Cirith Ungol Interview

Some of the band’s earliest influences were bands such as; Mountain, Budgie, Dust, Sir Lord Baltimore, Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep etc. Our band was always searching out new music mostly by scouring the import sections of local record stores around the Los Angeles area. Back then before the internet, this was not an easy task. We bought the first album of many of the bands mentioned above, not even knowing who they were at the time, some based on their covers alone. I can’t speak for the rest of the band but I still go back to many of those early bands for inspiration.

There is not much difference from our songs live and or on the album. We have tried to make them as close as possible for the enjoyment of the audience. We don’t have much of an organized stage show relying on a massive wall sound to do the work for us!

We started working on new material as soon as the band reformed, although never expecting any of it to be released. Tim found mention of movie “The Planet of Doom” on the Internet. We contacted the producers because we had a song, “Doomed Planet”, on our “One Foot in Hell” album. “The Planet of Doom” movie is one continuous tale broken up into 15 chapters, each interpreted by a different artist and musical band. It is an animated feature length film in which the hero, Halvar the brave, seeks vengeance aboard a witch-born chopper, journeying across a psychedelic landscape on a quest to defeat the deadly beast Mördvél for the slaying of his beloved bride. The art director and producer David Paul Seymour, and the animator and director Tim Granda, were long time fans of the band, and wanted to use “Doomed Planet”, during the closing credits of the movie. Fortunately for us one of the other bands in the movie had to drop out, so we were offered the opportunity to write an original composition for the movie. This song, “Witch’s Game”, was released in September 2018, and composed specifically for a segment in the movie where the hero of the movie “Halvar” enters a cave and encounters a witch who reads his tarot cards. During that reading he journeys into the cards, with some pretty trippy experiences! We are all very excited to work on this project, as we had never been involved in a motion picture soundtrack before, and we are eagerly awaiting the movie’s release, some time in 2021.

After we reformed Metal Blade Records approached the band and was interested in a live album. We had never done one before, and this seemed like the perfect time. Several shows were recorded and that album “I’m Alive”, was released on October 25, 2019.