Testament’s upcoming album will feature Floor Jansen on a slower track

Testament frontman Chuck Billy revealed some exciting details regarding the band’s follow-up to their 2020 album “Titans of Creation” in an interview with Paul Salfen of AMFM Magazine. Even though we’ve known for a long that the record was being worked on, what he disclosed in that interview is, to put it mildly, really fascinating. It turns out that Billy disclosed in the interview that Floor Jansen, the vocalist for Nightwish, will not only make a cameo on the future album but that her performance will consist of a half duet on one of the “slower” tracks on the album.

On this record, I don’t wanna say the word ‘ballad’, but we wrote a slower song like we had back in the ’80s and ’90s that we wrote on this record. And it’s really awesome, really good. We’re gonna bring in a guest vocalist, Floor Jansen from Nightwish. She’s gonna sing on it with me. And we’re gonna put in some string section into the song. We’re not afraid to take those chances where a lot of bands criticize you, like, ‘Oh, we don’t write ballads. ‘What are you doing that [for]?’ But you know what? At this point in our lives and career, we’re writing to make us happy first and foremost and what feels good, what feels right, and this song just felt right right now to kind of do this again.

We must be getting closer to hearing some new songs from the impending release as the album has been in the works for a while. Billy claims that even though they still have some time left before they’re finished, they’re getting closer and closer to releasing the dang thing.

We’re almost done recording right now. We finished, I’d say, three quarters of the recording before we left for Europe. And we have a three-week break now. And Steve’s in the studio finishing bass and Eric’s finishing up some of the rhythm guitars, but out of the 11 songs, I already tracked eight of ’em. So I just have a couple more songs to sing. We have another break after this U.S. tour in November. We’ll finish up all the backing vocals and anything that needs to be — after getting to live with it, which is something nice. We never really get to live with the music after recording. ‘It’s recorded. Here it is. Let’s go. It’s done, written in stone.’ Which is nice, is now we really get to live with it out on the road and talk about it together and say, ‘Hey, what if we did this or what if we tried that?’ And we’ve already came up with so much alternative stuff to try now. Like this week, Friday, I go in and I’m gonna try some new things on some vocal verses. We’re talking about tones of guitars and bringing in some string sections.