Alternative Press's 50 Best Albums of 2019

In this era of seemingly arbitrary punctuation in pop, the all-caps title for California hard rock band Badflower\'s full-length debut feels earned. *OK, I\'M SICK* is largely about, as well as a product of, frontman Josh Katz\'s anxiety. The raw nerves and self-awareness are palpable throughout, most notably in the harrowing suicide tale “Ghost” and the appropriately frenetic opener “x ANA x,” which contains the line that could double as the album\'s elevator pitch: “Wanna see what happens when I mix Xanax, blow, and a MacBook Pro?” (*Editor\'s note: Apple does not condone this use of its hardware.*) Here Katz tells Apple Music about some of the things he and his bandmates needed around them to exorcize—and exercise—their demons and turn them into some very loud songs. **Leonardo DiCaprio** “We have a house out in the desert in California City, our tour manager\'s house, about two and a half hours north of LA. We wrote everything here—we must have made like 50 demos. When we actually got to the real studio, a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio was on the mixing console, staring at us with every take that we recorded. I don\'t know why it was there, but I\'ll never forget that. At some point, we were jamming, just saying \'Leonardo DiCaprio\' over and over and over again. I have no idea why that happened.” **Xanax** “The reason the album came out the way that it did, with all this really heavy content, is because that\'s just the place I happened to be in—a lot of panic disorder and depression and things like that. And even the songs that aren\'t necessarily about that are still very much from that perspective. \'x ANA x\' is sort of making fun of these feelings—making fun of panic disorder and the mode of defense I feel when I\'m onstage. I don\'t have the slightest clue how to fix the problems that I have, I just know how to observe them and turn them into art. Xanax is comforting. I have a therapist that I\'m able to FaceTime with; I talk to her every week. That\'s comforting. I get really bad anxiety when I\'m on tour, especially. Like when I look at the schedule and how full it is, and knowing that we\'re going overseas and doing all this crazy stuff, and the shows get bigger, and there\'s more and more people who are relying on their incomes from this band. I don\'t wanna disappoint anyone, and there\'s just a lot of pressure surrounding what we do that a lot of people don\'t realize.” ***The Defiant Ones*** “I probably put that documentary on every night. The Eminem segment was hugely inspiring—he\'s a freak of nature. Watching that come-up story and seeing how the first album became his first album, we thought about that a lot when we were making this record. Eminem incorporated a degree of humor into everything that he did that, at the time, I don\'t think was really a thing, especially in rap. That was a huge inspiration on \'x ANA x\'—that\'s such an interesting way to approach songwriting. I wanna be able to make people laugh and cry in the same song if I can. And Eminem had a way of doing that.” **Shaving** “The song \'Promise Me\' is all about wanting to preserve youth, and wanting to preserve the way love feels when you\'re young. There\'s no love as powerful as the first love that you have when you\'re in middle school, you know? That breakup, in my mind, with the first person who I only ever kissed on the cheek, was the hardest one I\'d ever been through. It is something that I\'m really cognizant about, preserving my youth. I always shave my face, I don\'t like to have a beard. I think it still looks like I\'m getting older. I guess my job is preserving my youth—I\'m fulfilling my childhood fantasy, I\'m signed to a label, I go on tour for a living, I have fans. As long as I stop taking it so seriously and stop feeling so much pressure to be perfect all the time.”

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

“I think on *California*, we really had an idea of what we wanted that record to sound like and it was going back to the foundation of what blink-182 is all about,” bassist Mark Hoppus tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “\[*NINE*\] is everything that blink-182 should be in 2019.” How one reads “2019” in this particular context is a question of sonics and songwriting just as much as social mores. The world has changed a lot in the three years since the kings of pop-punk reunited—with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba in place of founding guitarist Tom DeLonge—for *California*, a wild, wheelie-popping return to form that, by definition, returned to everything that made them unlikely pop stars at the turn of the century: adolescent nursery rhymes taken to almost diabolical lengths, with lines like “There’s something about you that I can’t quite put my finger in,” as heard on the vintage 30-second outburst “Brohemian Rhapsody.” By design, *NINE* finds the trio not only dispatching with dick jokes entirely, but fully embracing modern electronics and textures—as well as beats that drummer Travis Barker had originally intended for other artists. The result resembles the pop and alt-rock of the current moment more than anything they’ve recorded until now, be it in the titanic guitar swells of “Happy Days,” the skittering rhythm of “Black Rain,” or the saturated tones of “Blame It on My Youth.” On the towering “I Really Wish I Hated You,” Hoppus even makes a subtle attempt at rapping, without any wink or trace of irony. To get to this point creatively, he says it was about letting go, “just trying to write great songs and not worrying about ‘Is this the quintessential blink guitar-heavy distorted sound?’ If you plug your guitar into a computer and it sounds great, then run with it.”

