Goliath

“It’s just fucking huge and gargantuan and colossal,” Exodus guitarist and co-lyricist Gary Holt tells Apple Music of how the Bay Area thrash veterans’ 12th album earned its title. You can hear that power from the jump. Opener “3111” kicks Goliath off with booming, ominous chords from Holt and fellow guitarist Lee Altus, who saw off prime thrash riffs throughout the album. Meanwhile, drummer Tom Hunting and bassist Jack Gibson deliver death-defying rhythmic turnabouts and monster low end. The man at the mic is Rob Dukes, who returns to Exodus after an 11-year absence. “We knew we were going to go back to Rob,” Holt says, referring to the 2025 departure of vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza, his third since originally leaving the band in 1993. “We don’t like change, which seems odd coming from a band that has created a couple changes. We would joke about finding some 25-year-old with 12-pack abs instead of a 12-pack of beer to jump off the drum riser, but Rob’s been one of our closest friends all along, and having him back has been a blessing.” According to Holt, Goliath is the band’s most collaborative album to date. “We just set about writing the best songs we could, and we weren’t afraid to try anything,” Holt says. “Lee wrote almost half the music on this album. He was so motivated that we’ve got 80 per cent of the next album done as well.” Below, Holt talks about each song on Goliath. “3111” “The song is all about narco wars. The number is how many people were murdered in Juarez in 2010. It was Rob’s concept, and then him and I wrote the lyrics. The original chorus was all in Spanish, but now it’s just one line. I did a ton of research, and that’s where the title came from. And then everything snowballed into the video, which got banned from YouTube because it’s all real footage. The hypocrisy of it is that all that horrific footage came from YouTube and Google.” “Hostis Humani Generis” “That’s Latin for ‘enemy of all mankind’. I wrote it from the viewpoint of a p