On their first album in eight years, Liverpool death metal titans Carcass double down on the infectious harmonized riffage and medical-atrocity lyrics of their 2013 comeback album, *Surgical Steel*. To say that *Torn Arteries* is long-awaited is an understatement: The album was originally supposed to be out in early 2020. In fact, Carcass released the first single, “Under the Scalpel Blade,” in late 2019. When the pandemic hit, the band decided to delay the record’s release until they could safely tour. To tide fans over, they released the four-song *Despicable* EP in October 2020. But now, the moment of truth has arrived, and Carcass vocalist/bassist Jeff Walker isn’t giving any spoilers. “I don’t want to talk about the lyrics because you’re giving the game away,” he tells Apple Music. “It defeats the object of me not wanting them on the album, and you’re kind of instilling in people how they should be thinking.” Still, we managed to extract some comments from him on some key tracks. **“Dance of Ixtab”** “Ixtab is the Mayan goddess of suicide by hanging. I’ve no idea how I stumbled across it, honestly. I could say I was on an alien peninsula or something, but that’s bullshit. Maybe I was watching *From Dusk Till Dawn*. I was probably doing some ‘research,’ and we all know what that means these days: Google. But it’s not glorifying suicide or dwelling on people being depressed. It’s a bit more sleazy than that.” **“Eleanor Rigor Mortis”** “If there’s anything that we dusted off from the old days for this album, it’s this song title. We joked about using it way back on the first album. It falls into this Kinks/Beatles quintessential Englishness that we’ve always incorporated into Carcass. That was the vibe I was going for. I’m sure \[Carcass guitarist\] Bill \[Steer\] cringes over the fact that I bothered to use it.” **“Under the Scalpel Blade”** “We’ve managed to release this song three times now. With every album, you have a song that kind of becomes a single. So, we released this at the end of 2019 as a flexi single with *Decibel* when the album was supposed to be out in 2020. But then, of course, that didn’t happen. When we decided to do the EP, we had three songs that are not on the album, so we brought out one album track as well. And, of course, the song has to be on the album itself.” **“The Devil Rides Out”** “This is a movie title I’ve always loved, but the song has nothing to do with that. There’s always been anti-religious songs, but this is an anti-Satanic song. Satanism is just as fucking stupid as Christianity or every other ‘ism,’ you know? I really fancied the idea of doing a song that could be picked up by Christians and then they run to town thinking it’s a pro-Christian song. I love the idea of the label servicing some Christian radio stations with this track, but it never happened.” **“Kelly’s Meat Emporium”** “This was a real shop in Liverpool, but it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s somewhere I’d pass occasionally, and I just thought it was quaint because one minute it was open and then for years it was kind of derelict. To me, it was just a sign of the times. But the title is totally disconnected from the lyrics. It’s like ‘The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue’ from the EP: It’s not like I watched the movie and wrote a song about it. I just liked the title. Like ‘Eleanor Rigor Mortis,’ it feels quintessentially British.”
