28 Years Ago: KREATOR release Extreme Aggression (2017 Reissue Out Now)

Daily Noise - / 2017

28 Years Ago: KREATOR release Extreme Aggression (2017 Reissue Out Now)

Recording was complete by late March. After two shows in Greece, KREATOR travelled to England and between 15 April and 7 June 1989 played at least 37 dates across Europe.

Kreator - Betrayer (Official Video)

On this day in 1989 Extreme Aggression was released by Noise in Europe and Epic in the US. A few months later, the beginning of September, KREATOR arrived in New York to begin a US/Canada tour: 44 dates between 2 September and 28 October.

They continued touring Extreme Aggression into 1990, notably into East Germany which was recorded on video for Live in East Berlin.

What we are trying to do is consolidate our style though. We don't want to impress people with extremely complex stuff, we just want to write good songs which will keep our fans happy. The time for impressing lables and other musicians is over, we know we are good musician, I hope they see that also, it's time to put out a really good album for the fans. We don't have to prove anything anymore.The new songs are less technical than "Terrible Certainty", that is my view, but no one can say we've regressed or are crap now because the writing is still the best in our opinion. The songs are easier to play and are songs that come over live alot better. I think they will be alot more accessible because of this and that's what we are aiming for.
[...]
alot of people encouraged us to press ahead with the album and to persue the same style. I don't want to go doing any strange experimentation with our music and I don't think our fans want that either. We still like to play fast technical music and to play live and our fans like it. So we'll carry on doing it. We don't deny we play fast heavy material, I think everyone looks for that with KREATOR and that's fine by us because we love it. If we didn't we'd give up. Okay, we'll write slow songs as well of course, all our ideas, but we must stay heavy and I think we do that.
[...]
Well, probally February or March I believe. It's better for us to work under a little pressure on each record so we never put things off too long. We can never be lazy because good songs come out of pressure and once the songs are ready we like to get them down. I mean, they don't improve that much when you're working on them over a long period of time, not in our experience. All this long over working on really complex, over progressive material is not for KREATOR - when we have a strong idea we know it is good and we finish it, that's our way.
[...]
On "Terrible Certainty" I think we tried too hard, now we're improving the structure rather than filling the songs with too many parts. There's no parts with strange acoustic guitar coming out of the blue or stuff like that, it's far better, but it's still not primitive. We have classical influences but we're still basically heavy metal with thrashy songs and heavy music.

- Metal Forces magazine, 1989