The original Alice Cooper band has released the new song “Black Mamba,” which features a guest spot by Robby Krieger of The Doors.
The single comes a couple days after Cooper and company announced their first album in 51 years, The Return of Alice Cooper, arriving July 25th. As the LP’s opening track, “Black Mamba” kicks it back to ’70s-era Alice with a crunchy blues-rock sound and the same murky psychedelia that defined the original Cooper band’s earliest albums such as Pretties for You and Easy Action.
Speaking with Billboard, Cooper described the track as “definitely an Alice Cooper, from-the-ground-up song” that came about during the album sessions. Krieger, a friend of the band since its days in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, was tapped for additional guitarwork.
Related Video
“It wasn’t even a song yet,” bassist Dennis Dunaway told Billboard. “We’re in the studio and we start jamming on the riff and warming up together. The next thing you know we get this swampy feel and decide it’s gonna be about a Black Mamba snake, which is very deadly, and it fell into place. It was so new, Alice had to stop us at one point and ask me if I remembered what the melody was. It was very spontaneous.”
The Return of Alice Cooper sees the shock-rock legend reunited with his old bandmates Michael Bruce (guitar), Dunaway (bass), and Neal Smith (drums). The album was produced by longtime Alice colleague Bob Ezrin, who helmed the board for the seminal albums released by the original band in the early 1970s — Killers, School’s Out, and Billion Dollar Babies — as well as Alice Cooper’s recent solo albums.
Previously, Bruce, Dunaway, and Smith reunited with Cooper for two songs on the latter’s 2021 album, Detroit Stories.
Meanwhile, Alice will be active with his current live band in 2025, as well, with spring/summer headlining dates and a co-headlining fall run with Judas Priest on the horizon. Get tickets here.
Stream “Black Mamba” below.
Content shared from consequence.net.