German Heavy Metal pioneers ACCEPT will release their new studio album “Blind Rage” on August 15th. Last week, the band revealed the video clip from their first single called ‘Stampede’.

Now their video director Dave Blass, an Emmy Nominated Production Designer and Director, reports from the shooting:

“It’s 4 in the morning and I am in a van with one of the hottest metal bands in the world ACCEPT. But right now, they are one of the coldest metal bands in the world because it’s -­‐7 degrees out and we had to rush back into the van to warm up. It was so cold that they couldn’t hold their guitar pics, and the rocky peaks they were climbing over still had a slick layer of ice on them. When we scouted the location 3 weeks ago it was a nice toasty 33 and we were worried that they were going to roast in the sun. We would all love that heat right about now.

This is the third video that my team and I have done with ACCEPT going back to ‘Teutonic Terror’. Wolf Hoffmann and I had met years before their reunion and I had told him that if they ever wanted to do a video that we should get together. With ‘Teutonic Terror’ we wanted to go with a Classic Metal video. No story, no visual effects, just the band with brand new lead singer Mark Tornillo, some fire and Wolf doing his guitar solo up on a tank. I wanted to keep it about the music, but with some iconic imagery which is why we closed the video on the twin burning flying V guitars that was a call back to the »Restless And Wild« album. Next we tried to shake it up with ‘Pandemic’, which we shot the morning after the 14 hour ‘Teutonic Terror’ shoot. The band was about to embark on a massive worldwide tour, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to get them for another shoot. We had no concept for the video when we shot it, we just did a clean capture of the individual band members on Green Screen, and knew we could do a wide variety of things. I didn’t want to do the standard deal of putting the band on a virtual set that looks like a cheap video game, so we later came up with the concept to make the video look like you were reading a graphic novel, which wasn’t something that had been done before.

The overall theme of the ACCEPT videos have always been about the band and the music. No matter how many shows the band does, there are fans all around the world who never get a chance to see them perform, and these videos fill that void. Even so, you still have to mix it up a bit. Even tanks and fire get boring after a bit. So here we are, freezing our asses off in the high desert of California at the Devil’s Punchbowl, a rock formation that looks like it’s from another world. It is actually. It’s right around the corner from where Captain Kirk fought the guy in the green lizard suit in the old Star Trek TV series.

The first new video from the forthcoming Album »Blind Rage« is for the track ‘Stampede’. It’s a hard pounding thrash of a song with as a nasty riff that has a heart going back to ‘Fast As S Shark’. Director Greg Aronowitz wanted the video to have a different feel and something that we hadn’t seen before. So many of the videos done today are all Visual Effects, so we wanted to take advantage of this amazing scenery and showcase the band in a new and unique way. Director of Photography Lan Bui wanted to maximize the great light by shooting both at sunrise and at sunset, but the sunrise was proving to be a bit challenging due to the cold. A slug of lukewarm coffee and we all jumped out of the van and climbed back on the frosty peaks as the sun crested over the horizon. We have Peter Baltes hammering away at his bass on a ridge so steep we are all cringing as he thrashes away. “We have insurance… right?” To capture these moments, and to get the scope of the

location Greg brought in the Phantom 2 Vision Quad Copter with a Gimbal-­‐Stabilized 108Op Camera and Fat Shark VR goggle control system. This gives us the ability to not only fly around the band at high speeds, but to hover a couple of feet away from them, then take off like a bat out of hell. It’s like having a crane, a helicopter and a steady cam rig all in one. That rig only worked for a some shots though, for the more precise shots, and close ‐ups and pans we used the new G ‐Rig Valos gimbal system developed by Clemens Fischer in Austria to give us a steady fluid system of movements that allowed us to track along the rocky terrain while running at full speed. Lighter and more versatile than a typical Steadi-­‐Cam this rig is so state of the art that we were the first video to get to use it. We had all the gadgets, one of the biggest metal bands in the world… and now we finally were getting some heat as the warm California Sun heated up our location, creating the golden glow that we had traveled 2 hours from Los Angeles to find. Watching the new sun glint off of Wolf Hoffman’s custom silver Framus as he launches into his solo 200 feet in the air above a nasty crevasse made it all worth it.

After 2 days of thrashing and bashing we had another cool video in the can.. now we just had to make the magic happen in the editing room, and bring it all together. For millions of fans, this video will be their first chance to hear the new album. As the sun set on the last day of shooting we said our goodbyes. It’s been a great ride since that first day at the tank yard and their first album in over one and a half decades. Now here we were, just 4 years later, three albums later and another world tour about to start. It’s been a hell of a ride… really more like a stampede actually.”

The single release of the opening track ‘Stampede’, will be on July, 11th, digitally and on a limited vinyl edition.

“Blind Rage” was produced by Andy Sneap (MEGADETH, EXODUS, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH). The cover artwork was done by Daniel Goldsworthy (HELL).