It’s no longer possible to call Bring Me the Horizon a rock band. On their sixth album, the Sheffield four-piece draw on so many genres and ideas, they evade any attempt at categorization. “I’ve always thought there’s too many borders, too many bridges, that people don\'t cross in music,” frontman Oli Sykes tells Apple Music. “The real world has too much of that as it is. I guess that’s our crusade.” *amo*—Portuguese for “love”—stretches from bittersweet pop to electronic experimentalism, calling on an art-pop visionary, a legendary beatboxer, and an extreme-metal icon along the way. Here, Sykes breaks down their crusade, track by track. **i apologise if you feel something** “We knew it was almost impossible to give anyone a heads- up of what this album was going to sound like. It was important for that first track just to be like, ‘Forget whatever you think it’s going to sound like, because you\'re not going to be able to guess from anything we’ve shown you before.” **MANTRA** “At the end of the writing process, I had a bit of a meltdown. Even though we did have a lot of stuff, we didn\'t have that song where we were like, ‘This is what we\'re going to show the world first.’ ‘MANTRA’ was born out of that: \[It\'s\] not so different that people are alienated, but \[it\'s\] giving you a taste that it\'s not the same as the last record. It’s about the similarities between starting a relationship and starting a cult—how you can throw away your whole life for something and you have to put all belief and faith into this thing that might or might not be right for you.” **nihilist blues (feat. Grimes)** “We had no idea if Grimes would even be interested in doing a song with us. But she was really just gushing, like, ‘This is one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard.’ I’ve always loved dance songs that had a dark edge—something almost primitive that triggers me. Getting it into our sound was really exciting.” **in the dark** “When we first started writing this, it sounded more like something we would have written on the last album. But it turned into this dark, poppy ballad that we all really loved. I love bittersweet, dark pop songs.” **wonderful life (feat. Dani Filth)** “I did all the lyrics and vocals in a day in the studio. I think it was the day The 1975 released ‘Give Yourself a Try\'—that inspired me to get up on the mic and just say stuff that came out. I dropped \[Cradle of Filth frontman\] Dani Filth a line on Instagram to see if he’d be interested in working on the song. He didn\'t believe it was me at first. I think he said something very quintessentially English, like ‘If this is indeed you, young man, then, yes, I would love to.’” **ouch** “It was one of those bittersweet realizations that you’re happy something\'s happened, but a lot of heartache or pain came with getting to that realization. I just wanted to present the lyrics in a way that wasn’t too dark, a way that feels low-key—and the jammy sound came from that.” **medicine** “‘ouch’ is a kind of prelude to this, quite linked to its vibe. It\'s that idea that you often don’t realize you’re in a toxic relationship until you\'re out the other side. It\'s not like a ‘f\*\*\* you’ song, it\'s just, ‘This is finally me having my say, and I\'m actually going to think about how it affected me and not how it affected you for once.’” **sugar honey ice & tea** “It sounds ridiculous, but just with the drums and everything, we approached it differently and ended up making something that felt quite fresh. It started off a lot more, dare I say, hip-hop- sounding, electro, and there’s elements in there that still remain. We kept a little bit of each version it went through.” **why you gotta kick me when I’m down?** “I was quite scolded by the way I was treated when I was going through hard times with my divorce and stuff that no one knew about. I was quite hurt by the way I was treated by people that I thought were there for me. The song’s saying, ‘I totally get it, it\'s fine, but stop pretending it’s coming from a place of love or care, because it’s not—it’s coming from a place of your own problems where you don\'t want someone to change or grow.’” **fresh bruises** “This was a very organic song, it came very naturally. It was one we just wanted to make—a song that wasn’t verse, chorus, verse, chorus, but more of an electronic vibe. The kind of music I listen to is like that, centered around a hook, and it has a drop and it has a buildup. Not in an EDM sense, but more like lo-fi electronic, avant-garde. It just felt cool to make something more jammy and free like that.” **mother tongue** “\[Love\] is really all this addresses—saying to someone, ‘There’s no need to play games, just be open about the way you feel and everything will be fine.’” **heavy metal (feat. Rahzel)** “Getting \[beatboxing legend\] Rahzel was \[keyboardist\] Jordan \[Fish\]’s idea, because we had this beat that almost sounded like there was beatboxing on it. We used to be this death-metal-sounding, crazy band, and now we play pop music—it’s something that pisses some people off. We’re so confident and proud of what we\'re doing, and at the same time, we’re human and we have our insecurities. This track is just a little in-joke that it can still ruin our day if some kid goes, ‘This is the biggest load of s\*\*\* I’ve ever heard. What happened to this band?’” **i don’t know what to say** “It’s about a friend that passed away from cancer. It’s me trying to figure out what to say in that situation and my regret that I didn\'t see him in his final few days—but also an explanation why. To do my best to talk about how speechless I am at his strength and his courage, and the way he took it all in stride. You’ll hear that story echoed from so many people who have lost people to cancer—they just become unrealistically strong and courageous.”

