We also talk to Matt Tuck about how his voice is holding up and the songwriting for the band’s new album!

Bullet For My Valentine have confirmed that they have wrapped up work on their thrird album. Set for release in the early part of 2010, BFMV’s Twitter has said: “Looks like album 3 is finished guys!!! That’s a wrap!!!! Tidy…”

We took time out to speak to Bullet For My Valentine frontman Matt Tuck about how his voice was holding up and how it was effecting work on the new album.

How’s the voice?

Matt Tuck: “Superb, thank you asking, ha ha. It’s such an amazing vocal production, there’s hardly any bullshit production, auto-tune, any bullshit. What you hear on this record is pretty much 80% what I did on the day on the microphone. It sounds so good. That’s been the biggest relief of this album is knowing I can go into a recording session and sing songs. Not spend a week on a line. That was the biggest thing on ‘Scream Aim Fire’ that will haunt me forever. The laboured vocal takes, and how hard it was, and how I was feeling mentally, and the end result. It still kind of sounds weird to me. But the new album sounds to me like the best vocal production I’ve ever done. And I think it’s one of the best I’ve ever heard. It’s pretty fucking good.”

And in that do you include the songwriting, melodies, voice as well as the ‘production’?

Matt: “Melodies, lyrical content, the harmonies, the screaming. Everything is there for a reason. It’s not just slapped down. Every single thing has been thought about, every word, each song was written lyrically four times, we’ve done three different versions of the melodies, that’s why it’s taken so long. We’ve started in March and we’re still going. We’re looking to be as near perfection as we can get. In three years time we might beat it again, but we’re going for total perfection of what a human achieve.”

All bands are excited about the new stuff, as you were before ‘Scream Aim Fire’, but do you think people who were expecting, ‘The Poison II’ were disappointed? Only with hindsight can we know how it will be received…

Matt: “The biggest thing about this record is that it’s the follow up that should have been. You can only realise that when you release something and it’s like, ‘Fuck, maybe we should have gone down a different road. Maybe these songs shouldn’t have been there. Some of the B-sides from ‘Scream Aim Fire’ should have been on there, instead of some of the other songs. But until you do some of these things you never know. ‘Scream Aim Fire’ was good for us, it allowed us to travel the world and make a lot of money and do what we love. It wasn’t a disaster, it just could have been better, and this one… is that album.”

You said you were going to write the lyrics at the same time as writing the music this time, did you? And how does that effect the finished songs?

Matt: “It happened on some of them but all of them. It’s a hard habit to get out of. It was conscious on every song, but if the music was on a total roll, you can’t stop it, and I wasn’t going to stop the music for the lyrics. On some of the stuff we’ve been editing things, chopping things, trying things out in different areas of the song. It’s been very vocal-based this album, even though the riffs and structure is heavy and it’s really rocking, it’s still a very vocal album, and that’s what Don was concerned about especially.”