Consequence's 30 Best Metal & Hard Rock Albums of 2024

Nineteen albums into their genre-defining career, heavy metal gods Judas Priest are still on top. *Invincible Shield* continues in the anthemic, fan-friendly tradition of 2018’s *Firepower* with songs inspired by internet-induced rage (“Panic Attack”), political charlatans (“Devil in Disguise”), and the Salem witch trials (“Trial by Fire”), among many other topics. “As the metal messenger of Priest, I\'m always looking for opportunities to touch on subjects and ideas that I haven\'t done before,” vocalist Rob Halford tells Apple Music. “You’re searching for something fresh, something new. It’s the same with all of us in Priest. I think this is so important in music—to be interesting, engaging, and entertaining. I think Priest have been doing that for 50 years. Otherwise, we\'d have been dissipated many decades ago.” Below, he comments on each song on *Invincible Shield*, plus the three bonus tracks included in the deluxe edition. **“Panic Attack”** “When you talk about topics and subjects and ideas and so forth, it\'s all been done. Let\'s face it. Whenever I do a title for a song, I search it, because I hate doing things that have been done before. But ‘Panic Attack,’ I just love that phrase. I used to have panic attacks before I got sober, and they’re very debilitating. In this case, it’s someone reacting to something they’ve seen on the internet.” **“The Serpent and the King”** “The devil is the serpent, and the king is God. Is the devil a deity? I don’t know. But I think the serpent came to me first, and then naturally my mind went to the king. And then I always try to use at least one word in a Priest album that I\'ve never used before, like ‘sulfur.’ We know what sulfur is, we know what it smells like. So, we’ve got the devil and God in conflict. Good and evil, positive and negative, black and white. It’s a constant battle.” **“Invincible Shield”** “This is resilience, determination, protection. As I was sitting there with a blank piece of paper and pencil, what came into my head was the invincibility of who we are as people in all aspects of life and living, and the shield that we defend ourselves with. It’s about standing up for yourself within our world of heavy metal.” **“Devil in Disguise”** “I\'m a news hound. Like most old people, you start to engage in politics more as you age. When you\'re a younger person, for the most part, you don\'t give a fuck about politics. But as you get older, you start thinking, \'Why do I want to do an Elvis—pull out my gun and shoot the TV?\' So, this song came from just thinking about the political spectrum, but also thinking about the snake oil salesmen of this world. In the old westerns, the snake oil guy would come into town saying, ‘This potion will cure baldness. This one will make the horse eat.’ We’re not far removed from that, are we?” **“Gates of Hell”** “There are some deep, dark moments on this record, and this one goes to purgatory. You get there if you ride with me. It\'s that unity aspect of this beautiful metal community that we\'ve got. Sign on the line, let the Priest sell your soul. I was thinking of the PMRC, and I was thinking about devil music, and the people that used to come and stand outside the venues with placards: \'Judas Priest is the devil,\' and all that fun stuff. This is kind of throwing it back in their faces.” **“Crown of Horns”** “It\'s about finding love. I think if you can find love, it makes you complete. And it\'s a very deep song for me, spiritually. It\'s about finding Christ, really, but I wrap it up in that beautiful sphere of love. Love is all that matters. Love beats hate worldwide no matter where you\'re from. It\'s what keeps us all together.” **“As God Is My Witness”** “I think what\'s happening with me here is there\'s a lot of mortality going in my mind. Life can be a battle. I mean, it can be a battle trying to get the particular brand of bread that you want—‘they’re out of the bread!’ Originally, we were going to call this song ‘Hell to Pay,’ but ‘As God Is My Witness’ felt better. It’s something people actually say, like, ‘You’ve got another thing coming,’ or ‘Breaking the law.’ These phrases are out in the world, and they’re fun to utilize.” **“Trial by Fire”** “I saw something on Netflix about the Salem witch trials. The horrific way all those women were treated was out of pure superstition. The power of religion is profound in the way it affects humanity, and some of that is trauma. That was kind of the spark for this, but it’s also a bit of a reference to the way the public, when they get a story or an incident—and this is human nature—become the judge, the jury, and the executioner. We are so fast to create our opinions.” **“Escape From Reality”** “The bulk of that song comes from \[guitarist\] Glenn \[Tipton\]. He has these riff vaults. The thing about a riff is that it doesn’t matter if he wrote it in 1970 or 2023. Within *Invincible Shield*, it’s an affirmation of the heaviness of Judas Priest in this slow-tempo