After gaining notoriety with their 2014 cover of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” I Prevail made it clear early on that they’re not your typical metalcore band. This follow-up to 2016\'s debut LP *Lifelines* pushes the extremes of their sound further, often within the same song: Witness “DOA,” an amalgam of crushing riffing, pop production techniques, and wild synths. “Goodbye” floats on skittering electronic beats, and “Rise Above It” incorporates dubstep and guest vocals from Ohio hip-hop artist Justin Stone, contrasting with the thundering riffing, brutal metalcore breakdowns, and tortured vocals of co-vocalist Eric Vanlerberghe in “Bow Down.” *TRAUMA* is aptly named given that Brian Burkheiser, who handles all the “clean” vocals, was diagnosed with a vocal polyp in 2017 and contemplated leaving the band before mounting a full recovery from surgery. The episode compounded his existing battles with depression, as essayed in songs such as “Low” (“Even when I’m high I still feel low”) and “Breaking Down,” which concludes with Burkheiser whispering, “I don’t really like myself.”

Ukrainian progressive groove metal wrecking machine JINJER have returned with their long-awaited new album Macro and once again prove why the unique blend of singer Tatiana Shmayluk's beautifully aggressive harmonies and vocal hooks, and the bands sheer technical brilliance and precision have set them apart from the pack. From Macro's opening track 'On The Top', which showcases all of their trademark sounds at once, to the superior musicianship and delivery of tracks like 'Pausing Death' and 'Home Back', to the viciously heavy reggae induced vibe on 'Judgement (& Punishment)', JINJER are making it known that they are here to take over in a huge way. "A cocktail of modern prog metal, 'Macro' is the album where Jinjer show us what the future of heaviness sounds like.” - Loudwire © NAPALM RECORDS

The cover of Machine Gun Kelly’s *Hotel Diablo* features the Cleveland MC as a child, hanging upside down with his head cracked open, his innermost thoughts ostensibly falling out for the world to hear. If the actual album is to be believed, what’s been cooped up inside a young MGK’s head is pain. Across the album, he catalogs a number of anguishes, including the continued and unrelenting jeers of the internet (“Floor 13”), battles with suicidal tendencies (“Glass House”), and what sounds like an extremely strained, if not irreparable, relationship with his own mother (“Burning Memories”). His signature blend of rap vocals and gnashing rock guitars is here, as are standout contributions from Trippie Redd, Travis Barker, and YUNGBLUD.

For the sequel to her 2015 musical and visual album *Cry Baby*, the singer-songwriter brings us up to speed with the title character, now in her teens, navigating a pastel-colored world of cruel kids and drugged-up school authorities. *K-12* tells a contemporary tale of self-acceptance. The pop-driven narrative has matured along with Cry Baby, approaching topics like bulimia (“Orange Juice”), self-worth (“Strawberry Shortcake,” “Show & Tell”), and social pressures (“Lunchbox Friends”) with sensitivity and humanity.

Back with producer Drew Fulk—who also worked with them on 2017’s *Graveyard Shift*—the Scranton, Pennsylvania, quintet turn their creative energies to an electro-industrial sound that complements their alchemy of metalcore and goth metal. Known for collaborating with some of hard rock’s biggest names, like Jonathan Davis (Korn) and Dani Filth (Cradle of Filth), the band wanted to separate themselves from any outside influence. “Disguise” and “Holding on to Smoke” show frontman Chris Cerulli at his most vulnerable, unbottling his personal struggles with identity and mental health. He welcomes all the misfits to unite on the soul-baring “/c0de,” positioning himself as an empathetic frontman who’s committed to promoting a message of individuality. “Legacy” quells the intensity just a notch, as Cerulli leads the charge with a call to arms: “What will your legacy be?”

