Exodus vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza was asked by Mosh Mag for his thoughts on the band’s absence from the Big 4, to which he replied:
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“I don’t consider the ‘Big Four’ the ‘Big Four.’ I consider it the ‘Big One’ and ‘The Other Three.’ I mean, honesty, on [the ‘Big Four’] t-shirt, one of the ‘Big Four’ is skipping a spot.
“If they were so ‘Big Four,’ shouldn’t they lie right under there? But that band is bigger than that other band? So how big is the ‘Big Four’?
“I know personally from playing with Metallica, they can sell 90,000 tickets. Those other three bands together – God bless ’em; I love them to death; they’re my boys; Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth, I love them – but they’re not the size of Metallica. They never will be.
“So where does the tier stop? Does it go Metallica, tier [one]; those three bands, tier [two]; Exodus, Testament, Overkill, tier [three]; Death Angel, tier [four]… How many tiers do you have then? You know what I mean? I don’t look at it like that.
“I’m very fortunate to keep playing this 33 years after the initial record came out. How many bands from that genre…? And I’m not talking about metal bands. I’m talking about when you watched MTV in 1985, when [Exodus debut] ‘Bonded By Blood’ came out, how many bands in other musical genres are still putting out records – kickass albums – that people still wanna listen to? None but the metal bands…
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“[Megadeth’s] ‘Dystopia’ won the Grammy a couple of years ago; great record. [Anthrax’s] ‘For All Kings’; great record. Slayer hasn’t put out a shitty record. The last three Testament records are all gold. Death Angel… Overkill… Nobody’s putting out, ‘Ah, well, there’s, like, three songs on there that I like and then a couple of fillers.’
“Nobody is throwing fillers up there there for you, gentlemen. They’re giving you right smack dab in the face what you deserve, what you get, and I think that’s a [testament] to us all being huge fans of what we do and what we still do.”