Live In Overhausen

Three and a half decades later and New Jersey thrash masters OVERKILL remain steadfast in their ability to char your soul and thoroughly ravage your ears. With 19 full length studio albums and with their last live album being released in 2002, the guys return with their latest energy filled recording: »Live In Overhausen«! For over 36 years, OVERKILL has dominated and with the coinciding 30 year anniversary of »Feel The Fire« and the 25th birthday of »Horrorscope« the time to play and record both albums live, seemed inevitable.

Although the anniversaries were certainly a catalyst that brought this album to light, there were several reasons this release needed to be special. First off, it needed to be bigger, it needed to be stronger, it needed to be more than just one full album’s worth of live songs so they thought, “why not two?” For the first choice, their 1985 debut album »Feel The Fire« seemed an obvious choice, being the virgin voyage for the band. “There’s something charming about young men who don’t know what they’re doing,” remarks vocalist Bobby “Blitz” Ellsworth. “We had no plan, but there was something charming about that chaos and it set the stage for what came later.” 1991’s »Horrorscope« began an entirely new chapter for the band and will forever remain one of OVERKILL’s defining sonic achievements.

Most importantly however, like all real music inevitably should be, this album is for the fans. “A niche market is hard to dispose of. Once you have a clientele, or in our case a fan base, and then even further; friends, it’s hard to get rid of. I think that beyond the fact of achievement that really shows the allure for the music,” remarks Blitz, and being that the band has existed for over 36 years, their fans expand through generations. Walking through a field of mud in Germany, Blitz recalls coming across a little girl wearing an OVERKILL shirt, her father, and her father’s father, all wearing OVERKILL shirts as she proclaimed in Dutch: “You are my favorite singer!” Blitz recalls: “To see the fruits of your intense labor manifest into three generations of fandom brings it all to light.”

The entirety of the live recording and DVD was done in one night in Oberhausen, Germany. By coincidence, 30 years to the week prior, the band was in the same area about 10 miles away recording their first video. Director and editor Kevin Custer who has been yearning to deliver a proper OVERKILL DVD, was at the helm with High Gain Recording in Germany manning the sound recording.

The album art is a combination of the cover art of both albums originally designed by JSR merchandising for a t-shirt which sold out at the show itself almost immediately. It was then handed over to artist Travis Smith (working with the band since 1999), who refined the art and expanded it into a tour book and picture collage to give it all a bit more depth.

Since the release of »The Grinding Wheel« in 2017, OVERKILL has maintained business as usual with continuous touring including their 5th Russian tour, Australia, their first time playing Loud Park in Japan, and their first ever tour of China, as well. They looped around the United States twice, once with CROWBAR for Metal Alliance and once headlining with NILE for a total of approximately 125 shows to support »The Grinding Wheel«, alone. The tenacity with which they travel the globe is a direct impression of the overall power OVERKILL continues to carry.

Their future holds a first time tour of India, another US tour, European tour, as well as another full length album which is already in the works and includes input from the band’s newest member: drummer Jason Bitner. There’s plenty more to come as these self-proclaimed Blue Collar workers show literally zero signs of slowing down and are still “smiling from ear to ear 36 years later.”