Featuring former Scar The Martyr frontman Henry Derek Bonner on vocals, Shadows Fall guitarist Matt Bachand on bass, plus former Megadeth members Shawn Drover (drums) and Chris Broderick (guitar), Los Angeles based super-group Act of Defiance return with the follow-up to their 2015 debut, Birth and the Burial (Metal Blade).Continue reading
Act Of Defiance, the new band featuring former Megadeth guitarist Chris Broderick and drummer Shawn Drover, former Scar The Martyr singer Henry Derek Bonner and bassist Matt Bachand (Shadows Fall), issued an update on the recording of their debut album. They entered the studio with producer Chris “Zeuss” Harris (Rob Zombie, Hatebreed, Shadows Fall) to record their debut album via Metal Blade Records. View the album trailer below.
“At this point of the recording of the new Act Of Defiance record — drums, rhythm guitars, bass — are finished. Guitar solos, clean guitars are pretty close to being completed, and Henry is around 70 percent done with vocals.
“The guys still have a few weeks to wrap things up, as it were, before we begin to mix the record with Chris ‘Zeuss’ Harris, for which I personally cannot wait.“The finish line is not far away in terms of the recording process and all of us cannot wait for you to hear what we have been working on for the past several months.”
He continues:
“People often ask me: what does the new music sound like? I loathe putting music in a nice tiny ‘heavy metal sub-genre’ box, so I won’t. Like I have said from the get-go, this music is 100 percent pure heavy metal made purely for musical purposes. We are creating music that we totally love, with hopes that others will dig it as well, which, at the end of the day, is all you really can try to do, in my opinion. Elements of thrash, progressive, traditional, dynamic — it’s all there and then some.
“We have been working with Travis Smith (Opeth, Nevermore, Overkill, Sanctuary) for our artwork, to which he has really come up with some twisted, bizarre, awesome concepts (right up my alley), which has also been very exciting. We cannot wait to see the finished ideas, to which he will provide in due time.”
A message from Act Of Defiance’s Shawn Drover:”So, I think it’s time for an update, so let’s go!!!!!!At this point…
Posted by Act Of Defiance on Friday, April 3, 2015
Former Scar The Martyr vocalist Henry Derek Bonner has been confirmed to have joined the new outfit featuring former Megadeth guitarist Chris Broderick and drummer Shawn Drover.
Drover commented:
“At this point, I can reveal to you that Chris Broderick and myself have the ‘music’ for our debut record written. Henry Bonner is our singer, who has sang on six songs in demo form at this point, to which its all sounding 100 percent heavy metal. Some of the songs are very aggressive and fast, others are more ‘accessible’ to the average heavy metal listener.
“I don’t like to label everything into the 100 subgenres of metal. To me, ACCEPT is pure heavy metal, yet so is KING DIAMOND and GOJIRA. Do they sound the same?? No, but they are all metal!!
“Chris, Henry and myself are all fans of all kinds of heavy music, which is great, as we are not putting any musical parameters on what we are creating here, which is very liberating, I must say.
“There is still a ton of great things going on that we cannot reveal at this point… Just know that we are all working hard to bring you the best heavy metal music we can.”
Former Scar The Martyr vocalist Henry Derek Bonner has joined the yet-unnamed new band featuring former Megadeth guitarist Chris Broderick and drummer Shawn Drover. Bonner parted ways in Scar The Martyr in April 2014 after recording one record.
Broderick appeared on SiriusXM’s Jose Mangin on Wednesday, December 17, 2014’s edition of Liquid Metal’s “666-LIVE” call-in show, and spoke about the new band:
“Through talking with Shawn Drover, we’ve talked about how we had all this material that was never gonna get released, all these killer, heavy riffs that we had written and stuff, and so we just decided, ‘Hey, why don’t we put the stuff out? Why don’t we form a band and get out these killer riffs, just to see what people think?’ So we formed a band, we’re working with a killer singer — he’s awesome — and we’ve got record labels that have made some good offers on the table, and we’re really excited about where that’s gonna go.”
Broderick spoke about the name of the new band:
“Here’s the funny thing: we have many names. But the problem today is that there are so many bands out there that the first thing we’ve gotta do is run them by trademark and make sure that we can get… We don’t wanna run into the ‘GHOST’ and the ‘GHOST B.C.’ issue, right?! So we’re looking into trademarks on the names, and I would love to tell you, but we wanna save some of it for our official press release, and we’ll talk about the singer then, and we’ll have the record label on board by then.”
About whether the musical ideas used in the new band were originally presented to Megadeth:
“Some of them were presented, but then some of them also… I’d be, like, ‘Oh, this isn’t appropriate for MEGADETH, their sound.’ I have a tendency to write very complex stuff, and so I’ve gotta watch it when I write and submit for MEGADETH under that kind of… I wanna make sure it’s not too complex and too crazy and all over the place. So those are the things that I would have held back.”