In an interview with Germany’s Moshpit Passion, guitarist Jeff Loomis spoke about the new lineup of NEVERMORE, which made its live debut on April 1 at IF Performance Hall Beşiktaş in Istanbul, Turkey. Joining Loomis and drummer Van Williams in NEVERMORE‘s current incarnation are the band’s latest additions, Jack Cattoi on guitar, Semir Özerkan on bass, and new vocalist Berzan Önen.

Regarding what the new NEVERMORE material will sound like, having announced earlier in the year that the band had signed a new record deal with a deal with Reigning Phoenix Music, Jeff said: “I’ve got a late start on working on new music, actually, because we spent so much time getting the band together that it’s almost like — I don’t wanna say that Van and I got burnt out or anything, but it was… Van really wanted to get back on tour again. He was, like, ‘I wanna get back out and play again, man. I wanna play in front of people.’ So it’s kind of been backwards as we’ve approached this. But the demos are now starting to flow a little bit.”

He continued: “I’ve got about six ideas going, some in the very infantile stages, some kind of complete. I think with Berzan being able to now come over to the United States, starting in November, it’s gonna be huge because when you’re writing something, man, in today’s age, you can easily send demos back and forth via the Internet and stuff like that. But I ultimately love to work in person with people. You can really feel it and get more energy out of each other that way. So, I don’t know — in a sense, I’m just kind of waiting for that, I guess. But we wanna really utilize the six months that we have completely to make the best album of our lives. And that’s coming up between October and March, basically. That’s what our plans are. We have kind of a structure worked out of what we’re gonna do, a plan.”

Loomis also talked about how Berzan and Semir were chosen for the new NEVERMORE lineup and how their musical contributions will affect the band’s sound going forward. He said: “Berzan is his own person vocally. He just is able to sing (late NEVERMORE singer) Warrel‘s (Dane) parts almost perfectly. But at the same time, we wanna give him his own identity as well. We wanna give him that opportunity to be his own person and not just have to sing like what Warrel did. But as far as reading every check mark, he got every one. And so did Semir. It’s, like, ‘Check, check, check. Yep, he’s that. He’s that.’ And so we had to make sure all those check marks were checked before we actually chose them. And they passed all that. I don’t wanna say it was like a test or something, but it was more just like, ‘These are the guys that we need in our band to make it proper.'”