Grave Digger have released The Number, the first piece of Faces Of Pain, which arrives on 15 January through Reaper Entertainment, with Uwe Jarling's cover.
The band have been plain about the subject, and it is not the usual one. They call the song a cry against forgetting and a memorial to humanity, and they are writing about the time when people were stripped of their names, their identities and their dignity and had numbers burned into their skin. What they say they are afraid of is that it returns in another form, and that people forget where the dehumanising of others leads.
They also insist the song is not only that: they call it a symbol of hope, for peace and for the dignity of every human being, and for a future in which every name matters. Four decades into this band, writing a Holocaust song and saying so directly is a long way from where German heavy metal usually keeps its lyrics.