Norma Jean

Ask most serious bands about the recording process, and if they don’t compare it to giving birth, they’ll likely tell you that making an album is akin to psychotherapy. But let’s be real here: How many of those bands actually take the album-as-therapy idea literally? For Atlanta quintet Norma Jean, who for all intents and purposes should be some of the most content dudes in underground music right now, the recording sessions for their third album, Redeemer, which charted at #38 its first week on the Billboard Top 200 sold a staggering 21,334 copies, packed group therapy, boot camp and endurance test into one gnarly package.

Produced by Ross Robinson (At The Drive-in, From First To Last, Sepultura), Redeemer is at once the heaviest and most personal album in this band¹s arsenal‹and that¹s saying something: With their 2002 Solid State Records debut, Bless The Martyr And Kiss The Child, Norma Jean established themselves as one of the noisiest and most adventurous young bands in metal today. With the 2005 follow-up, O¹ God, The Aftermath, drummer Daniel Davison, bassist Jake Schultz, and guitarists Chris Day and Scottie Henry welcomed new vocalist and Arkansas native Cory Brandan to their lineup and took their artful, technical noise to the proverbial next level, earning critical acclaim and a 2006 Grammy nomination (for Asterik Studios’ awe-inspiring artwork) in the process, and embarking on a grueling tour schedule that has found them on Ozzfest 2006¹s second stage, as headliners on the sold-out, nationwide Radio Rebellion Tour with Between the Buried and Me, headlining their own “Great American Noise Tour” with The Chariot, A Life Once Lost and The Handshake Murders, and, most recently, as direct support for Thrice and Underoath on their U.S. tours, a slot on the acclaimed Bamboozle festival in New Jersey and five days scheduled for the Vans Warped Tour 2007.