Overkill’s Blitz feels a deep grind

According to frontman of the legendary American thrashers Bobby "Blitz" Ellsworth, there's a distinct feeling in the nether regions which occurs in the studio that let's him know all is well with the material.

"Usually your balls kind of move," said Blitz of hearing the new music come to life at the mixing console. "You feel your nuts kind of shake. I think that the key is when the emotion strikes ... you want to move that feeling from me and D.D. [Verni] and Dave [Linsk] and Ron [Lipnicki] and Derek [Tailer] to you. We want to have you feel the emotion that we felt in the room.

"You know it came together when your balls move. That's really what it is. Like, 'oh shit, I just got a hard-on, we must be onto something here'. That's what it's all about."

The Grinding Wheel, Overkill's 18th studio album, was released today via Nuclear Blast Records.

It's ten tracks showcase many elements of Overkill's tried and true musical arsenal - touches of old school metal riffery, some punk angst, a dash of hardcore and lashings of glorious thrash.

Like 2014's mighty White Devil Armory was a crushing successor to 2012's The Electric Age, The Grinding Wheel again rises to a new level, both in terms of proficiency and sheer brilliance.

From the dazzling opener Mean, Green, Killing Machine through to the closing title track, this is classic Overkill and definitely creates an exciting new chapter to the history. The song Our Finest Hour may just be that!

Blitz agreed with the notion that The Grinding Wheel was very much a sum of all parts.

"Somebody went into the attic and pulled out one at a time some groove and some punk rock and a little bit of rock 'n' roll, some classic heavy metal and injected it into our formula," he said.

"With each of our albums it's always been there, but I think that once we saw that there was punk rock and rock 'n' roll in Goddamn Trouble and Let's All Go To Hades, there was traditional heavy metal in The Long Road, groove in Come Heavy ... they started pushing a little away from each other and that development kind of made them all the individual identifiable entities they became.

"At the end of the day, the key is to still put the Overkill brand over the top of all of the individual identities and I think we succeeded in doing so and the band has that feeling of success."

Of the writing, Blitz said the formula was fairly fluid these days, with D.D. taking care of the music and he the lyrics.

"If we weren't a metal band we'd be probably be bridge builders, we'd rather build bridges than not build bridges," he said. "It's pretty simple kind of an equation for us. As kids we didn't have the luxury of time. There are two studios among five of the guys in the band which gives us this unbelievable luxury of being able to overtake ourselves.

"With D.D. Verni writing riffs and recording all of the time in his home studio and playing them for his partner, me, who is able to go over and put some vocals down, the project really works on a continuous basis. It's kind of a cool process.

"I start with phonetics and something will just come eventually. It's really about a marriage with D.D.s original ideas, so let's say it's starts with D.D. and ends with me. That whole journey - from start to finish - and that time factor that I spoke about earlier, gives me a whole heap of time to think about stuff and ideas I've collected. My wife [Annette] thinks I'm down here confessing my sins for the last 14 months and to some degree I am and I come out of the basement as another man. It's a pretty good therapy. I was just having a conversation with Annette this week and I said, 'you know the only way to really do this stuff is you've got to be off somewhere, you can't just be the f*cking straight shooter, you're off somewhere'. The brain's twisted."

As with many of his songs over the years, Blitz shows off some slick wordplay throughout The Grinding Wheel, including presenting me with one of my favourite new lines "you chose the higher road, I took the psycho path" from the Sabbath-soaked groover Come Heavy.

Blitz said the song's title was inspired by an episode of The Sopranos.

"I've always said that Overkill is the drug that's kept me off the drugs because it got me high enough and I still chase that high and I speak about those kind of things," he said

"For Come Heavy I was watching an old Sopranos episode and Junior was just made the boss and Tony went into the deli to congratulate him and a couple of guys were talking behind Tony's back, and he says, 'the next time, you come heavy or you don't come at all' and I said to myself, 'that is New Jersey man ... I was in that deli'. So that's where the song started and goes into the principles that I like to live by."

As well as being a melting pot of Overkill sounds and genre influences, The Grinding Wheel boasts a mix - courtesy of the band and Andy Sneap - in which each musician is clearly identified.

"This has always been the flag of Overkill," said Blitz. "This hasn't been Bobby and D.D.'s band. The name Overkill is representative of those who hold that flag and I think that's a really good way of looking at it.

"Everybody should be louder than everybody else ... it's a Motorhead philosophy and it's applied here. To have such a great relationship between Ronnie [drums] and D.D. [bass] and to have them so up in the mix it makes us all feel powerful.

"When you see this band play live we don't set ourselves up as, here's where the spotlight should go, we set ourselves up like a defensive football line, four of us across the front. We're kind of like the communists of metal ... everybody's equal."

Overkill was formed in New Jersey in 1980. Blitz and D.D. are the only original members to fly the flag. The band has survived peaks and troughs in the industry and at all times have maintained an integrity that is relished by fans.

"It makes it non disposable," said Blitz. "The value in the music is now being appreciated by three generations. You can't throw out a virus you've got to kill it ... I'm like a fungi.

"I'll tell you what a great man told to me once in the 90s, he goes, 'Blitz, we've been over since Horrorscope [1991], but there's nothing more dangerous than a couple of guys from New Jersey who have got nothing to f*cking lose. And that guy was D.D. Verni. And I kind of live by that principle.

"I kind of like the fact that we don't have to play by anybody else's rules. We're in a community of thrash metal that really has rules that we have to set for ourselves and that feeling of being dangerous is a great f*cking motivator .. we've got nothing to lose, let's be dangerous with what we do and that becomes exciting and maybe that's why this grind has lasted so long.

"We all live on pride to some degree, that's our biggest sin and also our biggest asset. I think some of it comes through ... we've caught a good wave and we're riding it like a motherf*cker at the moment."

Blitz said the band was certainly keen to return to Australia for a series of shows.

"The road and the live stage was always my first attraction to this whole thing and I love going out on tour and doing the shows," he said. "They say business as usual is a good thing in this house because it means that we're still valued in the current day, and that's what it's all about, it's not about what we were but what we are."