Manowar just released their new and largely narrative EP The Revenge Of Odysseus, which was supposed to be a small piece of a much larger work rivaling their 1992 album The Triumph Of Steel.
In an interview with Rock Antennae, Manowar bassist Joey DeMaio said the epic was derailed after narrator and Greek actor Kostas Kazakos passed away in September 2022. This forced Manowar into condensing their new material into smaller chunks without Kazakos' voice, as they couldn't perform it live with Kazakos. Or as DeMaio puts it, the new and revised material is more concise and "ass-kicking stuff that will fry the hair on your balls." Typical Manowar stuff, you know?
"Here's the problem: the stuff that we just released was a small portion of a huge, huge, big work — much bigger than The Triumph Of Steel," said DeMaio. "And so it was kind of the appetizer. Which a lot of people didn't understand. They were, like, 'What is this shit? Classical music, narrations…' But that music was all composed the way Wagner composed; it was setting the tone for the future of what this big work would be, like a meisterwerk. So a lot of people misunderstood it.
"Well, while we were planning this big epic about Odysseus, the gentleman who spoke the narration as Odysseus passed away. So now we can't honor him with this huge work, because he's gone; he wouldn't be able to perform it live. So now we are going to condense that into a smaller piece that will, of course, [honor] this great Greek story and honor the life of Kostas Kazakos; he was the greatest actor in Greece.
"So that made us kind of shift gears. So now we're working on songs that are what people would normally expect. Instead of some big, epic, long three-, four-hour piece, now we're gonna be working on songs that I think people would expect from Manowar — ass-kicking stuff that will fry the hair on your balls, basically."
No word if touring guitarist Michael Angelo Batio will be a part of the new studio material.