As far as Khemmis are concerned, *Deceiver* almost didn’t happen. Stuck at home when the pandemic put an end to touring, the Denver doom dealers started doing some serious introspection. “I think we were all open to the idea that Khemmis just wasn’t an important part of our lives anymore when we were forced to contend with all these other things that were coming up for us,” guitarist/vocalist Phil Pendergast tells Apple Music. “When you’re forced to take a break from something and focus on your family and everything else in your life, a band that’s a huge time commitment seems less important.” On a personal level, Pendergast was struggling with depression and wondering if he had anything left to say artistically. “When you’re in a global pandemic and we’re confronting all this unrest around racial justice and women’s rights and the nature of capitalism and inequality, you wonder if the voice of a comfortably middle-class, straight white male is even worthwhile. The depression was also making me feel like I wasn’t capable. I realized that voice is what *Deceiver* really is.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Avernal Gate”** “We wanted the album to have a pretty boisterous opening, like one that would kind of knock people off of their expectations a bit. And we thought it was disarming to open the record with a clean intro and then go immediately into what’s essentially a Swedish death metal riff. But lyrically, it’s trying to lay the foundation for the rest of the album, invoking a sense of place and the desperation that the album taps into. The idea is that we’re opening the gate to hell that the title refers to, and it’s an invitation for us to go there together.” **“House of Cadmus”** “In the first track, we opened the pit to hell, and this song is the start of the real journey. You’ve fallen into the very bottom of the pit and you’re working your way back out. I think this is the darkest song on the record, and it just gets darker and more hopeless as it goes along. For me, it has to do with my family and the idea of an ancestral curse. It’s a very real thing that I’m ashamed of and terrified by, and I don’t want to go into it too much.” **“Living Pyre”** “This is one of the first songs that really came together riff-wise, the one where we felt like we were tapping into the creative spark of the band again. I similarly found the creative spark for what the album would be about lyrically, with the admission that ‘there’s nothing left to give.’ But what’s left to give is to admit your shortcomings and contend with your personal demons—to stare into the void and see what you can glean from that process.” **“Shroud of Lethe”** “I think these mythological stories, like the story about Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, are part of our DNA in a way. As I was writing the lyrics for the album, I was realizing that the arc of the story felt a bit like Dante’s descent in the Inferno. That kind of opened me up to the idea of wanting to play with some of this allegorical kind of mythological imagery, because the character of the tragic hero is relatable to the way I was expressing my feelings on the album. It’s someone who lets their perceived imperfections become their downfall.” **“Obsidian Crown”** “This was probably the most difficult song to put together, for some reason. I literally spent an entire day sitting in a closet trying to come up with ideas for this song and kept hitting a wall. One of the things I struggle with most is that I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I’m really hard on myself when I can’t achieve what I’m going for. So, the song ended up being about learning to have more compassion for yourself. The expectation that you’re always going to crush it every time you do something is like a neurotoxin.” **“The Astral Road”** “This track is similar in spirit to the first song. It’s like we’ve worked our way through these various circles of hell and we’re approaching the exit, so we’re able to survey our surroundings again. Again, there’s a sense of place—but with a reflection on the lessons learned. What I realized as I was working through all these issues on this album is that I needed to be a little bit more loving toward who I am. The other thing I realized is that a lot of collective problems we have come down to this lack of humanity that drives everything that’s happening today. Maybe some of these issues could be resolved to some degree if we’re all willing to admit we’re wrong, listen to each other, and try to find common ground again.”
On their fifth album, Swedish goth-metal maestros Tribulation deliver an ode to the supernatural inspired by elemental magic and mythology. Taking its title from a line in a song by German darkwave mysterios Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows, *Where the Gloom Becomes Sound* is a ghostly and dramatic record woven with the snaky melodies and death metal propulsion that have become Tribulation’s signature. “The title is all about the music,” guitarist Adam Zaars tells Apple Music. “And not only on this album—I would say that it describes what we\'ve been trying to do ever since our first album.” Seven of *Gloom*’s ten tracks were written by recently departed guitarist Jonathan Hultén (who has since passed the torch to Joseph Tholl of VOJD); the other three by Zaars. Below, he takes us through the songs. **In Remembrance** “Out of my songs, this is the one that I feel the most connected to or pleased with because it has some kind of fresh quality to it. The main riff that goes into the verses just felt right, but I had some trouble completing the song, so I got some help from Robert Pehrsson \[of Death Breath\] and Joseph Tholl. And then we incorporated some Swedish lyrics, which we’ve tried to do a few times in the past, but it always comes out sounding like some kind of trollish black metal. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not very Tribulation. This time we made it work.” **Hour of the Wolf** “This is a Jonathan song. It’s one of the more simple songs, I guess, which is always more difficult, I think. With less ingredients, you’ve got to cook them well. Jonathan said he was inspired by Roky Erickson and the Hungarian band Tormentor, especially their song ‘Elizabeth Bathory.’ Not to make it sound exactly like that, of course, but that was at least where he was starting. And I think it’s probably our most pop-rock kind of song so far. I was skeptical about it at first, but it really worked in the end and I’m really glad we recorded it.” **Leviathans** “This is a very dramatic song, and probably one of my favorites from the record. It’s also a Jonathan song. The spoken-word part is inspired by the recordings of Aleister Crowley—*The Great Beast Speaks*, I think it’s called—where he’s spitting out invocations. But in the song it’s Jonathan speaking. We wanted it to have that sample-like feeling, but we wanted to make it ourselves. Both this song and ‘Hour of the Wolf’ also have electronic drums on them, which is a new thing for us as well. It’s always fun to experiment with sound, and a small detail can add so much to a song.” Dirge of a Dying Soul “That\'s probably the most depressing song on the album—and I\'m saying that as a very positive thing. Again, it\'s a Jonathan song, and I don\'t want to speak for him, of course, but I imagine that this is maybe the most personal song on the album—lyrically, at least. From what I hear, it seems to be inspired by the first record of Dissection, which is very cool in my book, and by classical music as well. It\'s one of the songs that, along with ‘Inanna,’ I really liked the first time I heard them. They sounded very inspired and kind of set the vibe for me to follow with the rest of my composing on the album.” **Lethe** “This is also a Jonathan song, and that’s him playing the piano. In the past, we used to switch around when it came to organs and pianos and synthesizers. Sometimes I would play; sometimes \[vocalist/bassist\] Johannes \[Andersson\] would play, and sometimes Jonathan. But he’s obviously been practicing a lot, so he’s been the go-to guy for piano parts on the last two records. This piece was very much inspired by Swedish folk music, and I think he would agree that it sounds almost like it came off an album called *Jazz in Swedish* by a guy called Jan Johansson. Wonderful, wonderful record.” **Daughter of the Djinn** “The word ‘genie’ comes from ‘djinn,’ if I’m not mistaken, but this song is not about djinns, actually. The phrase ‘Daughter of the Djinn’ comes from Aleister Crowley, and it’s referring to hashish—but it’s not a song about hashish, either. It’s really about that old saying that one man’s food is another man’s poison—and a metaphor for the idea that the world, in my opinion, is never really black or white. It’s always gray, and I think it’s important to remember that things are more complicated than they seem to be when reading the news and so on.” **Elementals** “I don’t know what Jonathan was thinking about when he wrote this song, but when we were recording it, I could only think about what we’ve labeled as ‘post-Blaze \[Bayley\] Iron Maiden’—albums like *Brave New World* and *Dance of Death*. There’s something there that reminds me of it, but musically I think you can hear the red thread that goes throughout the album most explicitly.” **Inanna** “Innana is a goddess that went down to her sister in the underworld, and—like every myth—there are variations of the story. But as we know it, it’s from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the very first \[version\], I believe. This is one of the first songs Jonathan played for us that he’d written, and it immediately felt completely right. Like ‘Dirge of a Dying Soul,’ it really set the vibe for where we were going on this album.” **Funeral Pyre** “This is the last of my songs. It’s almost a heavy metal song to some extent, and one that could have gone in many different directions. At one point, it almost turned into a 10-minute song, but Jonathan was feeling that it really wasn’t very strong, so I had to go back home and rewrite a lot of it. This turned it into a much shorter song than I imagined, and I think this was a really good thing that Jonathan did, because it turned out great, I think. That push really made it into what it is now.” **The Wilderness** “This is an interesting song—Jonathan did the music and I wrote the lyrics. When listening to the music, I really felt there was a strong sense of story—not quite a fairy tale, but something along those lines. It’s probably the longest lyrics I’ve ever written—I think there are seven verses or something. I was reading John Woodroffe’s early-20th-century English translation of the Shat-Chakra-Nirupana, which is about the chakras that became so popular in the West. Some versions of this idea say there are seven chakras in the body, so that became the metaphor for the verses.”
