With their new album, Skull and Bones, scheduled for release Nov. 2, and their first Spanish-language album, Los Grandes Exitos en Espanol, due to be released in Latin America in September (and to the rest of the world in early 2000), the next few months should prove extremely busy for Cypress Hill.

According to founding member DJ Muggs, though, they have little intention of slowing down after that. With final mixes wrapped up for both albums, the Los Angeles area hip-hop trio have already begun work on their next album, a rock-oriented album that will include contributions from members of Rage Against the Machine, Korn, Fear Factory and Downset, among others.

"I'd say we've got about eleven tracks done already," Muggs says. "We're just waiting on the label [Columbia Records], because we work too fast for them and they don't know what the hell to do with it."

The idea is actually not a new one for Cypress Hill, who've experimented with rock in the past but haven't yet had the opportunity to showcase their interest throughout an entire album. "The last Cypress album [Cypress Hill IV], we started hinting towards that rock stuff, and this next album was going to be a straight rock album but Columbia changed staffs and came back at us like, 'We want a straight urban record,' so we did a real urban record," he says. "There's no rock stuff on it at all."

But the impulse to try their hands at rock remained strong, and the success of current rock-rap fusionists like Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Everlast bolstered the group's confidence.

"I see a lot of influences of ours in the current rock bonanza," Muggs said. "We've always been rock-heads and just lookin' at all this stuff, well, now is the time. We're still gonna f--- around and it's still gonna have a hip-hop edge -- it's gonna have cuts and breaks on everything. We're just trying to come up with our own flavor."

DAVID PEISNER
(August 17, 1999)