Newbury Park's own Warbringer, hot off the road with Exodus and soon to hit the shores of Europe. With new album in hand Metal Chaos laced up our high tops and dusted down our bullet belt to catch up with scream merchant John Kevill.

Off the back of the North American Riot Act tour with Exodus the band are then straight back out on the road with Nile. How much are you looking forward to these dates?

Quite a bit! It should be pretty excellent. We learned a lot about touring on the last one, so we are getting things more organized and together for ourselves as time goes on with that. We've played for death metal crowds before and gotten a good reaction too, so hopefully we'll do well.

June then sees Warbringer cross the Atlantic to hook up with Suffocation and Napalm Death. What are you expectations for the tour in Europe? Anywhere you particularly looking forward to playing?

I went to Europe last August and thought it was amazing, I can't wait to go back. And seeing the metal scene in a lot of those places and how into it everyone is was very cool. I wouldn't mind making my way back to Amsterdam, and I'd love to visit Sweden and Norway.

The name of Warbringer may be a new name to them. Can you tell us a little about the bands history and what influences you all bring to the band?

We started off about 3 years ago when John Laux and I met and started writing songs. Soon Andy Laux, his brother, joined on bass, and we started trying to find musicians to fill in the rest of the spots. We knew that we wanted to play fast, old sounding metal, and that soon shaped itself into an aggressive thrashy sound that we have now. After Adam and Ryan joined we had a solid lineup and all of us listen to pretty much all kinds of metal, so there's a little influence from everything. But we make sure the core of the music is solid violent thrashing.

Onto the bands debut album “War Without End”. Produced by legendary Thrash maestro Bill Metoyer, how was it to work with Bill and did the album turn out as you all hoped?

Yeah, we have almost no complaints! Bill was awesome to work with, very funny and laid back. His expertise helped us out a lot in getting the right sounds for things and making sure we liked the sound of the performances. With him too we went with a very un-triggered, un-click-tracked natural kind of sound that usually you don't hear on metal records today, and I like how that sound came across on the record.

Yeah! I would of had us working under a bit more pressure, as I think we got a bit too laid back and some things we could have done better, but it's all a learning thing. Looking back we all had a load of fun recording the album, it was very exciting seeing songs we've been playing for a long time come together piece by piece.

The album cover also has that real old school vibe, real Sodomesque! Who came up with the concept, who drew the thing for you guys?

The concept was my idea after looking at all sorts of Warhammer 40k art, what with all the massive over-the-top battle scenes and all. I asked for like a spiked-up looking tank that looked like a WW2 German Tiger to look like it was going to run you over in front of a massive war scene, and thats what Dez (the artist) came up with.

We had 2 main offers, one from Century Media and one from Metal Blade. We went with Century Media because they had a real plan for us to get us out there and develop the band before putting the album out.

When writing and recording the bands demo EP “One By One The Wicked Fall” could you have dreamt the impact it would have on the Thrash scene and how it would propel the band?

No, haha, that was a 2-day bang up job that we rushed out as fast as we could for limited time/budget reasons! We were very surprised at how much intrest there was, and how much it got out there.

Many of the bands quoted, as influences were recording and releasing albums before some of the band was even born. Therefore what makes these bands so relevant today as to inspire this new wave of Thrash bands?

I don't see bands as being "relevant" or "dated", to me there's just "good" and "suck". So I'll listen to some bands that released albums and broke up before I was even born, may not be relevant at all today but I don't care because it rules! I think a lot of old thrash has some qualities missing from metal today, raw energy power and aggression!

Warbringer have emerged from the LA underground, the same underground that spawned the likes of Slayer, Suicidal Tendencies and Dark Angel. What of the current scene are there any bands we should be looking out for?