"Pain as the guardian of my sin Sentinel of the garden of my feelings In this, the final stand of torture I will survive In thy flesh" Dedicated to the countless souls that still wander the forced paths of contamination. Artwork by Ainul Iblis.
“What do you think about a samurai Eddie?” That was the question Iron Maiden bassist, co-lyricist, and all-around mastermind Steve Harris posed to his bandmates when he came up with the Japanese theme for the imagery and title track of the band’s 17th studio album, *Senjutsu*. Roughly translated, the term means “tactics and strategy,” but the idea of Maiden’s shape-shifting mascot, Eddie, in full samurai regalia was immediately appealing. “Let\'s face it, we\'ve plundered a few cultures over the years with Eddie,” Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson tells Apple Music. “We had a Mayan Eddie and we\'ve had a sci-fi one. We\'ve had a space monster Eddie, an Egyptian Eddie, a mummy Eddie. We actually did have Eddie with a samurai sword on the *Maiden Japan* EP, but that was years and years ago. The band has always been quite popular in Japan, which is a pretty exotic place with a very rich samurai history. But most of the songs are unrelated.” Below, Dickinson comments on some of the album\'s highlights. **“Senjutsu”** “This starts out with some ominous drumbeats from what is intended to sound like those big Japanese taiko drums. Then Nicko \[McBrain\] comes in with this beat which is not the Keystone Cops, because I think we\'ve got to the point where we feel confident enough that we can be dramatic without being in a hurry about it. And ‘Senjutsu’ has got drama all over it. To me, it builds and builds and builds. There’s a vocal fugue in the middle with echoes going over the top and then another vocal line. It resolves beautifully into this really magisterial vocal line as you get towards the latter half of the tune. Does it have a chorus? No. There\'s millions of different ones, all strung together. For the most part, the vocal is done in a two-part harmony. It\'s one of my favorite tracks, and it\'s going to be a great way to open a set live.” **“Stratego”** “Stratego is a board game. I’ve never played it, but it’s kind of similar to chess. I was doing a little bit of searching and discovered that Stratego was based on a French board game from the 19th century. That game was based on something called military chess. Japanese military chess, in turn, is a game called shogi. The characters are basically flat stones with Japanese calligraphy on them, each denoting a warrior of some description. You’ve got a black side and a white side, but it’s entirely possible for characters to change sides. Not only that, but they can also transform into a different character. It’s a game of strategy and tactics, but also betrayal and intrigue.” **“The Writing on the Wall”** “The song is basically in two parts, and the intro sets the scene. When I first heard it, I was thinking, ‘This is a bit Tarantino here. It’s a little bit desert.’ I could see a Mad Max scenario opening up. I think \[guitarist\] Adrian \[Smith\] already had the title and a great riff, so we worked the body of the song around that. I thought it was a great title for what’s going on in the world now. There\'s lots of things coming up like objects in the rearview mirror—they may be closer than they appear. There’s a lot of choices people need to make about what kind of world they want to live in. I wrote the song without trying to preach, but to say, ‘You can’t bury your head in the sand. This stuff will bite you if you don’t do something about it.’” **“Lost in a Lost World”** “At the beginning, you would believe that you accidentally wandered into The Moody Blues or Pink Floyd doing something in about 1973, with the layered vocals and things like that. We’ve never done anything as explicitly detailed as that before. But it doesn\'t last for that long before some fiend comes out and hits you over the head with a mallet and the track kicks in. And then it takes you on a journey to a fantastical world that has ceased to exist.” **“Days of Future Past** “This track is as close as you\'re going to get to *Piece of Mind* or *Powerslave*-era Maiden. Four minutes, super high-energy riff, big anthemic chorus, big vocals—all that. Incredible riff from Adrian, and basically no guitar solo. The lyric is a reimagining of the graphic novel *Constantine*, particularly the movie version with Keanu Reeves. It’s kind of an interesting setup, because there’s always the assumption that God is the good guy. In this scenario, God seems to be a manipulative narcissist. He’s almost like a psychopath: ‘I\'m going to do all this horrible stuff to you, and then you just have to love me.’ How does that work? That’s what the song asks.” **“Darkest Hour”** “‘Darkest Hour’ refers not to just the movie about Winston Churchill—it’s about him as a person as well. A lot of people criticize Churchill because he made a lot of mistakes and did things people didn’t approve of. He was almost certainly a full-blown alcoholic, but a functioning one. He said horrible things about women. He did all these things that he would aptly be condemned for. But the bit that people forgive all that for—certainly, I do—is that he stood up to the Nazis and said, ‘No, these are barbarians. Even though the odds are stacked against us, we as a nation are going to resist.’ Half of his cabinet and government would’ve sided with the Nazis and done a deal. But he inspired the nation to do the right thing.” **“The Parchment”** “You really have to be careful about this one if you’re one of these people who likes flotation tanks and you’re going to put this one on in the headphones. It’s a processional, really. The end sounds like the emperor coming back, the prodigal son returning home after a long journey. But the whole middle section is absolutely hypnotic. It’s a monster track, but it\'s layer upon layer upon layer of different iterations and repetitions. If you get under the skin of it, it\'s really complex. I think Steve locked himself away for days to come up with this one. We had to learn it in pieces because it was the only way possible.” **“Hell on Earth”** “Steve is quite an unconventional personality. He\'s not an extroverted person—except onstage when he goes raving mad with a bass. But I think he feels a lot of things really deeply about the world he\'s in. The English band Blur had an album called *Modern Life Is Rubbish*, and I think Steve would concur with that sentiment and say, ‘What kind of world are we creating? Maybe I should just go to sleep. And then if I pass into the next life, maybe I\'ll come back and it\'s going to be better—because this place is hell on earth.’ But I don’t think he’s recommending accelerating your passage into the next world, because we’ve got a tour to do. But he’s genuinely concerned about stuff.”
Inspired by and steeped in the wonders of the natural world, Wolves in the Throne Room are American black metal’s foremost spiritual conjurors. The band’s seventh album, *Primordial Arcana*, is their first self-contained work—recorded, produced, and mixed by drummer Aaron Weaver, guitarist/vocalist Nathan Weaver, and guitarist Kody Keyworth at their own Owl Lodge Studios in the Cascadian Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. It’s also the first WITTR record for which Keyworth was involved from the beginning. “He was there for the very first stirrings of the conceptual framework all the way through the persnickety details of the final polish,” Aaron tells Apple Music. “So, there’s a vitality and a freshness to the record, like a cool breeze flowing down off of a mountaintop, and I attribute part of that to Kody’s presence and third perspective.” Below, Aaron offers a poetic interpretation of each song. **“Mountain Magick”** “There is a feeling that I love, standing high in the mountains under the full moon. Lunar light glittering upon the surface of an alpine lake. Beckoning my soul to journey into the very stones. In the heart of the mountain, I begin to feel the presence of elemental spirits. The mountain is alive.” **“Spirit of Lightning”** “I feel summer daylight in the mountains. There is a hunting lodge here. A wild river rushing nearby. Horned God! Bring bounty, vitality, and strength to the people. The spirit of swiftness is called forth. The arrows are blessed. Wild feasting and celebration after the successful hunt. Mead and meat served in epic quantities. Cernunnos is praised!” **“Through Eternal Fields”** “Autumn sunlight through leaves in the forest. Waterfalls at golden hour. Waterfall spirits draw me deeper into the mystery. To the castle in the forest. My beloved is there. Radiant energy fills me with peace. My eternal loneliness has ended.” **“Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)”** “Tantric union of fire and ice. Cosmic forces intertwine, conjoin. Serpent channels in the body open to healing magic. The source of creativity, of art, of magic is unleashed. Call upon the eagle as your protector...for the spinning green electricity is hot, too hot for some.” **“Underworld Aurora”** “This song is a true invocation of the goddess: Freya, Inanna, Babylon. In the form of a bear. A serpent. Dancing, conjuring in the desert. Goddess! Blow upon the fires in our forge. The sun rises, new life emerges.” **“Masters of Rain and Storm”** “A return to the Stone Throne Room, royal seat of the cult of the snake. Here, the mountain magic flows. Storm cloud waterfalls exploding with power. Sun-bleached fallen trees in the glory of the wildflower season. There are spirits deep under the mountain. Their fires and drums rage.” **“Eostre”** “Have we been in this glade before? Time loops back...a stream nearly forgotten. A cloaked figure crouches next to the body of the dying king. When you awake, the world will be born anew.”
