Diamond Head

Diamond Head streaming new album

We put the new self-titled album from metal legends Diamond Head in ‘Five Notable Releases of the Week’ back in March, saying:

The only member who remains from their timeless 1980 debut, Lightning to the Nations — the album that spawned “Am I Evil?,” the song that Metallica famously covered a few years later — is lead guitarist Brian Tatler, and he’s still got a few badass riffs left in him. The one-two punch of “Bones” and “Shout at the Devil” that kicks off the record is chock full of the kind of hard rock fretwork that never goes out of style, and he brings back that kind of magic on “Wizard Sleeve” too. Not to mention the nice twin leads on “Speed.”

The album actually didn’t come out that week — the band signed to Dissonance and it got pushed back to this week (4/22). Now you can stream it in full:

The album stream premiered via Noisey, who also interviewed Brian Tatler. Here’s an excerpt of them talking about Diamond Head meeting a young Lars Ulrich:

Well, you did get known and infamously a lad from LA called Lars Ulrich discovered you and admittedly helped put your name out there. How would a kids from America stumble across a band from Stourbridge?

I think he found out about Diamond Head through Sounds. He bought an album called Brute Force, which was a compilation by MCA. We had signed to MCA in 1982 and Brute Force came out, possibly before that, in ’81 and it had ‘It’s Electric’ on, off our first album. Lars loved that track. We sold the album by mail-order and we put six adverts in Sounds. You could go into any newsagent in LA and you could order specialist items, and he would have done that and then he sent off for his copy of Lightning To The Nations for £3.50. He wrote back to the same address where he’d obviously sent his money and said how much he loved the album, he was just this uber fan.

Then he came over to see us. He introduced himself backstage at this gig at the Woolwich Odeon in London, he was 17 and he’d flown over from LA to London to see Diamond Head. We were so impressed with that. No one had ever done that before. I let him stay with me for a week and he stayed at Sean’s for about three weeks, we sort of took him under our wing a bit and made sure he was okay. We just liked him, he was full of beans. He was like a Duracell bunny. And of course he had this fantastic accent, which was a cross between Danish and American and we’d never heard anything like it. We’d laugh at this this young guy saying things like “awesome”. To us it was brilliant.”

You must have been pretty blown away when you found out about Metallica, and thought, damn, that’s that crazy fanboy

Yes, well, obviously he stayed in touch. He wrote letters and wanted to know what was happening with Diamond Head. Then he told me in one letter about Metallica. He said “We rehearse six hours a day, six days a week” and I thought “Wow, that’s a lot more than us”. But I didn’t think these guys were gonna be the biggest heavy metal band of all time obviously. They were just Lars’ band ,and they just grew and grew. I watched them rise from nothing. They covered ‘Am I Evil’, which was very flattering. It was the first time any band had covered a Diamond Head song and I remember reading that Master Of Puppets sold a billion copies. I thought “Bloody hell, they’re much bigger than Diamond Head now”. And it just went on and on, never ending, through the roof.

You can read more here.