Nevermore returned to the stage this April after fifteen years, and Van Williams and Jeff Loomis have now described what getting there was like.
The detail that says most is the rehearsal. The first time the new five were in a room together, in Sweden, they went straight through more than twenty songs. "Right out the gate, I think we played, like, 20-something songs, 24 songs, right away, all the way through," Williams told Jorge Botas of Metal Global. Since then, he says, it has been nothing but goosebumps every day, and the bus wakes up laughing.
Jack Cattoi plays guitar, Semir Özerkan plays bass and Berzan Önen sings. The debut was on 1 April in Istanbul.
Loomis does not pretend the last of those appointments is uncontested. There was always going to be scepticism, he says, and Warrel Dane, who died in 2017, is not an easy singer to replicate. His answer is that once he and Williams decided to put the band back together there was no version of it that worked halfway, which is as honest a defence of a reunion without its singer as anyone has offered.