Friday Dies is back from the ashes, and Mark Friday is making the announcement with a head-banging thrash number from the past, “Protect Your Temple.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That song just blasts right out. There’s no long intro or anything, it just comes right at you.”
The song itself is from the band’s underground heyday in the mid-’90s. Like the band, the song and the album it was on, Of Wizards and Witches, burned out in the late ’90s. Mark likens the return of the song and the band’s name to the rise of the mythical phoenix.
The track does, as Mark says, blast right out of the gate and features an instrumental bridge of more than a minute and a half in which the drums and guitars make thrash war.
“It’s a pretty typical ’90s kind of hardcore underground thrash that you would never have heard on the radio, most likely,” he said.
Mark’s delivery of the lyrics is a high-speed war cry running into battle:
The priests fled to the neverland
Refusing to exist where people kill
What they do not understand
Doing unto others what had been done to them
The priests now practice the dark art of death.
The song announces that Mark and the band’s name are back and new music is coming. A whole album’s worth of singles will be released over the next year, a song about every six weeks.
In the last year, he has published about a dozen tracks from the old days, which include “Protect Your Temple. But he is not back just to resurrect the old stuff. He is writing and recording, and he hopes to get a band together to perform live.
“The only reason I pulled up the old stuff was because it had the old name and I wanted to have a place to put the new stuff. It took me a year to record these new tracks, so I was really just using the old stuff as a place to put it. Not that I don't like the songs. I mean, the songs are good songs.”
He describes “Protect Your Temple” as “a groove metal kind of thing, a mix, like blues and neoclassical stuffed together.” He says the center part is kind of jazzy, “a bunch of ninth chords and seventh chords and stuff thrown in there, which most people wouldn’t even hear, but they’re there.”
When he left music in the late ’90s, he left for good.
“I had a kid, and I got out of the business, out of playing live, partly because there was a lot of people in drugs, and I didn’t want to get into the drugs thing. It just became hard. I drifted away and never came back.”
“I should have,” he said. “I regret not staying around playing and writing.”
More than a year ago, he was thinking of getting back into it when his son found a box full of his old music.
“He was going through, I think, Christmas decorations, and he pulled out a box sitting in a closet or something, and he found these old CDs.”
Mark said his son had already — on his own, through no influence from his father — already begun listening to heavy metal music. Exploring the music, he found Friday Dies in an archive in Milwaukee, and he found pictures of his father.
“He couldn’t believe that was me. This didn’t make any sense to him — that was Dad. I was like, ‘Yeah, your Dad’s cooler than you thought, huh?’ And because I was thinking about getting back into music, I thought this would be a good place to start.”
The new fire lit, Mark has been working for a year on the songs that will be on an album sometime late next year, The Sky Is the Ocean. The songs are recorded and all that is left to mix them.
“I should start putting them out in January. Then, every four to six weeks I’m going to put out another single.”
Toward the end of next year, he will release the album that contains all the singles released between now and then.
“That’s the advice I’ve been getting from people in the business. They’re like, nobody pays attention to albums. You put an album out, you promote the album, and in six weeks you’ve lost it.”
Under this plan, as one song is fading, another comes on line.
The first song? “Whichever one gets mixed first.”
He performed in public about a month ago with some musicians he lined up, but he wants a regular three-piece band. He has guitar and is seeking a bass player and a drummer.
“I’d like to play live, in a way that I make enough money to at least cover the gas,” he said.
With “Protect Your Temple,” he is burning back into view, and “I want people to know that I have new music coming out, and I want them to listen to it.”
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