ANTHRAX's SCOTT IAN On 'For All Kings': 'We Threw A Lot Of Things In The Garbage While We Were Making This Album'

EMP Live conducted an interview with ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian when the band played at Spain’s Leyendas Del Rock festival in August. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On what the “magic potion” is that has enabled ANTHRAX to survive for 35 years and remain a success:

Ian: “I wish there was a magic potion, ’cause we’d sell it at the merch stand with the t-shirts. I don’t know… I think you just really have to love what you do; that’s a part of it. We still love being in a band. We love writing songs, we love making records, we love playing shows. For me, my favorite part of being in a band is the time onstage. So all of that. We just really enjoy getting to be in a band. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna have success; I assume everybody loves playing music. The only thing I can say is that we just work really hard and try and be the best that we can all the time for the fans all over the world that actually love this band and support this band. I guess that’s how you remain a band for 35 years — if people still wanna hear your music. I mean, without the audience, there’s no band. Or there would be a band, but we would just be in a house playing songs. I just think we work really hard all the time, and all that hard work, it pays off.”

On whether ANTHRAX‘s new album, “For All Kings”, marks a return to the band’s roots:

Ian: “I don’t analyze it. I don’t. I can’t, ’cause I’m too close to it; it’s all ANTHRAX to me. So it’s not something I really analyze. I like hearing what other people have to say about it and what their opinions are. But, for me, like I said earlier, we just work really hard in the time we have to write songs for a record, and we work really, really hard at that, and we’re really tough on ourselves and very critical about what we’re doing all the time. And that gets harder every time, because you always wanna do better — you try your best to do better every time. And ‘For All Kings’, we felt like we had a lot to live up to with ‘Worship Music’, because that record kind of put us back on the map. And then we toured for four or five years, and ‘For All Kings’ was coming, and we knew we had to make a great record, and that’s not an easy thing. Believe me, we threw a lot of things in the garbage while we were making this album that we just didn’t feel was good enough. And it all worked out, because I think the album is great — of course I do. But I would compare it to ‘Among The Living’ in the way that… ‘Spreading The Disease’, way back when, that’s the album that kind of put us on the map. Joey [Belladonna, vocals] joined the band, we made ‘Spreading The Disease’, we went out and toured, people started to find out about ANTHRAX, and then we became a band, and that was the band that was able to make ‘Among The Living’. It was very similar this time around, because Joey came back to the band for ‘Worship Music’, we went out on tour and then we became the band that could write ‘For All Kings’. So there are a lot of similarities when it comes to that. I don’t think they sound alike at all. But as far as places where the band was, it was a very similar feeling. To become a band again and be very happy about becoming that band again, there was a lot of positivity going into this record, just like ‘Among The Living’.”