Chuck Billy confirms the remixed version of “Souls Of Black” for 2027

During a recent interview with Stig Gøran Nordahl of Norway’s Metal Express Radio, Testament frontman Chuck Billy revealed that the band intends to release a remixed edition of their 1990 fourth album, “Souls Of Black”, as per Blabbermouth.

Me and Eric [Peterson] took back all the Atlantic records, the six records we did with [the] Atlantic [major record label]. Now we took them back. Next year we get ‘The Ritual’ [1992] back, and a few years later we’ll get ‘Low’ [1994] back. But right now we have ‘The Legacy’ [1987], ‘The New Order’ [1988], ‘Practice What You Preach’ [1989] and now ‘Souls Of Black’. And we remastered all the others — ‘The Legacy’, ‘The New Order’ and ‘Practice’ — because 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. It sounds good.

In the chat, Billy addressed the underwhelming production of the original release, explaining the circumstances behind its flat sound.

Well, 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. 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, and it just sounds… 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. So, yeah, it’s way better.

Would Billy have re-recorded his vocals again?

I thought I would. But I was very happy with all the vocals. It was actually a very strong performance on all the tracks. There was no… Nothing, when we listened to it, said, ‘Oh, oh, I wanna change that,’ or, ‘Oh, I don’t like that.’ All of it was… I had a good performance on that record, so that helped. I didn’t have to fix anything.

He also touched on a potential timeline, offering details on when fans can expect the newly remixed version to arrive.

That’ll be next year sometime. 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 next year.