In 2025, metal titans KREATOR celebrated two outstanding achievements by releasing vocalist/guitarist Miland “Mille” Petrozza’s book “Your Heaven, My Hell” and hitting German cinemas with “Hate & Hope”, the first proper movie about a really loud, really extreme metal band not only melting your face with firestorms of pyrotechnics but also music equivalent to searing bursts of hellfire.
Now, it is time to continue the tale of Kreator with its much-anticipated 16th chapter! Entitled “Krushers Of The World”, the new KREATOR album, will be out on January 16th and recently I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with Mille Petrozza to find out a little more about the album.
Ironically given what has taken up the band’s time in 2025 Petrozza is quick to admit that books and movies have been a huge inspiration on this album.
“Mostly books and movies and some current events also,” he says as we begin talking about inspirations. “There’s the song Seven Serpents, for example, which talks about the Stoic philosophy. Seven Serpents representing maybe the seven deadly sins or the evil that surrounds us. There’s this quote in the middle, the choir singing Amor Fatih, which to me is like the essence of the song is let’s deal with whatever gets on our nerves or whatever moves us. The world is really shitty but accept your fate, love your fate. There is a song based on the Dario Argento film Suspiria – the music is based on the older movie but the lyrics are talking more about the newer movie from 2017. There’s the last song on the album called Loyal To The Grave and it is about friendship and it’s about love and it’s about unity and loyalty Every song represents something – a different vibe or a different feel and a different theme. I think the music should speak for itself and the lyrics should speak for themselves.”
His talk about Suspiria leads me to ask about his fanatical love of horror fans.
“I got into horror at a very, very early age,” he explains. “When I was probably like five or something, I was with my grandparents and there was the old Universal monster movies like Frankenstein and the old Hammer horror movies with Christopher Lee as Dracula, like the classic stuff. So, I was always drawn into this and so from there onward, the journey was just starting.”
“Before I got into music I was into horror movies,” he adds. “It’s a little bit of a cliche for a metal musician to be into horror movies but that’s just what’s what. It is what I am and what I love to watch. Really I am a big movie nerd overall. Later on I got into the 80s stuff and nowadays I watch and like a lot of the newer stuff. I really enjoyed Long Legs and I really enjoy Ari Aster’s movies. So the movies that I recommend are not like the nerdy movies that people might expect but I’m a sucker for any new horror movie. I think we have had some great directors over recent years – like Ty West for example. His X trilogy reinvented the genre. I love the fact that it’s just like music or metal there’s always new stuff to discover. It’s amazing – it’s an ongoing journey that will probably last until the day I die.”
With our movie talk over though we turned back to Krushers Of The World and I found that Petrozza has a very special message for people who are going to sit down and listen to the album on the day it is released.
“If you listen to the album be aware that this album, even though we released three singles so far, we as a band still think in terms of albums so the whole album makes a lot more sense if you listen to it from beginning to the end. So, that being said it’s very old school A lot of people seem to think in single terms but we still think in album terms and we think that Krushers Of The World makes sense if you listen to it in the order of the songs. The melody, the poetry, everything makes sense when you listen from the beginning to the end.”
Krushers Of The World will be released on the 16th January.
