Away Team

Craig Locicero, Russ Anderson, Matt Camacho, and Steve Smyth of the Bay Area thrash band FORBIDDEN are proud to make the following announcement:

“After a couple of grueling months of sifting through video auditions, we’ve finally got our man. Let it be known that on Halloween 2011, Sasha Horn from Chicago is FORBIDDEN’s new drummer!

“Now that we have our band back intact, we can start writing the next FORBIDDEN record with the confidence that we have something special once again. Like Bostaph, Jacobs, Hernandez and Hoglan, Sasha Horn will earn his praise and respect from our fans. He’s FORBIDDEN’s next great drummer and we are very proud to tell the world! We are truly inspired to out-do ourselves.”

New FORBIDDEN drummer Sasha Horn (ex-November’s Doom, Ava Inferi) comments:

“This was an amazing opportunity from the get-go, to be able to throw my name in on auditions for a band that I’ve been an avid fan of since I was 12 years-old. How does it feel to now get the chance to slay alongside them? Otherworldly. Truly out of this world. To just be considered along with the other amazing drummers from across the globe was a humbling experience in itself. And it’s because FORBIDDEN is a band that wants to constantly take leaps and bounds up to that next level that I know this is the perfect union. When we got into that room and played together for the first time, the chemistry just went right off of the charts. That’s a good feeling to start off with.”









For more FORBIDDEN click here.

Guitarist / founding member / songwriter Craig Locicero of the Bay Area thrash band FORBIDDEN has issued the following update:

“This has been the week of all weeks for FORBIDDEN highs and lows. It started with losing a drummer and cancelling an entire tour. Really low. But there has been a few silver linings as well.

“If you deserve to sit on the same throne as Paul Bostaph, Steve Jacobs, Mark Hernandez, and Gene Hoglan, you’d better get ready to bring it out in the open! As far as we’re concerned, those are 4 of the greatest drummers in Thrash Metal so give it your best shot! What are you drummers waiting for? Let’s see what you’ve got!”

Send a Dropbox, Fileblaze, or Mediablaze download link to: forbiddendrummer2011@gmail.com.

By sending in your submission, you are granting your consent to having your video file uploaded onto the FORBIDDEN Drummer 2011 YouTube channel and other social media sites for comments.

Make sure to include your name and contact information in your e-mail.

Visit FORBIDDEN’s YouTube Drummer Auditions channel here.

Guitarist / founding member / songwriter Craig Locicero of the Bay Area thrash band FORBIDDEN has issued the following update:

“This is the most painful update I have ever had to write…

“Looking forward, not back.…”

For more FORBIDDEN click here.

Reactivated San Francisco Bay Area thrashers FORBIDDEN, along with Decibel Magazine and Metal-Sucks.net, are happy to announce the bands second headlining run of North America! Joining them are tech-death thrashers REVOCATION, traditional heavy metal champions WHITE WIZZARD, and Colorado based thrash merchants HAVOK.

Guitarist Craig Locicero commented on the bands upcoming trek:
“FORBIDDEN is proud to announce our first proper headlining tour in 16 years throughout the North America this Summer! Finally! We will be bringing out REVOCATION, WHITE WIZZARD and HAVOK along for the fun. These bands are all hungry, cool and young guns and they will add to the excitement!
Something we witnessed last Winter was the economy crushing many tours. A lot of kids just can’t afford the ticket prices anymore. When we made the jump to the Pantheon Agency a few months ago, we made it clear that we wanted a reduced ticket price and all ages venues. That way all the fans of FORBIDDEN can afford to go and bring their friends of all ages along for a real Thrash experience! Well that is just what we’ve done. Ticket prices will be between $10-$15 ever where we play. Step one is complete!
Step two is the actual gigs themselves. We will be starting at the Whiskey in Hollywood on June 9th and then we head North into Canada for an extensive run into the East, South, Mid-West to eventually end the tour in San Diego on July 2nd. These will be raw, intimate and bare boned Thrash Metal shows. Exactly how we started it. How it was meant to be!
So tell your friends, grab your kids…whatever it takes. You are ALL invited to join us on this Omega Wave!”