context. I think it’s the only one on the album with that kind of groove. Some of the messages on this album are quite personal, and ‘Escape From Reality’ is one of those. It’s about wishing you could go back in time to fix certain things, whatever they might be. It could be as simple as an argument in a relationship, or something big and traumatic.” **“Sons of Thunder”** “When you sit astride a Harley or whatever it is, it epitomizes freedom. The bike represents so many things with Judas Priest, and we\'re the only heavy metal band that\'s utilized the bike consistently. Those things that are attached to the bike—it\'s loud, it smells, it pisses people off—that\'s metal. I just wanted to have a bit of fun with that. And it\'s a little bit of a nod to *Sons of Anarchy*, because that free spirit, that part of Americana, is with us.” **“Giants in the Sky”** “The touchstones for this were Ronnie \[James Dio\] and Lemmy, two of my dear friends. Originally it was going to be called ‘The Mighty Have Fallen,’ but I thought that just sounds too bleak. Let\'s give it some lift. Let\'s give it some transcendence. I was also thinking about rock ’n’ roll radio. When I was growing up in England, we had one station. The first time I came to America, I couldn’t believe how many stations there were. And right now, as you and I are speaking, somebody in the world is playing Ronnie or Lemmy over the radio. They’re the giants in the sky.” **“Fight of Your Life”** “This is a bonus track. I really wanted it in the main track listing, but I didn’t get my way. I’m not a fan of brutal sports, but I do understand the athleticism and the skill of MMA and boxing, and even the fun stuff like wrestling. And you are fighting for your life. It’s a struggle and you’re pushing through. But I love this song. To me, it’s like, ‘Can we please put this song up for the NFL or NBA?’” **“Vicious Circle”** “Sometimes relationships can be in a vicious circle. ‘With the wicked schemes, cut deep the way that you can try/It makes me wonder how you sleep.’ So, again, we\'re in the political arena, aren\'t we? ‘I stand against you as you rage. My fate has struck your gilded cage.’ It\'s about the way personal relationships can sometimes get into a vicious circle, but it\'s also addressing the political spectrum.” **“The Lodger”** “Bob Halligan Jr. wrote this. He wrote ‘Some Heads Are Gonna Roll’ and ‘(Take These) Chains.’ He came to a show a few years ago, just to see the band. It was so great to see him, and I love what he’d done with those two tracks, so I said, ‘If you’ve got anything, send it to me.’ Maybe a month later, he sends me this. It’s about a guy who kills his wife and then his sister. It’s like a mini-movie about revenge and justice. Bob has a great talent for words and imagery, and I really love the dark and mysterious atmosphere of this song.”

For the follow-up to their 2018 Grammy-winning *Electric Messiah*, stoner-metal trio High on Fire enlisted Big Business’ Coady Willis to replace longtime drummer Des Kensel. “Coady is one of our favorite drummers, and it just seemed like it would make sense musically,” bassist Jeff Matz tells Apple Music. “Once we started jamming with him, it became apparent that it was going to work out really well. He has his own style, but he understands the High on Fire aesthetic.” Despite winning the Grammy for Best Metal Performance for their last album, High on Fire felt no pressure in writing *Cometh the Storm* with a new member. “I don’t really think like that,” vocalist/guitarist Matt Pike says. “It was nice to be appreciated by our peers and such, but we didn’t really get to take full advantage of it because the world shut down not long after we won. I think we got exposed to a lot of people who hadn’t heard us prior to that, but that’s probably it. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be weird to win another one?” Below, Pike and Matz discuss each track on *Cometh the Storm*. **“Lambsbread”** Pike: “Well, I always have a song about weed. It’s basically a description of a bong hit working in a higher mental element, like what pot does to a meditative state, I guess. I don’t know how to word that correctly, but that’s just what pot does to you.” Matz: “The music for the chorus has been kicking around since probably 2010, and it reflects my obsession with Middle Eastern folk music, so we added some acoustic baglama to that part. The intro and outro just popped into my head when I was driving around, so I scat-sang it into my phone. It’s so Beavis and Butt-Head.” **“Burning Down”** Pike: “That’s more of a serious one, and it’s a tiny bit political. I’m calling out people like the World Economic Forum and the billionaires who fly around in jets and tell us if we give them a billion more dollars, they’re going to fucking fix the world for us. Who the fuck are these people?” Matz: “Musically, that was one that Matt and Coady were working on when I arrived at practice one day. That riff’s got old-school High on Fire vibes. It definitely harkens back to the early