WHIPLASH have released "Bullet Train", the first single from "Roar", the New Jersey band's eighth studio album, due worldwide on November 27 via Time To Kill Records.
The track runs on what WHIPLASH have always run on: Tony Portaro's guitar and Tony Portaro's voice, neither of them polished into anything more agreeable than they were in 1986. Portaro describes the song as catching "that headlong rush of living life at 200 mph; the addiction to speed, chaos and the constant chase" — which, for a band whose name is a physical description of what their music does to a neck, is about as on-brand as a lead single gets.
"Roar" has already had one life. The album was recorded at Studio Mozart and Concrete Island Studio, produced by Portaro and mixed by Jamie King, and was pressed in small numbers for a European tour under the title "Thrashquake". Time To Kill picked it up in August, and the record is being reissued properly: same ten songs, new title, new cover art by Ed Repka, whose work did as much to fix the visual language of 1980s thrash as anyone holding a guitar did to fix its sound. The former title survives as the opening track.
The full running order:
- Thrashquake
- Bullet Train
- Can't Take Back A Bullet
- Sword Meet Skull
- Who Stole My Whiskey
- When The Deadman Calls
- Red Tape Riot
- Mother's Kill Club
- Sonic Asylum
- Graveyard Of Good And Evil
WHIPLASH are currently Portaro on vocals and guitar, William Winton on bass and Mitch Hull on drums.
Some context for anyone arriving late: WHIPLASH formed in Passaic, New Jersey in 1984 and put out "Power And Pain" in 1986, a record that has spent four decades being cited by people who play much faster than they talk. The band have broken up and reassembled more than once, and Portaro is the constant. Eight albums in, on a fourth decade of this, "Bullet Train" is not the sound of a reunion trading on goodwill. It is the sound of a thrash band that never found a reason to slow down.