DECIBEL & METAL-SUCKS present:
FORBIDDEN, REVOCATION, WHITE WIZZARD, HAVOK
06/09/11 The Whisky – Hollywood, CA
06/11/11 The Alley – Sparks, NV
06/12/11 Hawthorne Theater – Portland, OR
06/13/11 Studio Seven – Seattle, WA
06/14/11 Rickshaw Theater – Vancouver, BC – CANADA
06/15/11 Sapphire Nightclub – Kelowna, BC – CANADA
06/16/11 Pawn Shop – Edmonton, AB – CANADA
06/17/11 Riddell Centre – Regina, SK – CANADA
06/18/11 Royal Albert Arms – Winnipeg, MB – CANADA
06/20/11 Mad Planet – Milwaukee, WI
06/21/11 Reggie’s Rock Club – Chicago, IL
06/22/11 Peabody’s – Cleveland, OH
06/23/11 Montage Music Hall – Rochester, NY
06/24/11 Championship Bar and Grill (at The Backstage) – Trenton, NJ
06/25/11 AlRosa Villa – Columbus, OH
06/26/11 Fubar – St. Louis, MO
06/27/11 The Beaumont Club – Kansas City, MO
06/29/11 The Marquis Theatre – Denver, CO
06/30/11 Launchpad – Albuquerque, NM
07/01/11 The Clubhouse – Tempe, AZ
07/02/11 JT’s Limelight – Escondido, CA

FORBIDDEN 2010 features Russ Anderson on vocals, Craig Locicero on guitar, Steve Smyth on guitar, Matt Camacho on bass and Mark Hernandez on drums.









For more FORBIDDEN click here.

Reactivated San Francisco Bay Area thrashers FORBIDDEN are set to embark on their first tour in 15 years, this time as direct support to Overkill! Immediately proceeding the trek the band will continue on their own headlining tour with Evile, Gamma Bomb, and Bonded By Blood.

“It’s been 15 years since FORBIDDEN has actually toured in North America,“ commented an enthusiastic Craig Locicero. “That blows my fucking mind to say it! The funny thing is that even when we did tour here, we never properly did it. It was always a very short cycle with little or no support from the labels. Well, times have changed and so has FORBIDDEN‘s situation. With Nuclear Blast having our backs and properly promoting and supporting Omega Wave, I feel a sense of hope for this band that we have never felt before. Strange feeling, really. But we will take it.
Our goal is to get better every night and eventually become the live band that we never got to be. That takes dedication and a lot of hard work. We’re digging in commiting to just that.
We hope our fans will appreciate us as much as we appreciate them. See you all on the road soon!“

OVERKILL, FORBIDDEN, EVILE, GAMMA BOMB, BONDED BY BLOOD
11/11/10 Volume 11 – Raleigh, NC
11/13/10 Club Firestone – Orlando, FL
11/14/10 Culture Room – Ft Lauderdale, FL
11/15/10 The Masquerade – Atlanta, GA
11/16/10 Peabody’s – Cleveland, OH
11/17/10 Newport Music Hall – Columbus, OH
11/18/10 Diesel Nightclub – Pittsburgh, PA
11/19/10 Rocko’s – Manchester, NH
11/20/10 Starland Ballroom – Sayreville, NJ

FORBIDDEN, EVILE, GAMMA BOMB, BONDED BY BLOOD
11/22/10 Foufounes Electriques – Montreal, QC – CANADA
11/23/10 MOD Club – Toronto, ON – CANADA
11/24/10 Blondies – Detroit, MI
11/26/10 Phoenix Hill Tavern – Louisville, KY
11/27/10 Reggie’s – Chicago, IL
11/28/10 The Rave – Milwaukee, WI
11/29/10 Station 4 – St Paul, MN
12/01/10 Scout Bar – San Antonio, TX
12/02/10 Emo’s – Austin, TX
12/03/10 Scout Bar – Houston, TX
12/06/10 The Rock – Tucson, AZ
12/07/10 U.B.’s – Mesa, AZ
12/08/10 Whiskey a Go Go – Hollywood, CA
12/09/10 Ramona Mainstage – Ramona, CA
12/10/10 New Oasis – Sparks, NV
12/11/10 DNA Lounge – San Francisco, CA

For more FORBIDDEN click here.

Reactivated San Francisco Bay Area thrashers, FORBIDDEN, will hold a free public listening party for their first record since reforming on Friday October 22, 2010 at Soundwave Studios in Oakland CA. The event will start at 9 pm and is located at 2200 Wood St. Fans will have a chance to get free swag, win a Fernandes bass guitar, and purchase the CD before it hits the streets. Members of FORBIDDEN will also be in attendance to sign autographs and meet the fans.

“We are all very excited about our new release, Omega Wave,” commented vocalist Russ Anderson. “Everyone involved with creating the record worked extremely hard. Now, we want to share it with our fans and friends! So anybody who wants to come out and celebrate with us is officially invited! We will also have plenty of Nuclear Blast and FORBIDDEN swag on hand for giveaways. Be a part of our special night and you may just win some free shit too!”

Omega Wave, FORBIDDEN’s fifth studio album after a 13-year recording hiatus, will be released in Europe on October 22nd and on October 26th in North America. It was recorded at Sonic Room/Audio Voyage Studios in Livermore, California, produced by FORBIDDEN guitarist / songwriter Craig Locicero with Tim Narducci, and mixed by Sean Beavan (Slayer, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails).

To pre-order Omega Wave click here.
For more FORBIDDEN click here.

Reactivated San Francisco Bay Area thrashers FORBIDDEN have uploaded the track “Forsaken At The Gates” to their official MySpace page.

“’Forsaken At The Gates’ is FORBIDDEN‘s new thrash anthem for the 2010′s and beyond,” commented guitarist Craig Locicero. “If we could go back in a time machine to when we called it a day in 1997, there still would have been no way that we could have written ‘Forsaken…” back then. We needed the distance and hind-site to write this record and had to get a grip on what the hell FORBIDDEN was all about when we started. Our vision is clear. We are a Thrash Metal band! ‘Forsaken At The Gates’ says it all.
If I were to compare ‘Forsaken At The Gates’ to any of our old songs, it would be ‘March Into Fire’, which was one of the first songs that I’d ever written in my life. Ironically, ‘Forsaken…’ was the last song we’d written for Omega Wave. Funny how things work.
As far as the song itself, Mark was a fucking beast when we tracked it! I knew we had a monster on the first take, great energy and sense of urgency in his performance. It made one hell of a spine to connect all of the other moving parts to. Everyone blasted through their tracks with the same sense of urgency too. Playing those riffs, my blood pumps harder then in any other song I’ve played on. It was an intense session to track and Matt cruises through the entire thing like a bulldozer! The solo section brings me back to the good ‘ol days when trade-offs were all over the classic metal records we all love. I really love playing and writing with Steve, he makes me so much better and I think we make a great team.
After that, it’s Russ that’s next fucking level! Tim and I got him fired up and locked him behind the glass until he sounded as crazed as they lyrics are intended to convey. The song itself is about turning away the masses from the numerous underground shelters around the planet that will try to seek protection from any natural or unnatural disaster that would effect all of us on the surface.
The main line of the song says ‘Corpses laid out for the Rapture, New World Order buried in it’s tomb.’ In other words, if the surface isn’t worth living on and the powers that be decide who lives in a canned air bunker for future generations to come…let them rot down there, that’s not a world worth living in!”

Vocalist Russ Anderson added:
“Looking back on recording our first album Forbidden Evil and recording Omega Wave, there really is no comparison. During the recording of Forbidden Evil, we were in a time crunch and I sang the whole album in about one and a half days, impossible some could say, but true. I was happy with the results because that gave the album it’s rawness, that in my opinion goes down in history as true as a thrash album gets.
Omega Wave was a slower recording process. I worked with Craig and Tim as my right hand men and they know me. At times I think they were trying to ‘slap me around’ a little before the heavy songs like ‘Forsaken At The Gates’ to get me to approach the song with true aggression. You really should not be feeling love and flowers approaching a song like this, not to say that was what I was thinking, but it helps to bring out the aggression of the song through the vocals. ’Forsaken At The Gates’ was easier for me than some of the others, only because it was the last song I recorded and was done in one session.
By the time I was on the last of the songs I had a lot of fire to breathe and did not want to stop. ‘I love to record!’ As far as my voice being deeper or better, I don’t know, I tried to compliment each song and be one with it, and to do that, you must be one with your voice. That is something I have strived for over the years and hope it comes across.
I think that vocals can change or get better over time, like a fine wine, for instance if you listen back to James Hetfield when he did Kill ‘Em All he most defiantly has a more adolescent voice than, on say …And Justice For All. Vocals are touchy things and definitely unpredictable from day to day . The only way I have found to have any control over it is to approach every song with its intended emotion which is also the key to a good performance no matter how your voice is holding up that day. Point being, it’s a human instrument that mirrors the soul .
I truly gave it my all on Omega Wave and I hope everyone will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it . Hope to see you all on our United States tour that kicks off on the East Coast November 4th, ending on the West Coast on December 11th, 2010.
Thank you in advance to those that support FORBIDDEN and buy the album.”

