Fans of Pittsburgh metalcore favorites Zao will have to wait no longer for the band to play, and release new material, again.







The band will return to the stage Friday at The Altar Bar, and are set to release a new album by the end of this summer.







“(Performing live) has almost been a year in waiting because we started recording our record last June,” guitarist Scott Mellinger said. “Now that we’re in the final stages of recording, we want to start getting our feet back into the performance aspect of it.







“Now that the record is almost done, we want to get back out there and start getting the name moving again.”







The band has been on an unofficial hiatus since 2012, and members of the band now have jobs or careers or families to deal with, but that hasn’t stopped them from moving forward.,







“If you want to do something, you'll do whatever you got to do to make it work,” Mellinger said about working around the personal schedules of everyone in the band.







“I think everybody is really excited about the new material and super excited about the lyrical content. We're making it super fun so we're not going to be pressured into doing anything we don't want to do.” “Everybody's stoked enough that we'll work around work and deal with bullshit, just as long as we can do it,” he said.







Even though there are responsibilities outside of the group for its members, Mellinger does not see the band’s return to the stage or new album as a one-shot type of deal.







“I think there is going to always be some activity, I think the time of the three-year nothingness is gone,” he said. “We signed to a new booking agency. We definitely want to be as active as we possibly can be with how everybody's schedules are.







“There's not going to be a year go by where we don't play shows or release music or something.”







Even though the group started recording the new album last summer, some of the songs on the album have been around for awhile.







“Some of the songs were written right after we did our last record which was in 2009,” Mellinger said. “There are some songs that were only a couple of months old when we recorded them. I always write, so it was like an ongoing thing.”







In addition to the new album and long-awaited Pittsburgh show, the band has a few more dates confirmed for the year, with the probability of more added as the year goes on.







Based on the ticket sales for the show Friday, the band can perhaps expect its fans to come out in droves.







“This Pittsburgh date we're doing (Friday) because it's being so close, it's like more of a warm-up type of date,” Mellinger said. “It’s crazy, that fucking show's sold out! We had to open up more tickets (and the club opened up the balcony to standing room) because of it being sold out.”