There are musicians who suffer for their art, and then there’s Stefan Babcock. The guitarist and lead screamer for Toronto pop-punk ragers PUP has often used his music as a bullhorn to address the physical and mental toll of being in a touring rock band. The band’s 2016 album *The Dream Is Over* was inspired by Babcock seeking treatment for his ravaged vocal cords and being told by a doctor he’d never be able to sing again. Now, with that scare behind him, he’s using the aptly titled *Morbid Stuff* to address a more insidious ailment: depression. “*The Dream Is Over* was riddled with anxiety and uncertainties, but I think I was expressing myself in a more immature way,” Babcock tells Apple Music. “I feel I’ve found the language to better express those things.” Certainly, *Morbid Stuff* pulls no punches: This is an album whose idea of an opening line is “I was bored as fuck/Sitting around and thinking all this morbid stuff/Like if anyone I slept with is dead.” But of course, this being PUP—a band that built their fervent fan base through their wonderfully absurd high-concept videos—they can’t help but make a little light of the darkest subject matter. “I’m pretty aware of the fact I’m making money off my own misery—what Phoebe Bridgers called ‘the commodification of depression,’” Babcock says. “It’s a weird thing to talk about mood disorders for a living. But my intention with this record was to explore the darker things with a bit of humor, and try to make people feel less alone while they listen to it.” To that end, Babcock often directs his most scathing one-liners at himself. On the instant shout-along anthem “Free at Last,” he issues a self-diagnosis that hits like a glass of cold water in the face: “Just because you’re sad again/It doesn’t make you special at all.” “The conversation around mental health that’s happening now is such a positive thing,” Babcock says, “but one of the small drawbacks is that people are now so sympathetic to it that some people who suffer from mood disorders—and I speak from experience here—tend to use it as a crutch. I can sometimes say something to my bandmates or my girlfriend that’s pretty shitty, and they’ll be like, ‘It’s okay, Stefan’s in a different headspace right now’—and that’s *not* okay. It’s important to remind myself and other people that being depressed and being an asshole are not mutually exclusive.” Complementing Babcock’s fearless lyricism is the band’s growing confidence to step outside of the circle pit: “Scorpion Hill” begins as a lonesome barstool serenade before kicking into a dusty cowpunk gallop, while the power-pop rave-up “Closure” simmers into a sweet psychedelic breakdown that nods to one of Babcock’s all-time favorite bands, Built to Spill. And the closing “City” is PUP’s most vulnerable statement to date, a pulverizing power ballad where Babcock takes stock of his conflicted relationship with Toronto, his lifelong home. “The beginning of ‘Scorpion Hill’ and ‘City’ are by far the most mellow, softest moments we’ve ever created as a band,” Babcock says. “And I think on the last two records, we never would’ve gone there—not because we didn’t want to, but just because we didn’t think people would accept PUP if PUP wasn’t always cranked up to 10. And this time, we felt a bit more confident to dial it back in certain parts when it felt right. I feel like we’ve grown a lot as a band and shed some of our inhibitions.”

