In a new interview with Stoyan Tsonev of Bulgaria’s Z-Rock radio, W.A.S.P. leader Blackie Lawless once again spoke about the status of his long-in-the-works autobiography. Asked how the book is coming along, he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “ Slowly. Everybody says ‘when, when, when,’ and I say, well, I’m hoping maybe a year from now it’ll be finished and ready to go. But I’m at a point now where I think I’ve assembled all the ideas to get them where they need to be. So now it’s just a question of putting them all together. And I feel pretty good about it. So, like I said, hopefully in a year, I would say, it’ll be ready. The problem is the touring schedule has been so intense, there just has not been the time to work on it as much as I would have liked.”

Lawless also talked about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the follow-up to W.A.S.P.‘s most recent studio album of all-new original material, 2015’s “Golgotha”. Asked if he had anything new to share about the band’s upcoming LP, Blackie said: “Not really, because, as we were saying, the tour schedule has been so crazy. Everybody wants to know when — ‘When are you gonna have this? When are you gonna have that?’ It’s, like, well, you know what? It’s a big world out there, and it takes a long time to get to all these different cities. For this tour that we’re on, we just finished doing North America and South America. Now we’re gonna be in Europe all this year. So it takes a long time to get to all these places. And so where does that leave us when we’re finished? Then we go back and look at doing a book, maybe finishing the album. But, like I said, the touring schedule is so intense that there just hasn’t been time to do everything.”

Back in October 2022, Lawless told Rockin’ Metal Revival about the process of writing his autobiography: “When I sat down to start writing the book, it just poured out of me. And that was an interesting process, too, because, never having done that before, you always think of the… the first thing that comes to anybody’s head is the things that stand out. But what I found that more than anything is it was a process of self-discovery, because if you look at any given event that may happen in your life that’s significant — we all have those; those signposts that point us in one direction or another — it’s one thing to write about it, but to get to the root of it, what you have to do is go back and do some real self-examination and say, ‘Okay, what led me to this? And then what led me to that?’ And so forth. And when you do that…

“It reminds me. I’ve heard stories of psychiatrists, when they tell people, if they’ve gone through something that’s intense in their life or they’ve lost a loved one or something like that, write them a letter,” he continued. “And I found that doing this is very much like that. Because I’ve never done the thing that the psychiatrists have said — fortunately, I’ve never been put in that position — but it reminded me of hearing what they were saying, because it ends up being a letter to yourself. And you discover some interesting stuff — the good, the bad, the ugly and all that. And it’s quite a revealing process, because the person you are now is not the person you were when you were doing some of those idiotic things, or when something intense happened in your life that wasn’t idiotic. But again, what led you from point A to point B to become that person, and you look back on it now and you go, ‘Wow, look how I’ve changed.’

“Writing, whether it’s lyrics or anything like that, you try to write them as multi-dimensional as you can because the listener, when they listen to it today, you want them in five years to be able to look at those same lyrics and see something totally different, because who they are in five years is not who they are right now,” Lawless added. “So that’s really what you’re trying to do.”

Lawless also talked about his autobiography in May 2022 in an interview with Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station. At the time, he said: “It’s taken a whole lot longer than I thought it would, but it’s been one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life. It’s a tremendous amount of work because there’s so many things, over the course of a lifetime, that you forget about, especially when you do what we do for a living. Anybody that does what we do, it’s not like the average person out there where you go to work and you do your thing and you get into a routine. And there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s different.

“I’ve often said that I’ve already… because of the schedule and the way that any band has to do things — you’re here today; you’re somewhere else tomorrow — it’s like you’ve already lived four or five of somebody else’s lifetimes,” he explained. “And because of the amount of intensity that goes into the same amount of space that everybody has. Twenty-four hours for somebody that does this is not the same as twenty-four hours for somebody that’s in a routine. And it can get a little on the insane side.

