Bleeding For Your Art With KRAGEN LUM From HEATHEN

HEAVY Music Interviews

For the past 40 years, the venerated Thrash Metal outfit HEATHEN have abided by their never-say-die attitude.
Formed in 1984 in San Francisco’s Bay Area—home to EXODUS, METALLICA, TESTAMENT, and DEATH ANGEL HEATHEN quickly separated themselves from the pack by expertly fusing David White’s distinctive vocals with a melody-driven and forward-thinking musical style. The band’s first two albums, Breaking the Silence and Victims of Deception, are widely regarded as Bay Area Thrash classics. The HEATHEN brand of intelligent yet aggressive Thrash appealed not only to the genre’s core demographic, but also Metal fans looking for brains behind the brawn. The most recent full-length album, Empire of the Blind, continued to push the boundaries of the genre, expanding their audience while restoring faith in vicious yet brainy Thrash Metal, the very kind that put HEATHEN on the map.
Since the release of their last album, Empire of the Blind, HEATHEN has toured nonstop, playing hundreds of shows across five continents. From the moment that the COVID restrictions lifted in 2022, the band hit the ground running, touring with contemporaries such as TESTAMENT, EXODUS, OVERKILL, and SYMPHONY X over the last three years. Recorded in several cities across the United States during the 2023 Bleed the World Tour, Bleed the World: Live is the perfect audio representation of the HEATHEN live show. Featuring songs from each of the band’s albums, including recent tracks such as Sun in My Hand and The Blight as well as classics such as Hypnotized and Goblin’s Blade, the live album mirrors the band’s crushing live set list. The cover artwork by Travis Smith depicts a steel HEATHEN logo piercing the bleeding Earth, held by a hand that encapsulates the world tour as a moment in time.
Produced by guitarist Kragen Lum and mixed by Zeuss, Bleed the World: Live transports the listener into the concert hall with a crystal-clear yet heavy production and captures the interaction between band and audience that makes every HEATHEN live show special.
HEAVY caught up with Lum for a chat earlier today, starting with the early response to the album.
"All the feedback that we've gotten so far has been great," he smiled. "One person mentioned that it was like, if you closed your eyes, you were there at the show. And that was exactly what we were trying to do. We made sure that when we were recording, we recorded not just the band, but also the audience at every show so we could really get the live album feel. Those classic live albums that we used to love - Live After Death and many other ones - you feel like you're there because the audience is so prominent. The feedback from the crowd and everything in the song. And I think modern live albums are missing that because a lot of bands record the show, but they don't record the audience, and you're kind of missing an important element to the live show."
In the full interview, Kragem spoke more about what to expect from Bleed The World: Live, the early feedback, if the band approached the concerts any differently knowing they were being recorded for an album, the process of putting together the tracks and selecting them, how critical the band members were of themselves when they listened back through, how they made every effort to replicate the live sound on the album, his early experiences with Heathen before joining, if there was any pressure on him coming into an established band and how long it took him to feel comfortable, their strike record of one album every ten years and if they plan to speed up that process moving forward, the possibilities of coming to Australia and more.
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