As aggressive and intense as Slipknot looks and sounds, their approach to creating music is as tender and nurturing as a doe’s love for her fawn. For their sixth studio album, *We Are Not Your Kind*, the Iowans took their time—four years—working on their communication and brotherhood. Most of all, they responded with force to a world in crisis. Slipknot percussionist Clown (aka #6, government name Shawn Crahan) has noticed that fans (lovingly called “Maggots”) constantly praise 2001’s *Iowa*, but he encourages them to read the room. “I always have to stop and remind them of the temperature of the world at that time,” he told Apple Music. “And then they step back a little and realize that the world was upside down, and you needed music to get through. We feel that the world\'s like that again.” On this album, anti-authoritarian anthems (“Birth of the Cruel,” “A Liar’s Funeral”), martyrdom (“Unsainted”), and heady meditations (“Insert Coin,” “What’s Next”) are dropped into the band’s swirling circle pit of electronic-tinged thrash metal. Clown took Apple Music through *We Are Not Your Kind* track by track. “We gave the music and ourselves a deep breath,” he explained. “Everybody\'s all in.” **“Insert Coin”** “It\'s a way of saying, ‘I\'m here waiting for everybody else. And here they come.’ It\'s like being on a foothill overlooking the ocean, and just seeing everybody making their way through rough waters. It\'s an aligning. Insert the coin. Let\'s go.” **“Unsainted”** “The whole album has that theme where you look at a song, measure by measure, beat by beat. And you wonder just how much color, temperature, and love you can give it. And it was an amazing experience, and it fit perfectly. And it was the mentality of the album. When that song came about, years ago, I do remember hearing the guitar riff and the chorus. And I can remember just being like, ‘This is the first song on the album.’ It was just magical. This is new, this is us, this is where we\'re at.” **“Birth of the Cruel”** “That’s one of my favorites. It shifts. It\'s intense. It\'s driving. We\'ve had it for a while. Corey Taylor says, ‘I\'m overthrown/I\'m over your throne.’ These plays on words I just live for.” **“Death Because of Death”** “That\'s another example of what life is. It’s very atmospheric, making you question things. It\'s another little puzzle piece. It\'s like a snake that creeps up on you, and it\'s gone before you realize what you can do. They may be short, but it may be very venomous. And that may affect you in a way you didn\'t seek, if you give in to it.” **“Nero Forte”** “I challenge myself personally. I\'ve learned a lot from people that have been in this band. Just being out on the road, the peers that I\'ve been around, and the respect level that I have for these people, I recognize it\'s so beautiful. I wanted to take everything I\'ve learned to write a little cadence—the breakdown area that you hear was really important to me. And the chorus just blows me away. The falsetto—20 years in the gig and Corey Taylor’s singing falsetto. What’s better than that? Talk about evolution and still taking chances, and just loving music. It\'s like hitting the beach running for your life.” **“Critical Darling”** “This one draws a lot of reaction. The vocal melody is my favorite. I love his headspace. Corey\'s my favorite singer of all time because he\'s able to delve so deep into his own self and bring up this personal stuff that most people may not want to do for themselves. But he does it for himself and all of us. It\'s very different for us, but at the same time, it’s exactly us. I think it really helps the other colors of the album.” **“A Liar’s Funeral”** “These sorts of tunes can be very difficult for many different reasons. It starts off with a demeanor that you think you know what\'s going to happen, but you realize this is the heaviest you’ve heard Corey sing so far on the album. It gets to a place you find yourself still in the chair with a stare. And this is one of those songs that I battled personally for and the song got its due. Everything got dot-crossed, and here it is: ‘Burn, burn, burn, liar!’” **“Red Flag”** “That\'s your traditional Slipknot feeling right there. It\'s got a very thrash feel. It\'s fun, it swirls, and it’s not like ‘Get This (Or Die)’ or ‘Eeyore’ different. I believe it\'s much needed in the temperature and the ingredients of the album.” **“What’s Next”** “Intermission is a nice way of saying it. I mean, I\'ve never really thought of it that way, but maybe that\'s why it falls into the slot that it does. Innately, we don\'t have these ideas about how to get people back into the reality of the music, and not get caught up and giving their dog some water or something. This sort of vibe is so us and where we\'re at, and even where we’ve been from 1998 to here. So, yeah, ‘What\'s Next’ is like ginger—it\'s like resetting the palate, countered with a potentially condescending notion. It\'s a nice little trot.” **“Spiders”** “‘Spiders’ is an anomaly—the song everybody thinks they understand and has something to say about. We\'ve been talking about this quote that gets passed around: ‘It\'s easy to make something simple sound crazy, but it\'s almost impossible to make something crazy sound simple.’ Listening to ‘Spiders,’ it sounds simple, but it goes into some weird places. It’s a pivotal part of our career, because we\'re always searching ourselves. We\'re always gaining further and further as artists, because music\'s God to me. So I don\'t shame anything we make. In the end, it\'s got to have everybody and it\'s got to be Slipknot. And ‘Spiders’ is as Slipknot as it gets. ‘Spiders’ is coming for you.” **“Orphan”** “A very, very heavy, heavy song. ‘Orphan’ was the very first song that we had arranged and figured out early. And then we got away from it forever because everything else came in. Corey came in about a year and a half after some things were written, and ‘Orphan’ was one of those songs that he had been given to write lyrics to. I can\'t remember what it used to be called. He texted me and said that he was naming it ‘Orphan’—I knew it was going to be really heavy-duty personal. And just that word, orphan, creates a color in one\'s mind that is, for me, very gray, numb, just monotone and unable to move. I remember staring at my text. Then Greg Fidelman, the producer, looks over at me. I\'m like, \'This song\'s going to be called \"Orphan.\"\' We\'re all just like, ‘Whoaaaa.’ So it\'s a very deep song with a traditional sort of feeling for us.\" **“My Pain”** “‘My Pain’ has been around for a second. And again, it\'s all about communication. That is a very, very important song for the world, for individuals. We have songs like that: ‘’Til We Die,’ ‘Heartache and a Pair of Scissors,’ ‘Skin Ticket,’ ‘Prosthetics,’ ‘Danger - Keep Away.’ We have this otherworldly source that we go to. And I think this is one of those songs, but it\'s a little more focused into its own reality.” **“Not Long for This World”** “It draws heavy imagination. It paints pictures in my brain. It’s like we’re taking you to *Fantasia*—the Walt Disney movie. Mickey goes in to mess with the wizard’s wand, and he gets into these brooms while getting water. I’m 49, but as a kid, that was frightening. This song paints the end of the world not to be contrived. It’s very important in the steps of the album. You start on step one, and you work your way to the end, till you\'re at the top. You either jump or you go back down. You could say it\'s setting up ‘Solway Firth.’ I don\'t know if it\'s a concept, because everything we do is a concept. I could cite that everything from \'98 till now has been a concept, because art is heavy with us—in the music, in everything.” **“Solway Firth”** “When I heard Corey at the end say, ‘You want a real smile? I haven\'t smiled in years,’ I cried. I hurt. I hurt for me. I hurt for my family. I hurt for people around me. I 190% hurt for him. I hurt for whoever he was talking about. I hurt for everyone. And it was like: This will be the last song on the album. Nothing can follow that line. Anybody who\'s going through shit on this planet, that\'s a way of saying it, ending it, getting up, and changing your potential immediately. And there\'s this little false ending before it. So you\'re like whisked away for a moment, and then it\'s like, bam! You get the biggest smack in the face, and it\'s up to you to get up and believe that you have control to change your destiny.”

