DOWN kicked off their two-week North American tour on Saturday night, August 15, at The Eastern in Atlanta, Georgia, with HELMET and SPIRIT IN THE ROOM in support. Fan-filmed footage of the opening night is already circulating.
The lineup remains the one that made the band a genuine supergroup rather than a side project: vocalist Philip H. Anselmo, guitarists Pepper Keenan and Kirk Windstein, drummer Jimmy Bower and bassist Pat Bruders.
DOWN headline every regular date on the "Strap It Down" run, which closes September 2 at the Ramova Theatre in Chicago. Two festival slots break up the routing — Zakk Wylde's "Berzerkus" on August 28 in Scranton, Pennsylvania and August 29 in Wantagh, New York, alongside LAMB OF GOD and BLACK LABEL SOCIETY — and on September 4 the band plays Shakopee, Minnesota as direct support to SLAYER.
The tour arrives with a record behind it. Speaking to Metal Nation, Windstein said the long-awaited album is finished. "It's done. It's been recorded… we kind of self-produced it, so it's not that we're looking for a producer. The work is done. We just need to find the right person to mix it properly. So that's what we're looking at right now. But we're hoping to have a release by October or something."
He describes writing sessions that snapped back two decades. "It really clicked — when we started writing for this new record, it was like we were back in the '90s or something, writing the 'NOLA' record. It's, like, everybody's got ideas." He singles out Anselmo, whose songwriting he thinks is chronically underrated: "Three of the 10 songs on the record are pretty much his songs; every part is his."
The recording method was deliberately old-fashioned. Bower does not play to a click, so Keenan suggested tracking guitars together rather than one player at a time — stopping and restarting whole sections when either man slipped. "It's got more of a live feel, because Pat and Jimmy laid the drums and bass down together… DOWN's one of the few bands — of course we use Pro Tools, but we don't do click tracks and fix shit. It's real music."
The album lands via Nuclear Blast, who signed the band in April 2025. It began life as a covers record before the group concluded that learning obscure songs would cost more effort than writing originals.
Source: blabbermouth.net