albums, but it’s got some really interesting little timing changes.” **“Trismegistus”** Pike: “The title means ‘thrice great,’ which comes from Hermes, who I always thought was an interesting character in mythology because he combined the wisdom of the material and the spiritual worlds. The music sounds kind of Egyptian, so in the lyrics, I’m talking about Osiris and Duat and Anubis. I’ve always been into esoteric mythology, but I’ve never really done one on Egypt.” Matz: “The verse riff came from when I was jamming with Coady down in LA. It reminded me of Lucifer’s Friend or something, like a weird classic-rock riff, but I tried to make it a little more like Voivod with some discordant intervals. The chorus uses a Middle Eastern scale, so I think that’s what set Matt off in that Egyptian lyrical direction.” **“Cometh the Storm”** Pike: “This is basically about nuclear war and how foolish it is. It’s kind of an elaboration of ‘Burning Down,’ how we’re just starting wars and talking about nuclear war like it’s normal.” Matz: “The track started out of a little thing I started playing at practice, just tapping on the bass, and Matt just started coming up with a vocal right on the spot. I really like the vocal melody, and it’s probably my favorite vocal performance on the whole album.” **“Karanlık Yol”** Matz: “I’ve been studying Turkish folk music pretty intensely since just before the pandemic. I’ve been studying the Turkish folk lute, the baglama, and just learning how to play different folk tunes and different styles with different teachers in Türkiye and the Philippines. So, I basically wanted to try to write something in the style of a Turkish folk dance because I think those types of sounds blend really well with the particular kind of heavy music that we play.” **“Sol’s Golden Curse”** Pike: “That’s the first song I wrote with Coady when I flew down to LA so we could feel each other out. I took something out of our riff vault, which is just hours and hours of music that me and Jeff have compiled over the years, and started working on it with Coady. Lyrically, it has more weird, esoteric shit about the Sethians and Abraxas.” **“The Beating”** Pike: “That’s our D-beat song. I’ve always been into the martial arts world, especially MMA and boxing, but I don’t do too many songs about it. This one’s pretty much about ring fighting. It seemed to take the right shape. It’s a ripper and definitely one of the faster-paced ones on the album. And I’ve got to put a \[Jeff\] Hanneman solo on every album, so this is the song.” **“Tough Guy”** Pike: “We’ve played with many hardcore bands in the past, so we were being smart-asses and wrote this hardcore breakdown about 10 years ago. It turned out really good, even though we were just joking around. But it’s got more of a metal mentality to it, just fighting and moshing, but it’s also about rebuilding our band from scratch. It’s truly violent sounding, so I went with that theme for the lyrics.” **“Lightning Beard”** Pike: “The title was kind of an inside joke between me and Jeff. I took this picture of him when he was posing all crazy with his bass, and I had this camera app, so I put all these lightning bolts all up in his beard and on his fretboard. We called it ‘Lightning Beard,’ which just sounded cool. But the song is about my El Camino. During COVID, I got it going really fast and was doing doughnuts in front of all the street racers, and they were cheering me on, so I made lyrics out of that.” Matz: “That’s another ripper that we came up with at practice. It’s got a pretty crazy freak-out section during the solo where the bass just completely goes nuts. It’s pretty fun.” **“Hunting Shadows”** Pike: “That one has some deep lyrics to me. I was just having a hard time with depression and my alcohol recovery and all sorts of stuff. I wrote that song not thinking about it, but really, I was trying to heal myself. I ate a bag of shrooms to try to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. I thought I was singing those lyrics to someone else, but I was singing them to myself, so I had this crazy conundrum. But it’s about self-reflection.” Matz: “Musically, that one’s really interesting. It’s got more of a positive, hopeful energy to it that’s definitely a little bit different for us.” **“Darker Fleece”** Pike: “Once we started writing the new record, I went over to Jeff’s to put some ideas together. I had this riff, but it was so long and complicated. Then we made it more complicated by adding subdivisions. It’s almost a lesson in timing, how you can cut up a whole note into quarter notes and 32nd notes. Lyrically, it’s just about life and war—it’s very much a war march. I’m part Scottish, and Coady’s dad plays the bagpipes, so I put a bagpipe-style guitar solo on it.” Matz: The direction that Coady took with the drums on this song really changed the character of it and made it a lot heavier and beefier sounding. It’s definitely one of my favorites on the album. With the intro and outro, it seemed like the perfect closer track.”

