TESTAMENT have remixed "Souls Of Black," the 1990 album long regarded as the weakest-sounding record of their classic run, and it is due in 2027. Singer Chuck Billy confirmed the plan in a new interview with Stig Gøran Nordahl of Norway's Metal Express Radio.
The remix was only possible because of a rights situation that has been slowly unwinding. "Me and Eric took back all the Atlantic records, the six records we did with Atlantic," Billy said, referring to guitarist Eric Peterson. "Next year we get 'The Ritual' back, and a few years later we'll get 'Low' back. But right now we have 'The Legacy', 'The New Order', 'Practice What You Preach' and now 'Souls Of Black'."
For the other three, the band had no choice but to remaster. "We couldn't find the two-inch master reels, so we just did a remastering. But 'Souls Of Black', we had all the tracks, so we went in there and remixed it, and it sounds great. I can't wait for people to hear it. It sounds so good. Really modern sound and raw."
Billy was unusually direct about why the original underwhelmed, and the answer was inexperience rather than sabotage. "We put our faith in the producers, engineers, people mixing it. We were young, and we put a record out every year and toured. We didn't know the studio or none of that stuff. We were just writing songs and recording, so we left it up to the people in charge. In the end, we wanted it to sound better, but we didn't know how to make it sound better."
Hearing it now, the difference is structural. "It took us 35, 40 years later for us to get in a studio and put up the tracks again and go, 'Oh, God, that sounds bad. Let's fix that.' So now that's what we've done. I hear the songs way different now, because you can really hear the guitars are so heavy and the vocals aren't all wet and reverbed out. We pulled a lot of stuff back and made it really raw and hit you a lot harder."
He did consider re-recording his vocals, then decided against it. "I thought I would. But I was very happy with all the vocals. It was actually a very strong performance on all the tracks. Nothing, when we listened to it, said, 'Oh, I wanna change that.' I had a good performance on that record, so that helped. I didn't have to fix anything."
Peterson had been blunter still about the album back in 2013: "I wouldn't have rushed out 'Souls Of Black' like we did. That album could've been something different. It is a classic record now, but it was just thrown together so quickly."
A date is not fixed. "That'll be next year sometime," Billy said. "Right now we're still pushing the original version with Nuclear Blast. And then next year, once that's done and we got a really cool packaging put together, that'll come out."
TESTAMENT's most recent album, "Para Bellum," arrived last October via Nuclear Blast, recorded with Juan Urteaga and mixed by Jens Bogren.