Metal Web

"The last record was From Wisdom To Hate, and that was in 2001. Then we did two US tours for that record, and then not long after, Steve [MacDonald] the drummer passed away, and I decided to put the band on hold,” recalls Luc Lemay through his thick French-Canadian accent.

"In my mind I was done with the band. I never expected that we’d do another record. So anyway, circumstances came that, Big Steeve [Hurdle], my friend that played on Obscura, I joined his band Negativa, and we did that EP, and he is the one that suggested to me that I should do another Gorguts record to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the band. So that was in 2007 that he came up with that idea.”

Fast-forward another six or so years, and Colored Sands became the fifth and most celebrated full-length release from Gorguts. A double-layered concept album based around the idea of mandalas and the history of Tibet, the mind-bending technical monstrosity ended up on ‘best of 2013’ lists the world over.

“Man, I don’t know what to say about this, because I never ever expected that. First things first, I did a record because my heart was totally into it, as much as when I stopped the band it was because my heart was no longer into it. Then doing this record, when I started jamming again with Big Steeve, he was a lot on the internet, on those metal forums, and reading a lot on the bands and stuff, but not me. I was using the internet just a bit for my email; I didn’t even know what a MySpace site was back then. So the thing is Big Steeve was saying, ‘Dude, you’d be surprised the amount of people that are talking about the band,’ because for me it was done, it was forgotten, and people weren’t really caring about it anymore.

"I never ever expected that"

“So first things first; I said I’ll do it for the joy of crafting songs, and now after we do this, and seeing all the people, the response, the fans that I meet at the shows, you see that they are still there, and even more interested in the band than before. Not that before people weren’t interested but we didn’t have as big of a following as now. I think maybe the band started back when the internet was not around, even when we did Obscura and From Wisdom To Hate, internet was not going on much for the metal… It was, like, starting. So internet I think is a big, big, big reason why I think the album got… spread around so much. I couldn’t be happier with the response I got from people.”

Since the release of Colored Sands Gorguts have toured the US, Canada and Europe multiple times, and now head down to Australia, New Zealand and Japan for the first time ever.

“It has been an awesome year… the best the band has ever had in 25 years. I can’t complain.”