Judas Priest has almost completed work on their 19th album, bassist Ian Hill reported.

There’s no release date yet for the follow-up to 2018’s Firepower, but in a new interview with Vinyl Writer Music, Hill offered a hint at what to expect.

“There is an album in the pipeline, and it’s not far from being finished,” he noted. “Whether it’ll be out sometime next year or the year after, we don’t know yet. But there will probably be a little bit more touring next year in 2023, so we’ll wait for the dust to settle and let everybody catch their breath. And then we’ll probably start again in 2024. It might be sooner than that, but we’ll see what happens.”

Hill added that "as far as sound, we’ve taken it forward again. It’s gonna be a bit more intricate and maybe more complicated than Firepower." He described the new work as another example of the band trying to develop and improve their music: “That’s what we’ve always tried to do, and hopefully, it’s another step in the right direction.”

Looking back at how their creative approach has affected their success, Hill noted that 1982’s Screaming for Vengeance “kicked off things for us commercially in a big way. ... But the band’s peak was probably Defenders of the Faith, which came next. That was a more polished version of Screaming for Vengeance, and it was the last album along those lines. The album that came next, Turbo, was very experimental, with it the synthesizer guitars and what have you. And then, after that, we went with a much harder edge on Painkiller, which was probably a reaction to where we were in the late ’80s.”

Hill pointed out that Judas Priest "tried to get better, or at least be different, with each album, and I think we accomplished that quite well. But after Screaming for Vengeance and Defenders of the Faith, it became more difficult because we had reached our pinnacle with that. And then the guitar synths came along on Turbo, and we thought, ‘Well, maybe that’s it for us. We probably overdid it!’"

The Best Song From Every Judas Priest Album

Eighteen tracks that prove the British veterans never abandoned their core principles.

More From 107.7 WRKR-FM