“I wanted the album to feel really fun,” Amyl and The Sniffers vocalist Amy Taylor tells Apple Music of *Cartoon Darkness*, the Australian quartet’s third full-length. That goal does, however, come with a caveat: “I wanted it to feel fun without putting up the blinkers and being like, everything’s sweet, all good. Things are really weird and things are pretty bad and there’s a lot of things to be stressed about, but there’s the balance of it. Not to encourage people to ignore the bad, but to try and find more of a balance.” So while *Cartoon Darkness* finds Taylor confronting issues such as body positivity, the ills of social media, the climate crisis, and capitalism’s impact on society and people’s wellbeing, she does so with an unrelenting lust for life and an indefatigable spirit that, on songs such as “Jerkin’” and “Motorbike Song,” adheres to the adage that life is for the living. Recorded with Nick Launay (Midnight Oil, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606, which boasts the same mixing desk on which Nirvana recorded *Nevermind* and Fleetwood Mac did *Rumours* (“I really didn’t want to spill anything on it,” laughs Taylor), the band approached *Cartoon Darkness* with a specific sonic goal in mind. “Bryce \[Wilson, drums\] and Declan \[Martens, guitar\] were really keen to try and explore different sounds and make it feel a bit more like a studio album,” says Taylor. Adds Martens: “In the past we’ve tried to see how everything would relate to when we perform it live. And even though a lot of these songs will be included in the set, I think we just wanted to make sure the focus was on making the best listening experience at home rather than making the best songs to be taken live.” A typically fiery slice of raw punk rock, albeit one that takes a breather on the gentler “Big Dreams” and “Bailing on Me,” the end result is what Taylor calls “the first album we feel really proud of from the get go.” Here, Taylor and Martens walk Apple Music through *Cartoon Darkness*, track by track. **“Jerkin’”** Amy Taylor: “It’s a tongue-in-cheek poke at keyboard warriors, at the haters in general. It’s just a fuck you to anyone who’s down to accept it.” Declan Martens: “This was conceived earlier than the intense writing period. We came up with it in the early half of 2023. It has a good intensity. Despite this being our attempt at a studio album it does replicate what we do live, which is straightaway energy.” AT: “I really wanted to write a song that big-upped yourself while bringing down the haters. I wanted it to be like, ‘I’m sick, you’re shit.’” **“Chewing Gum”** AT: “So much of life is just a carrot dangled in front of your head, like you’re just around the corner from being able to take a break, or the goodness is always just around the corner. And it’s so much hard work. Under capitalism you’re just constantly working for goals you can never seem to hit. I feel that robs people of themselves and robs people of happiness and joy. Something else that robs people of those things is criticism and judgment. I think with social media, a lot of people are constantly bombarded with how they should be and what they could do and what they might be and how bad they are. I feel that robs people of the joy of making mistakes, and making mistakes is so important for growing up. I want to make the wrong decision sometimes, and I want to have fun and I want to feel love even if that’s a wrong decision, even if that’s a dumb decision, because what else is the point?” **“Tiny Bikini”** AT: “I always try and consciously surround myself with women, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Even in the studio I was the only lady of maybe eight dudes in the room. So I was just channeling that energy going, ‘Yeah it’s technically my space, but I’m the only one here in a bikini.’ I think a lot of my experience in life is being the only lady, and I feel like, for me, I love expressing myself in slutty ways. The world is a boring place, and to dress up or to be scantily clad or just be interesting is something I value, so that song is going, ‘That’s what I like.’” **“Big Dreams”** DM: “I write a whole scope of heavy and soft songs, and finding the softer songs’ place in Amyl and The Sniffers has always been a challenge; I’ve had a fear of doing it. So I showed it to Amy and she really enjoyed it and encouraged it. I think a lot of the misconception is that it’s experimenting, but I feel like these sorts of songs have always been in us. I prefer to refer to it as exploring rather than experimenting.” AT: “A lot of people in my life have really big dreams and they are really talented, and they are trying to make something of themselves. The world is a harsh place, and even if they’re super talented, it’s really difficult because of the cost of living and the oversaturation of everything. And it’s like we’re all getting older and a lot of people’s dreams may not happen, but that internal energy, it’s still swirling inside you.” **“It’s Mine”** DM: “The guitar \[has\] a really odd tuning that I’d never used before. Me and Nick \[Launay\] had