In a recent interview on 'BODS Mayhem Hour' podcast, Overkill drummer Jason Bittner offered an update on the band's upcoming 20th studio album, tentatively due for release next April. The album will serve as the follow-up to last year's The Wings of War, which also marked the first Overkill album to feature Bittner.

Jason Bittner commented: "Technically, we were supposed to already be done with it by now, if the world hadn't changed back in March. But now, due to the fact that we're not pushing for a release that quickly, it's given us a little bit of time to hone the songs a little better and spend some more time and whatnot. I'm at about the song-seven mark right now out of 11 demos that we have. So I have about seven of them wrapped up so far. I'll be working a little bit more on a couple of more new ones later this weekend and next week. I think right now, the last time I talked to D.D. [Verni, bass], our idea is to try to start getting drums done, like, September-ish, depending on what happens. The problem is that we really can't do our regular pre-production right now, because we all don't live in the same state. I mean, D.D. is in New Jersey, and I'm only three hours away. Blitz [singer Bobby Ellsworth] is two hours away from where D.D. and Derek [Tailer, guitar] are, but Dave [Linsk, guitar] lives in Florida. So the problem is even if he comes up for pre-production, we can't even do any of that for two weeks, because he'd have to quarantine first. The way we normally do records is we work on everything ourselves, and then we take a week where we go down to New Jersey and everybody gets together. And we'll work on, like, two songs a day and just bust it out for five or six days and then get everything together. But this one may be a little bit more of us getting it together from our homes and doing a lot more online discussion and stuff about things rather than us actually playing it. So, we'll see."

When asked if the 11 songs are the ones that will end up on the new album or if there's more material to be written, he said: "My guess would be that what we have right now is what's gonna be on the record. We're generally not a band that writes extra songs. It's kind of like you write what you need for the album and you write another one for Japan, [which] always needs an extra B-side. And that's pretty much it. We don't do that Metallica thing of, 'Let's write 30 songs and pick 10 of the best ones.' I think it's definitely a better idea to just concentrate on doing 10 great songs rather than having six throwaways or whatever."

Source:	facebook.com
Band profile:	Overkill