Tommy Victor, the lead singer and guitarist for the influential New York metal band Prong, has a simple explanation for his band's eight-year absence: It's all his fault.

"Sometimes I just need a kick in the ass," says Victor. "I had a lot of periods of self-doubt, and some neurotic years. That's pretty much what was going on."

Fortunately, a revamped band lineup and a new record deal helped push Victor back into the music world. Prong's newly released sixth studio album, Scorpio Rising, is a welcome return to the group's hardcore-industrial-metal roots.

Prong's minimal success remains somewhat of a mystery. Over the past sixteen years the band has put out several highly regarded albums, including 1989's Beg to Differ (which featured "Lost and Found," the adapted theme song for MTV's old Headbanger's Ball) and 1991's Prove You Wrong. Trent Reznor was a fan -- at one point, he even enlisted Victor for a side project called Tapeworm that never materialized.

"Actually, that's one of the reasons I threw in the towel for a while," Victor admits. "I was promised so much by that whole camp -- not to sound bitter or anything. I went down to New Orleans and worked on some stuff, but I never heard any finished product. But some of that stuff I worked on appeared on some Marilyn Manson stuff. I was ripped off -- that's happened several times."

After the non-start of Tapeworm and disappointing sales of 1996's Rude Awakening album, Prong disbanded. Victor reformed the band in 2002, adding members Pat Lachman (now the lead singer of Damageplan), drummer Dan Laudo and guitarist Monte Pittman, who recently gigged as a touring guitarist with Madonna. The new lineup reinvigorated Victor. "I was dedicated to Prong for so many years I got tunnel vision," he admits. "Collaborating with new people really helped me."

Scorpio sticks to the early Prong sound, although in a more guttural form: the thrashy "Regal" even flirts with old-school death metal. However, the band did experiment with something startling new, at least for them: a sense of humor. On the slow metal dirge "Letter to a Friend," Victor ends the song mumbling something like "My penis is huge."

"Actually, that wasn't supposed to be there," he says, laughing. "I was in the studio doing an impression of our former road manager, who was an incredible pervert, and somehow that got on the tape. It's funny, because that's a really serious love ballad. It's really bitter, and then it breaks into that. It was almost too serious for Prong, so that's why it's there."

KIRK MILLER
(March 3, 2004)