worked to get this really direct, harsh, aggressive guitar sound, and that’s what makes it unique—it makes it sound like you’ve just stuck your head in a bucket of bees swarming.” AT: “Lyrically, it’s a subconscious dump trying to explore lots of different themes—the pressures of bodies to be perfect, and it’s saying it might not be perfect but it’s mine. And dipping into the confusion of consumerism and getting swept up and wanting to buy stuff. It’s a big mix of that.” **“Motorbike Song”** AT: “It’s a yearning for freedom. Life can be so stuffy, especially with screens and technology, so much of it is sitting still and looking at a screen for hours. I just saw a motorbike driving along and I wanted to embody the motorbike. I don’t want to ride it, I want to be the motorbike.” DM: “When we were working it out it felt like a So-Cal, ’80s punk song and it developed into more of a Motörhead-type thing. It’s fun, it’s got my most guitar solos on one song ever.” **“Doing in Me Head”** DM: “I was trying to write a disco song. I wanted it to be like The Gap Band. But I guess when you bring it to some Australian punks it comes out as ‘Doing in Me Head.’” AT: “This song kind of embodies the whole of *Cartoon Darkness*. Like it touches on the fact we all use our phones and social media, and they favor outrage, and subconsciously the system floods us with negative emotions and then it profits off that. It kind of dictates our life, not the other way around. You have to favor the algorithm, it won’t favor you. And talking about how spoon-fed our generation especially is and the lack of critical thinking.” **“Pigs”** AT: “Sometimes people are like, I know more so, therefore, I’m better than you and you’re an idiot. I don’t agree with that, because I’ve been on both sides of knowing stuff and not knowing stuff, and being an idiot and being a legend. So this song is saying, ‘We’re all pigs, you’re not better than me, we’re all just pigs in the mud.’” DM: “I’m really fond of the chorus. It’s a recycled riff that I wrote before our self-titled album that we jammed on but never became a song. Now, with my new knowledge in music, five or six years on, I found a way to make it interesting. I remember seeing that excitement in Amy’s face when I first started playing it differently.” **“Bailing on Me”** AT: “I was really struggling to write lyrics to it and figure out what to say and Declan was like, ‘I think it’s a sexy song, try and make it horny.’ I was trying to do that but was like, ‘I really don’t get that vibe from this song.’ So I ended up making it a heartbreak song.” DM: “I think it’s interesting that my intention was horny and Amy interprets heartbreak. I think that’s a funny way of looking at it.” **“U Should Not Be Doing That”** AT: “So much of my experience in the music world has been people trying to hold me back with their negativity and their limitations. Because they’ve made limitations for themselves that I don’t subscribe to. They might be saying you shouldn’t be doing that and I can’t believe you’re doing that, but I am doing it, and you’re not. I’m over here experiencing this with the choices that I’ve made, and you’re down in Melbourne having a bitch while you’re doing lines at 4am with other 50-year-olds, bitching about a 24-year-old. There are Facebook groups with old rockers being like, ‘I don’t like that band, she’s crap.’ Kiss my arse!” **“Do It Do It”** AT: “For some reason I always imagine some random athlete trying to listen to this to gee up, so that’s what it’s about. Someone being like, ‘Yeah I’ll fuckin’ get up and run.’” DM: “This was the last riff I came up with before moving to the US. The working title for it was ‘Pornhub Awards’ because, the night before, I found a free ticket to the Pornhub Awards. I didn’t win anything.” **“Going Somewhere”** AT: “Anyone can find dirt, but it takes hard work to find gold. It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize. People are just lazy, and they’re not trying hard enough to find the good in stuff. There’s no perfect world and there’s not going to be utopia, because utopia would be dystopia anyway. It’s just saying I’m going to go somewhere, hopefully you can come there too.” **“Me and The Girls”** DM: “Amy sent me this hip-hop song that had like an Eddie Van Halen sort of guitar sample in it, and I was like, ‘I’ve got a riff that’s super repetitive, almost like a sample, a loop, and I wrote it when I was 21. It’s called ‘Fry Pan Fingers,’ because I used to stick my fingers on the frying pan to callous them before gigs when I was young.’ So I was like, ‘All right, Amy, here’s this repetitive \[riff\], like a hip-hop loop that I’ve got.’” AT: “I needed a lyric for the chorus, so I was like, ‘Declan, now’s your chance, do you want to do a duet?’ I said, ‘Me and the girls are drunk at the airport,’ and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe that it’s an open bar,’ and I loved it, but everyone else was like, this is a bit weird. We’d been listening to a lot of Beastie Boys so we were like, let’s add in the vocoder \[on his voice\] and make it sound like that.”