Sum 41’s 2016 release, *13 Voices*, saw singer/guitarist Deryck Whibley reckoning with the infamous drinking habit that nearly killed him. With that out of his system, he approached the band’s seventh album, *Order in Decline*, from a renewed position of strength. Inspired and energized by the unwavering fan support he experienced on the band’s comeback tour, Whibley went on a writing frenzy while still out on the road. “It got to the point where when I got home from the *13 Voices* tour cycle, I just had all these ideas and started putting them together,” Whibley tells Apple Music. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Holy shit—do I have a new album already? I guess I do!” But while looking for lyrical inspiration, Whibley found himself wrestling with a destructive force more formidable than alcoholism: the polarizing political landscape of post-Trump America. (And he’s not just being an armchair Canadian critic—the Ajax, Ontario, native now calls Los Angeles home for part of the year.) Sum 41 isn’t known for being a particularly topical band, and Whibley is quick to note that *Order in Decline* “doesn’t include any lines about immigration policy.” But it’s impossible to ignore the unsettled undercurrent that courses through the album. The band\'s playful pop-punk has always been counterbalanced by a sincere appreciation for \'80s metal, which is all the more pronounced now that they\'ve settled into the triple-guitar formation (featuring Whibley and original foil Dave “Brownsound” Baksh alongside the latter’s onetime replacement, Tom Thacker) introduced on *13 Voices*. Free of the band’s characteristic snark and smirk, *Order in Decline* is Sum 41’s hardest and angriest record to date, marked by thrashing diatribes like “Out for Blood” and the wholly unsubtle “45 (A Matter of Time),” where Whibley tells a certain sitting president that “a number is all you are to me.” But as Whibley explains, he’s not so much expressing his anger at the current administration—he’s more expressing his frustration with a world that has gotten so messed up that even a band like Sum 41 is compelled to write political songs. “The world does seem in disarray, but I’ve always used music as an escape from that,” Whibley says. “I’ve always felt like, ‘I don’t want to talk about all this shit!’ But as I was writing the words to ‘45,’ it was the first moment where I thought: ‘Now this fuckin’ asshole is taking over my music? That’s not supposed to happen!’ So I tried to change the words and go somewhere else, and now the song just feels like I could be talking about anybody. If it wasn’t called ‘45,’ maybe you wouldn’t even know who it’s about.” More than providing a window into Whibley’s current state of mind, *Order in Decline* is also a testament to Sum 41’s ongoing evolution and maturation. Twenty years after they signed their first record deal, the band barely resembles the fun-lovin’ brats responsible for Warped Tour generation classics like “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep.” They continue to stretch their musical parameters in unexpected directions: “Catching Fire”—a song Whibley claims has been bouncing around his head for 10 years—is a stirring breakup ballad from the U2/Coldplay school of arm-swaying arena anthems. And with the acoustic-to-symphonic serenade “Never There,” Sum 41 effectively comes up with its own “Wonderwall.” But while such changes of pace may take some old-school fans by surprise, no one is more surprised by their appearance here than Whibley himself. “I didn’t write ‘Never There’ for this album,” he reveals. “I didn’t think that would ever see the light of day. I played it for our manager and said, ‘I’ve got this song, I don’t know what to do with it—do you know anyone we could give this to?’ And he was like, ‘Why would we give this away?’ I said, ‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a Sum 41 song to me, especially for this record, which is much heavier—this song is not a heavy song.’ And he said, ‘This *is* a heavy song, just in a completely different way.’”

