A grimly glamorous ghoul who first slithered from the cobwebbed shadows of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the early 90s, Wednesday 13 has firmly established himself as the world’s premiere purveyor of balls-out horror punk insanity. With a vivid and vile imagination that has endeared him to countless fans of riff-driven macabre over the last two decades, he has been one of rock’s most prolific protagonists, spreading his credo of grave-robbing rock ‘n’ roll and Halloween debauchery around the globe and unleashing a seemingly endless stream of blood-spattered albums and EPs.

“All my favourite stuff, like Kiss and Alice Cooper and Twisted Sister, those guys set the bar pretty high,” he states. “I always wanted to do something in the worlds of those bands. That’s the blueprint.” After several years of sharpening his creative teeth, Wednesday 13 emerged from the fetid crypt of obscurity with his band Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13, before becoming a bona fide international rock star as frontman for Murderdolls, his collaboration with Slipknot’s Joey Jordison. The band took the world by storm, with Europe and the UK in particular succumbing to the feral charms of the 2002 debut album, ‘Beyond The Valley Of The Murderdolls’, a raucous eruption of big tunes and bad attitude that noisily redefined the horror punk genre.

After Murderdolls went on an extended hiatus in 2004, Wednesday 13 embarked on a widely lauded solo career that again provided him with an outlet for his relentless outpouring of fiendish musical and lyrical ideas. Murderdolls reconvened in 2010 for the vicious ‘Women And Children Last’ album and another successful world tour before disappearing once more into the freezing midnight fog, leaving Wednesday to revive his solo career with a few thousand volts of wicked electricity and an acclaimed studio album, ‘Calling All Corpses’.

Frustrated with the arduous process of releasing his own music, our favourite black-hearted freak has thrown himself and his music into a whirling maelstrom of reinvention. The result is not just the heaviest and most authentically disturbing record of the great man’s career but also a huge creative leap forward, neatly encapsulated by the new album’s simple and direct title. In musical terms, ‘Condolences’ showcases Wednesday’s growing obsession with the world of heavy metal and its endless possibilities for exploring tales of horror and violence.

Produced by renowned studio guru Zeuss, new songs like the anthemic ‘What The Night Brings’ and the pile-driving ‘Blood Sick’ still exhibit a dash of B-movie weirdness and are full of Wednesday’s trademark twisted lyrics but where previous albums were rooted in the worlds of punk rock and glam metal, ‘Condolences’ is a full-on modern metal record with gigantic balls and the attitude to match. From the glowering menace of ‘Good Riddance’ to the grandiose hellishness of the album’s 7-minute title track, it’s living, breathing, murdering proof that the Wednesday 13 of 2017 means business.

“It’s non-stop touring once the record comes out,” Wednesday concludes. “We just did our first video for ‘What The Night Brings’ and the visuals are really cool. I’ve incorporated a lot of stuff I’ve been doing live, like this devil character I’ve been transforming into at shows, and that got worked in. We’re taking the music, the imagery and the entire stage show up a level. It’s gonna be a full-on theatrical stage production, so I’ll be busy as fuck on stage! I’ve been doing this shit for so many years, I started thinking ‘How can I make this fun again?’ (laughs).”