Omega Wave, FORBIDDEN’s fifth studio album after a 13-year recording hiatus, will be released in Europe on October 22nd and on October 26th in North America. It was recorded at Sonic Room/Audio Voyage Studios in Livermore, California, produced by FORBIDDEN guitarist / songwriter Craig Locicero with Tim Narducci, and mixed by Sean Beavan (Slayer, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails).

For more FORBIDDEN click here.

Reactivated San Francisco Bay Area thrashers FORBIDDEN have debuted the artwork to their new studio album, Omega Wave, on their official MySpace page.

FORBIDDEN guitarist / songwriter Craig Locicero checks in about his collaborative process with artist Kent Mathieu, the visual elements that can be found in the album’s artwork, and his concern for the future of the human race:

“As soon as FORBIDDEN committed to writing a new record, I wondered where Kent Mathieu was. I’d always felt like Forbidden Evil and Twisted Into Form were pretty iconic album covers… when things like that actually seemed to matter.
“Then, the good people at Nuclear Blast actually located Kent! I got pretty excited and reached out to him immediately. He was equally excited to hear from us, too. The only real direction I gave Kent was to somehow tie the past into the future. Find a way to make the two skulls [from Forbidden Evil’s artwork] vital again. He had worked up about 12 sketches all kinds of variously cool stuff. Out of all of the pictures he sent me, I liked the way one of them was laid out because of it’s simplicity. After thinking about it for a long while, I had a concept for Kent to work with. The Omega Wave concept. The title wasn’t decided until I had a good idea for the cover.
“I don’t want to over-explain the actual picture because there is enough symbolism for everyone to interpret everything differently. That is always a plus, in my book. What I can tell you is that the skull in the center is based upon the crystal skull of Belize. This skull was found at some of the pyramid ruins in two perfect pieces, jawbone and upper cranium. It was always quite a mystery, but some years later Hewlett Packard scientists did extensive tests on the skull and found many anomalies.
“One of them was that there is no way, even with our most modern technology, that we could cut into the crystal the way this skull was formed. It would shatter with any instrument we have available, even today. Another thing was the fact that no matter what temperature the skull was placed in, the skull’s temperature would stay almost exactly the same. Scientists even believe the skull holds information that they could not tap into, like a giant computer chip with an impenetrable code.
“So I got to thinking: Does this skull – and the other ones found throughout the most ancient places on Earth – hold something that we would need to know to possibly save ourselves? This is not an entirely new concept, but it hit me pretty hard. What could we learn about ourselves that may save us at this all-important juncture for the human race?
“It seems as if we’ve reached our Omega stage as a civilization. Meaning, we as people seem to be in a hurry to reach some sort of ending… possibly all self-manifested by accepting some sort of pre-determined fate. Or possibly just pawns in a game that was played out before and will be repeated again and again in other times and dimensions. So Omega Wave is part science fact and part from my imagination.
“Kent Mathieu is a artistic genius who created something that respects this concept, as well as FORBIDDEN’s past, present and future! All of this with one very strong hand-painted picture. That’s right, no computer manipulation whatsoever. Something else we can all be proud of! We hope you approve.”

Omega Wave, FORBIDDEN’s fifth studio album after a 13-year recording hiatus, will be released in Europe on October 22nd and on October 26th in North America. It was recorded at Sonic Room/Audio Voyage Studios in Livermore, California, produced by FORBIDDEN guitarist / songwriter Craig Locicero with Tim Narducci, and mixed by Sean Beavan (Slayer, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails).

FORBIDDEN 2010 features Russ Anderson on vocals, Craig Locicero on guitar, Steve Smyth on guitar, Matt Camacho on bass and Mark Hernandez on drums.

Song titles on Omega Wave include:
•Alpha Century
•Forsaken At The Gates
•Swine
•Immortal Wounds
•Hopenosis
•Adapt Or Die
•Inhuman Race
•Behind The Mask
•Dragging My Casket
•Overthrow
•Omega Wave

FORBIDDEN are confirmed for January 2011’s 70,000 Tons Of Metal cruise and will tour the U.S. this November supporting Overkill with Evile, Gamma Bomb, and Bonded By Blood.

FORBIDDEN will go on to headline their own tour with Evile, Gamma Bomb, and Bonded By Blood from November 22nd – December 11th. VIP tickets for pre-show Meet & Greet sessions with the band are now on sale at EnterTheVault.com. VIP ticket buyers will also receive a customized poster signed by the band.

Hear two FORBIDDEN demo tracks, “Adapt Or Die” and “Hopenosis,” and the entire Green album here.

For more FORBIDDEN click here.