“The first thing I did was interview everybody that I could think of and said, ‘What are your memories of this?'” Blackie revealed. “So I got those. But then where I got the majority of it from was really going back in my own head. And the deeper I got into it, the more things I had totally forgotten about. Because, like I said, there’s so many things that will happen in a given day that the only thing you remember is the most intense thing. But maybe the two or three other things that were just under it were just as intense, but you don’t remember it. You remember being on the flight the time the guys got angry with a stewardess and stuffed her in the overhead bin, but you don’t remember the two or three things that happened under that. That’s a true story, by the way.”

Asked what he has learned about himself from digging into his life while writing his book, Blackie said: “In the preface of the book, I write that this has been a process of discovery — both good and bad. I would say, after it’s all said and done, that it’s been far, far more good than bad, because what it’s done for me, it’s been like writing a script to a movie. And again, like I said, there’s a lot of stuff you forget about. But also at the same time, what it does is it helps you connect the dots of your own life, of maybe things that you didn’t really think about were connected, and you go back and you look at it and you go, ‘This is as plain as the nose on my face. Why couldn’t I have seen this before?’ And there’s been a number of incidences like that — just things that are personal that might not be something that you could share with anybody else, because it wouldn’t make sense to them. But then again there may be things that are. So I’m hoping that when people read this, they’ll see a lot of themselves in it.”

In July 2024, Lawless confirmed to George Dionne of KNAC.COM that he and his W.A.S.P. bandmates had been working on music for the follow-up to “Golgotha”. He said: “We have been, and last year, we had done quite a bit of work in between the American tour and the European tour, we did a lot of recording, a lot of demoing. And I thought I liked what I was hearing, and then I came back. I had a problem with my back last year when we were in Europe, and, actually, my back got broken while we were over there, so I had to have a couple of surgeries when we got home from the tour. And it gave me a lot of time to sit around, twiddle my thumbs and just listen to stuff. And I listened to the demos that we did, and there is some good moments, but it’s not consistent. ‘Golgotha’ was a very consistent record. I mean, ‘Golgotha’, I think, is one of the best things I’ve ever been a part of. And to try to at least do something on that level…”

He continued: “Today, a band like us, it’s all about your legacy, because we’re not making records anymore to sell records. I mean, those days are gone. But what we do, or what any artist does when they make a new record now, they are competing against their past. So your new album effectively becomes your opening act, and it’s an opening act that’s going up against songs that the audience has heard and romanced in their heads for decades. That’s stiff competition. So when something new comes out, for it to even be remotely considered good, in all honesty, it has to be better than the original stuff, and that’s no joke.

“It had been a while since I listened to ‘Golgotha’, and I listened to it — I don’t know — a couple months ago, and it was, like, ‘Wow, this is a pretty good record,'” Lawless added. “And it has to be that good to compete with the ‘L.O.V.E. Machine’s and the ‘I Wanna Be Somebody’‘s of the world. Because, again, people are romancing those songs in their head, and rightfully so.

“Music does a funny thing to our sense of time. It creates memories, the same way smell does and things like that. We remember where we were when we heard a certain song, and those are very powerful memories. And I’m glad we have that, but at the same time, when you’re the person that has to create new music, you’re constantly going up against that legacy.

“So, again, the new album will always be your opening act, and your opening act has to try harder just to get noticed,” Blackie concluded.

W.A.S.P.‘s latest release was “ReIdolized (The Soundtrack To The Crimson Idol)”, which came out in February 2018. It was a new version of the band’s classic 1992 album “The Crimson Idol”, which was re-recorded to accompany the movie of the same name to mark the 25th anniversary of the original LP’s release. The re-recorded version also features four songs missing from the original album.

