Jeff Loomis says Nevermore have six song ideas going and a window from October to March to record their first album since 2010.
Nevermore put the band back together before they put the songs together. Jeff Loomis admits that was the wrong way round, and he is only now catching up.
Speaking to Germany’s “Moshpit Passion“, the guitarist said writing for Nevermore‘s first album in sixteen years got off to a slow start because everything else came first, the auditions, the new members, the return to the stage.
“I’ve got a late start on [working on new music], actually, because we spent so much time getting the band together that it’s almost like — I don’t wanna say that Van and I got burnt out or anything, but it was… Van really wanted to get back on tour again. He was, like, ‘I wanna get back out and play again, man. I wanna play in front of people.’ So it’s kind of been backwards as we’ve approached this. But the demos are now starting to flow a little bit,” Loomis said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
There is a deadline attached. Loomis says the band have carved out a six-month block for the record, and that vocalist Berzan Önen relocating to the United States in November is the piece that unlocks it.
“I’ve got about six ideas going, some in the very infantile stages, some kind of complete,” he continued. “I think with Berzan being able to now come over to the United States, starting in November, it’s gonna be huge because when you’re writing something, man, in today’s age, you can easily send demos back and forth via the Internet and stuff like that. But I ultimately love to work in person with people. You can really feel it and get more energy out of each other that way. So, I don’t know — in a sense, I’m just kind of waiting for that, I guess. But we wanna really utilize the six months that we have completely to make the best album of our lives. And that’s coming up between October and March, basically. That’s what our plans are. We have kind of a structure worked out of what we’re gonna do, a plan.”
Loomis and drummer Van Williams announced open auditions on the last day of 2024 and worked through roughly 700 submissions before settling on Önen, guitarist Jack Cattoi and bassist Semir Özerkan, who also plays with Oceans Of Slumber. The five-piece signed with Reigning Phoenix Music in February and played its first show on April 1 at IF Performance Hall Beşiktaş in Istanbul, Turkey. A documentary directed by Ola Englund captured their January rehearsals in Sweden.
Regarding how the two newcomers were chosen and what they bring, Loomis described a process that sounded closer to a checklist than a jam.
“Berzan is his own person vocally,” he said. “He just is able to sing Warrel‘s [Dane] parts almost perfectly. But at the same time, we wanna give him his own identity as well. We wanna give him that opportunity to be his own person and not just have to sing like what Warrel did. But as far as reading every check mark, he got every one. And so did Semir. It’s, like, ‘Check, check, check. Yep, he’s that. He’s that.’ And so we had to make sure all those check marks were checked before we actually chose them. And they passed all that. I don’t wanna say it was like a test or something, but it was more just like, ‘These are the guys that we need in our band to make it proper.'”
Nevermore formed in Seattle in 1992 out of the wreckage of Sanctuary, and ran for close to two decades on the strength of Loomis‘s writing and Dane‘s range. The self-titled debut arrived in 1995, followed by records including Dreaming Neon Black, Dead Heart In A Dead World and This Godless Endeavor. The Obsidian Conspiracy, released in 2010, remains their last album. The band stalled in 2011 when Loomis and Williams walked over personal differences with Dane and founding bassist Jim Sheppard.
Warrel Dane died on December 13, 2017 in São Paulo, Brazil, aged 56. He was midway through recording Shadow Work, the follow-up to 2008’s Praises To The War Machine, when he suffered a heart attack overnight. Guitarist Johnny Moraes, who played in his solo band, said he performed cardiac massage and called emergency services, who arrived too late. Moraes also spoke about the singer’s condition at the time: “His health was already very weak because of his diabetes and his problems with alcoholism.” The instrumental tracks were nearly finished and Dane had begun his vocals; the album was completed and released posthumously.
Sheppard, who co-founded the band with Dane, is not part of this lineup and has said publicly he was never contacted about the return. Williams has described the split from him as irreconcilable and said a clean start was necessary.
Between the two eras, Loomis released the solo records Zero Order Phase and Plains Of Oblivion, co-founded Conquering Dystopia and spent nine years in Arch Enemy, leaving amicably in December 2023 to take the wheel of his own music again. Williams kept busy with Ashes Of Ares and Ghost Ship Octavius.
