Drunkard Bio

DRUNKARD came forth somewhere in 1999. The idea to form a band came rather rapidly, and at first it was obviously not meant to be taken seriously. John (guitars) and Savvas (bass/vocals) linked up with Thanos (drums) and started rehearsing the first Drunkard song ever titled "Alkolowarriors". The ideals of the early days were more "retro" oriented, as an opposition to many shitty modern metal bands we never liked and despised, both from Greece and abroad. After only a couple of rehearsals, John had prepared the riffs for 2 more songs, titled "Full moon blasphemy" and "Disco slaughter". It was just then, when the band, despite the obvious inexperience and lack of performance abilities, was invited to open a gig at a local metal festival in Thessaloniki - Greece. This fact gave a lot of thrust to the band, and although we ended up being cheated out of money and laughed at by some of the other bands present, we swore to continue and build Drunkard because we fuckin' wanted this! (Note that from all 6 bands that appeared that night, Drunkard is practically the only one still playing today - 2004, constantly rising in level and popularity).
Somewhere in 2000 we recorded a 5-song demo titled "alcoholic thrash attack". The whole recording session lasted only 4 hours. The whole thing was a disaster but yet, there was something to this! Despite the fact that this material is no match for your average well-polished heavy metal production, it does inspire a feeling that's just hard to come up with.

This primitive demo was thus burned in a small number of cds and distributed to fans and labels, to get a first reaction. And surprisingly, most likely because of the reasons stated above, "alcoholic thrash attack" caught the attention of many underground labels from the US and Germany. Deathstrike records (the German label of Teutonic Thrashers NOCTURNAL!) in particular were very excited with it and finally released it on tape in 2003. Moreover, it is good (and satisfying to me personally) to state that Drunkard NEVER had a problem in finding a label. Even though the big label contract is yet to come, in those early days with the equivalent primitive demo in our hands we could EASILY choose to sign from a list of different labels… And this "tradition" continues 'til today.

After A.T.A. was recorded, we continued doing gigs and constantly grinding ourselves with Metal. Always going against the odds, it almost felt like a struggle of Drunkard vs everyone. And let's face it, as many of the major labels out there think (hey karmageddon) like "Drunkard's cool but no one likes old-school nowadays!!!" 3 more gigs were therefore performed the following months in Thessaloniki/ Greece, the one better than the other. But then, we snapped. Especially John and I went into serious fighting and arguing resulting to broken equipment and tons of alcohol wasted. Drunkard was nearly disbanded for no good reason, other than the ego of its own members.

In 2002, as if by divine intervention we all got together in the city of Xanthi / Greece, and things led to the complete recovery of the band. We did a gig in a festival there that same night, and for us, that night still symbolizes the beginning of a new era. The show went great, the audience was the best yet, but the good part came after the show. We decided to start doing an album. Metal's there just to break the rules…

2 brand new songs were produced. Discoblood and Alcoholic death. The riffing and general song writing was evolved-as-hell since we were a lot more experienced by now and ready for something more than keeping Drunkard in our home city's boundaries. There started a long period where we worked hard to produce a full-scale album capable to bring forth a full powered release. At first we burned the above mentioned 2-songs on cd, and distributed it as a promo, in order to give the fans a revised image of the band. This cd ("Promo 2003") was actually a test-recording, yet the production is much more supreme to many other ambitious underground metal bands. This is mainly due to our excellent cooperation with studio Q in Thessaloniki.

Having received (in just a few months) about 200 letters of support from Greece only, the recording session of the album begun in mid-2003.
It is worth saying that the songs were rehearsed only 3-4 times before recorded in the studio. Better yet, some of the key ideas of the album came up during the recordings! The result, you will see for your selves. Pure aggressive heavy metal, not retro-oriented but sounding fresh and massive. NO relation to the average mediocre Greek-metal sound and production. Hellish Metal Dominate is here, and shows clearly Drunkard's intentions for the future. As the Greek metal hammer wrote: Thrash-Fucking-Metal!