SWMRS’ CV includes a 20-minute soundtrack to a Saint Laurent runway show in Paris *and* a goal celebration theme for two-time MLS title winners the San Jose Earthquakes; it’s clear the Oakland punk-pop band (featuring drummer Joey Armstrong, son of Billie Joe) appeals to a wide constituency—fashionistas and soccer supporters included. For their second album, *Berkeley’s On Fire*, the quartet opens the floodgates of sound. Tracks like “Trashbag Baby,” “Too Much Coffee,” and “Lose Lose Lose” ring with cool ’80s post-punk and new wave. “April in Houston” and “Hellboy” show glimmers of their raucous punk-pop past. And while the band members are still in their early twenties, they address tough topics like gentrification and media distortion. The title track references the 2017 Berkeley protests following a gathering of white nationalists: “Too many motherfuckers confusing this freedom of speech with swastikas, like Milo Yiannopoulos.”

We could keep agonizing over why TOOL took so long to release *Fear Inoculum*, or to put their catalog onto streaming services, or all the ways the world has changed since the alt/prog-metal band’s last album came out in 2006. But we just spent 13 years doing all that. Instead, put on the best headphones you can find. It’s time to explore the 87 minutes of music we waited thousands of hours to hear. Whether or not this album is the “grand finale… swan song and epilogue” that Maynard James Keenan alludes to in “Descending,” the first thing to say is that *Fear Inoculum* will not disappoint. On their longest-ever album (despite only containing seven songs, broken up by three brief ambient interludes), TOOL refines and expands on their greatest strengths to create a meditative, intensely complex album that may, in terms of sheer musical skill, be their most impressive yet. Danny Carey’s extraordinarily creative and technical approach to rhythm takes center stage, from assaultive double pedaling to atmospheric tablas and electronic tinkering, heard best on “Chocolate Chip Trip,” a five-minute, multidimensional percussion solo. Guitarist Adam Jones unleashes more jams and solos than ever, particularly on the 15-minute opus “7empest,” which begins by sounding like the most traditionally TOOL song of the lot—but it sure doesn’t end that way. (Plus, Jones apparently wrote part of it in 21/16 time.) Justin Chancellor’s bass riffs are hypnotizing and powerful, unique in their ability to be both repetitive, even monotonous, and completely engulfing. Keenan’s lyrics—layered, poetic, often elegiac—are as fun to analyze and interpret as ever. And though the album is easily their most drawn-out and ambient, it’s also immensely heavy. The balance is calculated and sublime. So, what’s *Fear Inoculum* actually about? Keenan deliberately evades explanation, allowing the listener to find their own meaning. But in the most lyrically lucid moments, you’ll find reflections on life, growing up and facing your fear (he’s stated it could mean giving in to *or* becoming immune to it). There’s no pretending that 13 years haven’t passed—on “Invincible,” he sings: “Age old battle, mine/Weapon out and belly in/Tales told, battles won… Once invincible, now the armor’s wearing thin.” Still, there’s no sign of weakness, just acceptance and the kind of wisdom that comes with age. “We’re not buying your dubious state of serenity,” he knowingly roars on “7empest.” “Acting all surprised when you’re caught in the lie/It’s not unlike you… We know your nature.”