Anthrax’s Scott Ian on Inter-Band Harmony, Phil Anselmo’s Atonement

Anthrax‘s Scott Ian is sick of describing his music. “It needs to be experienced, it needs to be felt, it needs to be heard,” the excitable guitarist says a few hours before he and his fellow headbangers take the stage at the Moody Theater in Austin, Texas. “This is just a super metal record.”

Luckily for Ian, as the group has been test-driving songs off its upcoming 11th LP, For All Kings, including the blissful rager “Breathing Lightning” and thrashy battle cry “Evil Twin,” it’s been to the audible elation of fans. “People seem to connect with them, especially ‘Breathing Lightning,'” he says. “When that ends, there’s always a big roar.”

Thirty-five years have passed since he started Anthrax as a high school student in Queens, New York and helped create a chunky, hyper-speed sound that put them at the forefront of thrash metal. Their ever-mercurial lineup has changed significantly since then, as they’ve settled into a writing core of Ian, drummer Charlie Benante and bassist Frank Bello, who fine-tune songs before turning them over to singer Joey Belladonna and recently added guitarist Jonathan Donais.

But it’s nevertheless a system that works well compared to Anthrax’s past, when Ian & Co. micromanaged Belladonna’s recordings on classic albums like Among the Living and Persistence of Time before ultimately firing him in 1992. The band has learned from its past, Ian says. Following the genesis of their last LP, 2011’s Worship Music, a years-in-the-making LP that found them working with two other vocalists before welcoming back Belladonna permanently to the fold, For All Kings was a cakewalk.

Here, Ian reflects on how he learned to let go of his “control freak” ways and how he and his bandmates found the internal bliss to make music that transcends their own explanation.

This is the first time you wrote a record with Joey Belladonna’s voice in mind in a quarter century. How was that different for you?
We weren’t thinking about it from a sonic perspective. It was more a case of the vibe in the band after doing Worship Music. We’re really just becoming Anthrax again. So when we started writing in the beginning in 2013, we had a momentum and an attitude and confidence that hadn’t been there in a long time. The writing sessions were different than in the past because we weren’t distracted so much by outside bullshit. We could just be Anthrax.

Well, making Worship Music was a Homeric Odyssey.
Yeah. We don’t need to rehash that [laughs].

When did Anthrax feel like a band again?
Pretty soon after Joey came back in 2010 and we toured with Megadeth and Slayer. That’s when we started listening to the music for Worship Music as a band. We’d play songs in the dressing room and think about what we could do better. As soon as I heard Joey singing the new songs, any questions I ever had about the future of this band went away.