For their 14th album, Swedish prog wizards Opeth created a concept record around the reading of a will. Partly inspired by a talk-show segment and partly by the massively popular TV show *Succession*, Opeth guitarist/vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt decided to write about an inheritance with a twist. “I stumbled upon the idea of putting the whole story as it would’ve been written in a legal document, like a proper old piece of paper with paragraphs like, ‘My daughter will get the country house,’ and things like that,” he tells Apple Music. “But it’s more like a confession of sorts, where the patriarch reveals secrets about himself, his paranoia, and his regrets. And some of these secrets will immediately affect his children in an existential kind of way.” *The Last Will and Testament* also marks Åkerfeldt’s return to the death-metal vocal style of Opeth’s early days. “I wanted to bring back the screaming vocal, but at first, I felt a bit like a fraud because I wasn’t listening to brutal music,” he explains. “I’m listening to Dexter Gordon and David Crosby. But after I finished two songs with that kind of vocal, I thought it was fucking awesome.” Add guest appearances from Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson (on flute and narration) and Europe vocalist Joey Tempest, and you’ve got another fascinating installment in Opeth’s catalog. Below, Åkerfeldt comments on each track. **“§1”** “This was the first song written for the album. It’s when I dipped my toe in the water, so to speak, to see where I was on a musical level. At the time, I didn’t really have the lyrics ready, but I wanted to try out that screaming vocal. So, this song is kind of the guinea pig for that. And usually, when I start writing for a record, I come out all guns blazing. So, it’s kind of heavy, evil, fast, and a bit insane. Lyrically, the kids are being summoned to attend the reading of their late father’s last will and testament. There’s also a couple of solicitors in place. The reading starts, and he’s explaining that there’s going to be prizes. But they might not be what you wanted.” **“§2”** “I can hear that I was quite comfortable with whatever I was doing musically here. And that kind of stands out because it has two guests on there. On ‘Paragraph One’ you have a voice-over thing by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, and he’s heavily featured in ‘Paragraph Two’ as well. And so is Joey Tempest, from Europe. For some reason, he loves Opeth, which is awesome for me because I grew up with Europe. The song itself is pretty adventurous, I think. It’s probably one of the songs that will take a long time to sink in with the listener. There’s also a calm section that I kind of nicked from Paul Simon’s ‘Still Crazy After All These Years.’” **“§3”** “This is more of a classic heavy metal song, I would say. The opening was inspired by a theme you often hear in jazz music, like Django Reinhardt, but also some classical music and fusion-rock bands. And the musical *Chess*, believe it or not, which was written by Benny and Björn from ABBA. From there, it kind of becomes a normal heavy metal song, but with more emotions than your basic Iron Maiden song. I’m not saying Iron Maiden doesn’t have emotions, but this is kind of a sad song—to me at least. Lyrically, there’s some explanation about infidelity that happened and what that led to.” **“§4”** “This is an interesting tune because it’s almost like a couple of different songs in one, which is not so uncommon for Opeth. I started off trying to write something called 12-note music, which is an experimental classical thing where you have 12 notes in an octave, and you can’t play the same note twice—meaning it’s going to be fucked up. So, the beginning of the song is hard to sing along to. It’s a bit Zappa-esque. That leads into kind of a metal-y call-and-response with death metal vocals and clean vocals, and then it stops and goes into a harp section. I actually found the harp player from an article in a Swedish newspaper, which is weird. That leads to the next section, which is Ian Anderson playing the flute. Then it builds into the most vicious, evil-sounding music on the record.” **“§5”** “This is maybe the last song I wrote for the record, or one of the last. You can tell that I’m comfortable in my songwriting here because it’s quite experimental. There’s not a lot of acoustic guitars on this record, but this song is built around an acoustic lick and clean vocals, and all of it gradually becomes heavier. In some parts, maybe the heaviest sections on the record. And really good death-metal vocals on that track, if I do say so myself. There’s also a Middle Eastern-sounding midsection, which I never dared to do before. If you just hear the song once, you probably won’t know what the fuck is happening. You need some time with it.” **“§6”** “During the recording, everybody feared this song because it’s so difficult. It doesn’t sound difficult, but for some reason, it’s really, *really* difficult. I’m not really a good guitar player or a good musician, but for some reason I have a knack for writing really complex music. And this song, it’s almost like it spirals out of control in a way, like you’re losing control of the horse and it just stampedes. I’ve never done cocaine in my life, but it sounds like what I imagine a cocaine rush is. I think that’s got something to do with me not tampering with the tempo of the song, which resulted in us almost not being able to play the fucking thing.” **“§7”** “This always felt like the ending song of a record, even if there’s one after. But it’s still the end of the testament, as it were. It’s more of a groovy song. I don’t really like that word, but sometimes it’s the only word that applies. It’s slower than the other songs, and less crazy. It’s also the first song in our history where every band member sings. There’s a multipart harmony vocal that happens a couple of times, and everyone is on it. I can tell you there were people who had never been in front of a microphone before, which was quite fun.” **“A Story Never Told”** “At this point, the testament is done. But everything that’s been said in the testament doesn’t really apply because here comes the twist to the story. The inheritance has been settled, a few years have passed, and a letter arrives, revealing a secret. The song itself is a ballad, and I’m a sucker for ballads. I wanted to write a beautiful ballad, not just because I love ballads, but because the seven songs prior to ‘A Story Never Told’ are so intense that there’s no room for breath, really. And this song feels like a good ending, with a beautiful Gilmour/Blackmore-esque solo by \[Opeth guitarist\] Fredrik \[Åkesson\] at the finish.”

