Interview by Kris Peters
Brazilian thrash outfit Nervosa are preparing to enter the next phase of their already successful career when they release new album Jailbreak onto the world on September 29.
Jailbreak marks a decisive new beginning for the band, being the first album to welcome guitarist and founding member Prika Amaral to the mantle as lead vocalist, as well as premiering the new line-up completed by the immensely talented and well experienced Michaela Naydenova on drums, Hel Pyre on bass and Helena Kotina on guitars.
Unrelenting and sonically vicious, Nervosa have decimated crowds the world over on four previous albums, but are set to spread their brutality even further with Jailbreak.
Amaral joined HEAVY to discuss the album.
"I'm feeling super excited," she smiled. "We have been working for this new album since 2021 - so four months after we released Perpetual Chaos we started working for this new album - and for me it's the biggest step in my career because it's the first time that I have been singer (laughs). I can't describe how excited I am to show everyone what I was working very hard on."
We ask Amaral to dive deeper into the musical side of Jailbreak.
"I think this album is super revolutionary," she measured, "because we have the second guitar right now. It was something that we had in the beginning, but we never recorded any albums with two guitars. So it's a big change in Nervosa life, and also me talking personally being a singer was a huge challenge in a very short time and period. I gave my best. I had a lot of fun. It was a very experimental album in some ways, but at the same time was the most fun composing this new album. We have a lot of diversity, and a different style of metal. Everything combined with thrash. We have thrash and death metal together. We have traditional heavy metal with thrash metal. We have punk with thrash metal and we have some melodic death metal, melodic thrash metal, and a bit, in one song, maybe death metal. We put everything together in a mixer (laughs)."
In the full interview, Prika talks about following on from the success of previous album Perpetual Chaos, her role as singer and how easy the transition was, why she elected to assume the role, the new band members and what they bring to Nervosa's sound, the wicked cover image, special guests Gary Holt and Lena Scissorhands and what they brought to the album, the "new era" of Nervosa, touring plans, playing on 70000TONS Of Metal and more.