovery. Owen left the band in 1996 and suffered a brain hemorrhage in 1999.
“I can’t remember when this came up, but we were doing some press conference at a festival, and I think we all kind of agreed that even though Ken isn’t playing in the band as such right now, he’s kind of involved in everything we do, stylistically, because when he was so unique – when he was playing drums, his approach was just totally different. Also, the riffs he came up with, they were just really far out there. They were loads of fun to learn. I still think, as a guitar player, some of the stuff was very unorthodox and it was quite a challenge. That kind of influence still runs through what we do today. Just as a friendship thing, we’re all still in touch regularly, and it’s just been great to see Ken’s life stabilizing. Basically, he has a good standard of living and he’s a happy guy.”
Listen to the full discussion below:
