Today, Corrosion of Conformity have confirmed they will be releasing No Cross No Crown, their first album with Pepper Keenan in 12 years, on January 12th via Nuclear Blast Entertainment.
"Reed called me and mentioned maybe playing a couple shows," Keenan recalls. "I said, 'Let's just go to Europe and see if it works.' So we went to Europe and then ended up going back four times in one year… We toured for a year and then started tracking about ten or eleven months ago." Today we get our first taste of new music, with the excellent jam, "Cast The First Stone."
The band recorded in North Carolina with longtime producer John Custer. They spent about forty days, over the course of a year, recording the album. "We took our time and didn't put any pressure on ourselves," Keenan says. "I'd go up from New Orleans and we'd do four or five days at a time, just hacking away at it. It was fun because we did it like a demo, but in a studio. We were writing and putting it on tape at the same time. We took what parts we thought were great from the old days and weren't scared to go backwards. It kinda wrote itself that way."
The album's title comes from a recent tour stop in England. "We were playing this old church from like the 1500s that had been turned into a performing arts center," Keenan recalls. "The dressing room had stained glass windows and one of them showed this poor fella being persecuted. Underneath it said, 'no cross no crown.' So I just took that idea. We're not trying to be on a soapbox, but we used it as a catalyst to write songs around."
If you like what you hear, you can pre-order at Nuclear Blast.