Blackie previously spoke about the progress of the songwriting sessions for W.A.S.P.‘s new LP in a 2024 interview with Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station. He said: “We still are [working on it]. What happened was when we came back from the European tour, I had to have surgery and stuff, about a year prior to that, we had been working on a lot of new stuff. And when I came back, I’ve had a long time to go through those early demos, of what we have been working on. Listening to it with fresh ears, some of it’s really good, but there’s not enough of it yet where I would be comfortable in saying, ‘Okay, this is finished, and let’s go with it.’ I’d like to go back and visit the drawing board, so to speak, and see what else is there. Because even from a two-year period of when we started working on that before to where we are right now, you’re gonna gain so much, you’re gonna grow so much.”

Blackie continued: “I’ve learned you don’t make records or I don’t make records anymore that are spread out over a two- or three-year period, because the guy you are when you first start making it is not the guy you are when you finish making it. Get in, six months top to bottom, get that thing cranked out, because, like I said, if you don’t, you end up running the risk of it kind of being a schizophrenic type of record where you’ve got one type of one thing and then the other half is something else and it has no real cohesiveness.”

Asked what kind of stuff inspires him now, Blackie said: “Well, when we got ready to start this record a couple years ago, my mindset was I wanted to do a heavy, nasty, stinky rock and roll record. And that’s where my heart was at. But when I started to write, that’s not what was coming out. And so when you first start the process, you think, ‘Okay. We’ll go along with whatever comes out to begin with, but I wanna try to start steering this ship in a different direction as time goes by.’ And that’s just not what was happening. It was stuff that was more in-depth. And I thought, we did call ‘Golgotha’, that’s one of those thinking man’s records, and I thought, I don’t wanna do that this time. I wanna do something that’s a little lighter, like I said, a little nastier, stinkier old-time rock and roll, but as hard as I was trying to force it in that direction, that’s not what was happening. Now, when we get done with this tour and the European tour next year, then it’ll be time to start looking at that again in earnest. So who knows where we’ll come out of it again? To give you an honest answer, I’d need a crystal ball right now to tell you that, ’cause I don’t know.”

In November 2023, Blackie addressed the high musical standard of W.A.S.P. most recent albums, telling Canada’s The Metal Voice: “Nobody makes money making records anymore. So if you’re going to make records now, you’re doing it because of your legacy. And if you’re going to do that, then you really have to make sure that it’s as strong as it can be, because it’s always gonna be measured against what you did to begin with.”

He continued: “All bands, they make their bones the first five years they’re together, the first five or six records they make; their whole legacy is cemented there. It doesn’t mean you can’t make good records later on down the line, but everything is gonna be constantly compared to that… In other words, think of whatever new record you do now as your opening act. It’s always gonna be compared to that early stuff. And so for it to get an honest review or a fair shake, so to speak, that new record has to maybe be even better than the original stuff was, because people have had so many years to romance those older songs in their heads. And when you go up against people that have been doing that for a long time, it’s hard to erase those memories, and you don’t wanna do that anyway. But you just want the new stuff to have a chance to compete. And the only way that new stuff can do that is they have to be solid records.”

W.A.S.P. kicked off the North American leg of the “Album ONE Alive” tour on October 26, 2024 at Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, California. The 39-city run made stops across North America in Vancouver, British Columbia; Toronto, Ontario; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Dallas, Texas; New York City; Orlando, Florida; and more before wrapping up on December 14, 2024 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, California.

Along with bassist Mike Duda and lead guitarist Doug Blair, W.A.S.P. is joined by longtime drummer extraordinaire Aquiles Priester.

Because of the extensive back injuries Lawless suffered during the European leg of W.A.S.P.‘s 40th-anniversary tour, the band’s previously announced 2023 U.S. tour was canceled.

W.A.S.P.‘s massive European leg of the 40th-anniversary world tour wrapped on May 18, 2023 in Sofia, Bulgaria at Universidada Sports Hall.

W.A.S.P. wrapped up its first U.S. tour in 10 years with a sold-out show on December 11, 2022 at The Wiltern in Los Angeles. This marked the 18th sold-out shows for the U.S. tour, which kicked off in late October 2022. W.A.S.P.‘s performances included the return of the band’s classic song “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)”, which hadn’t been played live in over 15 years.