Chat Pile’s sludgy mix of nu metal and ’90s underground rock isn’t anything new, but it’s hard to imagine it existing so comfortably at any other time. Part of it’s their willingness to traverse what in another era would’ve been uncrossable cultural lines: Pledging your allegiance to the funny, post-punk surrealism of a band like Pere Ubu (“Camcorder”) at the same time as the single-entendre misery of Korn (“Funny Man”), for example. If metal is, on some level, guitar-country, Chat Pile is firmly set in its rhythm section, which is as rumbling and inescapable as the power lines and strip-mined hills of the Middle America outside their window, leaving the guitars primarily to peel paint. Where guys this misanthropic might’ve been considered social liabilities in their past (or at least dangers to their parents and church youth group), now they sound content to stay in their rooms and pig out on memes about the world they’ve always known was in ruin. “Tape” is the peak here not because it’s the hardest but because it’s the funkiest, whatever funk means to bands like this. Forget alienation—they’re laughing.

For their third album, Kentucky hardcore troupe Knocked Loose chose a title that resonated deeply with vocalist Bryan Garris. During an airplane takeoff that triggered Garris’ fear of flying, the woman seated next to him offered the comforting words, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” “The line struck him so strongly that it immediately occurred to him that it should be the title,” Knocked Loose guitarist Isaac Hale tells Apple Music. “It also became a lyric in the last song, ‘Sit & Mourn.’ Like the rest of our records, this is a collection of stuff from Bryan’s personal struggles dealing with anger and loss and depression and sadness. It’s a reminder to him—and all of us—that we’re still here. We made it through all the hardships that came with the past four years of writing this.” Musically speaking, Knocked Loose entered the writing sessions for *You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To* with a very different mindset than the one that drove their 2019 breakthrough *A Different Shade of Blue* and revered 2021 concept EP *A Tear in the Fabric of Life*. “There was just way more pressure, and we had way more experience,” Hale says. “Some people view the third album as a make-or-break record. We had pressure from the fans and the outside world, but more so pressure from ourselves. We thought, ‘How can we possibly outdo what we’ve done before?’ It was tough, but I think we were able to come up with a record where every song accomplishes something unique.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Thirst”** “This was written in the first session that we ever had for this record. It was written before *A Tear in the Fabric of Life* even came out. It came from a jam session we were having where we wanted to create a really difficult song on drums to challenge our drummer Pacsun. We wanted something super short, super intense, and we just made it as complex as we could. And to start the record, it’s something we’ve never done before—a super in-your-face jump scare.” **“Piece by Piece”** “This was our attempt at doing kind of a Hatebreed-esque banger. It has a hook to it, but the hook is one of the mosh parts in the song, akin to \[Hatebreed’s\] ‘Perseverance.’ One of the things we wanted to accomplish on this record was to create stuff that was hooky and catchy, but at the same time crazy heavy. In many ways, I think that it’s the most hardcore song on the record, and that’s what we love about it. It’s our version of a catchy hardcore track that can really connect with people.” **“Suffocate” (feat. Poppy)** “We wrote this song after we thought we had a finished record. Before we went to record, Poppy slid into Bryan’s DMs asking if we would be interested in collaborating on some music. Me and Bryan are huge Poppy fans, so of course we said yes automatically. That same day, Bryan called me like, ‘Hey, man—I’m coming over. We need to write another song.’ We wrote the track the next day, and it was one of the smoothest writing experiences on the record because we wrote it knowing Poppy was going to be a part of it. And because of that, we were able to do some sassy parts that maybe we wouldn’t put on a normal Knocked Loose song but that really work with her voice. I think it’s one of the most special songs we’ve ever written.” **“Don’t Reach for Me”** “This was our attempt at writing a song with a more rock- or pop-oriented structure. It’s different from stuff that we\'ve done before because it has a slightly melodic chorus with a hook. It has a soft bridge with a jam part and some cleaner guitar. And a lot of it is midtempo, besides the very beginning. It only gets fast very briefly. That’s very new for us. There’s like seven mosh parts, so we needed to balance those. It took a long time to figure out, but I think the final product really succeeds in that juxtaposition.” **“Moss Covers All”** “This was written in the second writing session that we did for this record, up in Michigan. We woke up one morning, started jamming, and we were just not coming up with a lot of stuff we liked. We were pretty much just throwing paint at the wall and getting aggravated. When we took a break, I had an idea and basically wrote this entire song in my head in about a minute. I voice memo’d it briefly on my phone and then immediately started putting it down without telling the guys. When they came back, I played it for them—and what I played is pretty much exactly what’s on the record. It’s short, sweet, and super heavy, with a breakdown and a spooky lead that goes directly into the next song.” **“Take Me Home”** “‘Moss Covers All’ and ‘Take Me Home’ are very much connected songs. ‘Moss Covers All’ was written first, but then we really felt the need to have a song on here that’s meant to scare you. We didn’t worry about a mosh part or any sort of heaviness. We just wanted a scary track that’s uncomfortable and throws the listener off guard. When we were thinking about what shape that could take, I immediately thought of that spooky lead from ‘Moss Covers All,’ which we ended up looping as the blueprint for this track.” **“Slaughterhouse 2” (feat. Chris Motionless)** “This song started as an inside joke because Motionless in White was kind enough to reach out to Bryan and have him collaborate on one of their songs, ’Slaughterhouse,’ a very heavy, politically charged track. We’re all huge Motionless in White fans, so of course he accepted. And then we were able to tour with them. As soon as Bryan did that track, we were joking that we should do a song called ‘Slaughterhouse 2.’ We were just kind of laughing about it for a while, but then we thought we were kind of shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t do it. Chris was down from the beginning, and his voice is amazing on this. It was a challenge to match the theme and vibe of the original song, but I think we were able to create something that’s not just a great sequel, but that really stands on its own as a highlight of the record.” **“The Calm That Keeps You Awake”** “The funny thing about this one is that the song totally revolves around the huge breakdown at the end. That part was written first, as part of another thing that was written before *A Tear in the Fabric* had even come out. So, like four years ago, we needed to write new parts because the rest of the song we’d written wasn’t up to par, but that breakdown was super necessary. In doing so, we created this really cool, Meshuggah-esque, kind of Sepultura-auxiliary-percussion vibe that’s one of the most unique parts of the record.” **“Blinding Faith”** “We definitely have some jabs at religious hypocrisy throughout the Knocked Loose discography, and this is just kind of an update on that situation. We hadn\'t done one in a while, and it was something that was feeling close to home for Bryan at the time. To me, this sounds like a mix of some of our greatest riffs that we’d written over the course of a year—it’s kind of a riff-salad song. In some ways, it’s one of the heaviest and scariest songs on the record, so we put it out as a single to say, ‘If you thought we were going to get any softer, absolutely not. And here’s proof.’” **“Sit & Mourn”** “This one revolves around the melodic lead and the kind of ambient post-rock breakdown at the end. We wrote that in the first writing session in Joshua Tree, and it took us a while to come up with more parts that we felt were that good. But the song is very, very anthemic. It sounds very dark and melancholic, but at the same time, the lyrics are positive in a way. Thematically, it’s kind of a title track in the way that the lyrics relate to the name of the record. I know it was a very cathartic song for Bryan. In many ways, it’s the saddest song on the record, but in other ways it’s the most positive. And it’s mentally exhausting from start to finish. It ends with a sound clip that I won’t disclose, but it’ll take you by surprise.”

What doesn’t get mentioned often enough about The Jesus Lizard’s relentlessly ugly music is how fragile it is. They can make a stumbling noise riff sound like a broken music box (“Hide & Seek”) and a man ranting about giving birth to a perfectly trained dog feel like a secret wish (“Swan the Dog”)—strange, private moods rendered in noisy, explosive music. Like “Louie, Louie,” The Stooges, and Nirvana (whose Kurt Cobain was a vocal and devoted fan), they are both caveman-simple and savant-smart, or at least in touch with a force beyond our earthly realm. Part of what makes *Rack* such an unsettling listen—26 years after 1998’s *Blue*—is realizing how prophetic their version of America turned out to be: a violent, mysterious place where the biggest threat is probably that guy next door.

Amigo the Devil occupies a space all his own in alternative roots music. The South Florida-bred singer-songwriter, also known as Danny Kiranos, writes densely narrative and allusion-rich songs that reward repeated listens, with an uncategorizable sound that lands somewhere between Lucero and Leonard Cohen. Following 2021’s critically acclaimed *Born Against*, *Yours Until the War Is Over* is a showcase for Kiranos’ storytelling: He shows it off on the rough and rowdy “Once Upon a Time at Texaco pt. 1,” which spins a tense but humorous yarn about going out for a bottle of tequila, and the addict’s lament “Cannibal Within,” which boasts the caustic lyric, “I just don’t wanna blow my brains out to ‘Hotel California.’” Kiranos serves these stories with a careful balance of theatrical bombast and folksy plainspokenness, finding and amplifying the tension in between. For those who enjoy literature with their music, or just dig the guttural growls, Amigo the Devil is a friend to all.