ATROCITY - "Don't You Forget About Me" sample online

In anticipation of their monumental new album of '80s pop-song covers, Werk 80 II, Napalm recording artists ATROCITY offer "Don't You Forget About Me" as an online audio sample Here. The North American (USA + Canada) release date for Werk 80 II is confirmed as March 4th.

And some more background info on Werk 80 II, the follow-up to 1997's smash-hit Werk 80, from a recent interview with vocalist/producer Alex Krull originally conducted in German:

Alex, why did you choose to record "Don't you forget about me" ?

Alex: “It is a song I always had in my mind to do and it was also repeatedly demanded by several different people to record "Don't you forget about me". After the release of the first WERK 80, fans and several other people came up with a list of songs that they would like to hear the next time which was really some kind of funny. Liv once told me that that she could very well imagine this song in combination with my voice and heavy guitars. So we tried it out and the song works very well in my opinion. For me it is something like a following-up of "The Great Commandment" from the first WERK 80 album.”

Do you connect any special memories from the eighties with the songs that we can hear on both WERK 80 albums?

Alex: “This is a question I got asked several times right now. As a “kid of the eighties” there are of course some songs which you keep in mind and then you connect them with certain events . There are probably many nostalgic stories for many people like their first love romance or something like that. But for me it is mostly metal songs which I adore now and in the past. So these are songs which we don’t play on any of the WERK 80 albums. There were many metal songs in these days were we partied along and listened to when we were rambling the streets. Don’t forget that we founded ATROCITY as young teenagers during this period in the mid-eighties which was a serious step in our lifes. So we decided to become a metal musician at a very early stage. Music took always the center stage and it is still our purpose in life. Clearly, music always has a nostalgic aspect if you can refer it to a special epoch. And this is definetly the point that many people feel the rising of memories when listening to WERK 80. I have a clear memory about some songs when I listened to them on radio or TV that I thought they would sound cool as a metalsong with heavy guitars. That’s actually the beginning of the idea to play well known songs of the eighties with our band in a metal way. But you can also find some songs on both WERK 80 albums that were interesting for us besides the memories of youthness, for example for breaking taboos such as homosexuality. It has been a very sensitive subject in our society until today. Many bands have tried to break boundaries in these days by very offensive and provocant means. I think it is right to kick societies ass from time to time with its hypocritical values and norms and its absurd double standards. That’s exactly what Heavy Metal is about – breaking the rules, man!”