For the follow-up to her harrowing 2019 album *Caligula*, Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) explores the physical and religious ruins of rural Pennsylvania as a metaphor for personal turmoil. “I think overall the record is about betrayal and consequences and facing the repercussions for your actions,” she tells Apple Music. “Looking at myself and the people close to me, it\'s about my most recent very turbulent relationship, and trying to love someone who cannot love you, and the resulting loneliness and isolation.” Because she was living in rural Pennsylvania to be in that relationship, she chose to detail the strange history of the area on *Sinner Get Ready*. “One of the major focuses of the record was to create darkness and intensity, and a very emotional soundscape,” she says, “but to do it without the trappings of extreme music and metal and noise, and to use a totally different palette to create the same vibe.” Below, she comments on each track. **“The Order of Spiritual Virgins”** “This track is a bridge between the last album, *Caligula*, and the rest of the record. The Order of Spiritual Virgins relates to the Cloisters at Ephrata, which was a small monastic society in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. They were hardcore ascetics, and I think a lot of it was based around totally repressing sexuality. I wanted to introduce a lot of the vocals that appear throughout the record—they’re congregational and not particularly refined, but they have real conviction. This song also has the only blatant synth aspect on the record, which is in the Morton Subotnick style.” **“I Who Bend the Tall Grasses”** “This song is inspired by a poem by my friend Blake Butler\'s late wife, who passed away around the time I was writing this record. She\'s a poet named Molly Brodak, and the poem is called ‘Jesus.’ I found it so striking and moving, and so the language of this track is very much indebted to that poem. It’s probably the most violent song on the record, and it also transitions out of the screaming stuff I’ve been doing for the last two years now. It’s like the last gasp of that for this record, and I believe we did it in one take.” **“Many Hands”** “With this one, I really wanted to focus on the repetition of the lyrics because I think they are fairly graphic. I also wanted to bring in part of the world that I\'ve been building previously and to reference ‘All Bitches Die’ by actually pulling the piano progression from that song and then repeating the lyrics and pulling that from the song as well. So that’s actually the first thing you hear, and then it transitions into this other song that is laid over it. They kind of talk to each other throughout the song. I think it has an Angels of Light vibe.” **“Pennsylvania Furnace”** “This is an actual place, a defunct community that’s about 20 minutes away from where I was living this past year. And now it\'s just a big ruin with a concrete slab and some crap laying around. ‘Pennsylvania Furnace’ was another contender for the record title, but I wanted to give it to the song. Musically, I wanted to create a very lonely feeling. We wanted to create something that sounded grand and huge but also extremely close to you. So there’s a very dry, close vocal. It’s a very sad song.” **“Repent Now Confess Now”** “The title for this is from a sign on I-70, which is an interstate that runs the length of Pennsylvania horizontally. About 45 minutes outside of Philly, there’s a barn by the side of the road on what looks like an Amish farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the phrase ‘Repent now, confess your sins and God will abundantly pardon.’ But the song is directly about the surgery I had to get this year. I had a massive disc herniation in my lower back that became an emergency situation that threatened total loss of my lower body.” **“The Sacred Linament of Judgment”** “A lot of the lyrics on this record are intended to emulate or are directly appropriated from Amish and Mennonite texts from the 1800s and 1700s. And this one comes from a book called *The Heart of Man: Either a Temple to God or the Habitation of Satan: Represented in Ten Emblematical Figures, Calculated to Awaken and Promote a Christian Disposition*. Also appearing on this song is the confession of Jimmy Swaggart, an evangelist who was brought to accountability by one of the prostitutes he had been frequenting.” **Perpetual Flame of Centralia** “Centralia is an abandoned mining town 30 minutes outside Philly where there was a coal mining accident in 1962, and there’s been a fire burning underground ever since. This song was the first song I did in the studio, and I really wanted to focus on creating an intimate space. Vocally, the phrases are very long and there is a lot of breath taken. I wanted to focus on the quality of the voice as it\'s losing its ability to project or sustain itself. The song is about consequences and judgment.” **“Man Is Like a Spring Flower”** “This song was a wild ride. The title is from a piece of Mennonite fraktur, which is the illuminated manuscript that they would paint in their copious spare time. Again, it starts off with this polyphony, which is just me, but it\'s so grating and abrasive that every time I listen to the song, I start laughing because I think it sounds so gross. We brought in this really, really good banjo player and had him do this compositional technique called phasing, which affects the rhythm of the song. And then I did the most miserable vocal I could muster.” **“The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata”** “I wanted the emotional trajectory of the record to be a bit of an unraveling. It starts out with strength and confidence and virulence and ends in total despair, acceptance, and perhaps a wish for absolution. I kept trying to add all this crazy stuff to this one, but we kept taking it out until I was left with a very simple congruent harmony. It seems like a nice, traditional song, but the only curveball is the lyrical ugliness at the end. It really is about the acceptance of loneliness, I think.”
For the first time in their 20-plus years of existence, Belgian post-metal shamans AMENRA have deviated from their longstanding tradition of entitling their albums in numbered “masses”—*Mass I*, *Mass II*, etc. The title of the band’s seventh full-length translates to *The Thorn*, and it also marks the first time that vocalist Colin H. van Eeckhout sings entirely in his native Flemish. The majority of the music on *De Doorn* was composed by guitarist Lennart Bossu, also of fellow Belgian heavyweights Oathbreaker—and Oathbreaker singer Caro Tanghe contributes additional vocals throughout. “The lyrics are in Flemish because the songs were first written for a folkloric ritual we performed in the city where I live,” van Eeckhout tells Apple Music. “That’s why we felt the album wasn’t a ‘mass’—the songs were written from a completely different angle.” Below, he gives a glimpse behind each track. **“Ogentroost”** “‘Ogen’ means eyes, and ‘troost’ comfort—like to comfort someone—so I just made a word by putting those two together. It’s like the look in someone’s eyes when you hit rock bottom, or the eyes of your mother when you’re a very sad child. Imagine if you have a really severe accident and you’re in a lot of pain and you don’t know if you’ll make it or not—it’s the eyes of the first person that comes to you and tries to tell you that everything’s going to be all right. And so, those eyes mean everything to you.” **“De Dood in Bloei”** “This is ‘death in bloom.’ It’s kind of a continuation of the previous song—they are all connected in this way—and I’m talking about how we will never overcome this kind of beauty. We are continuing in a movement that was started long ago, but this song is kind of a pause. On every album, we have a moment when everything becomes smaller and it’s a moment to rest. And then you continue with the heavier things.” **“De Evenmens”** “Like ‘Ogentroost,’ this is a new word that I created. There is a phrase in Dutch that means we’re only human for a short while, so I made a word that describes this thing: de evenmens—the human that is only here for a little while. It sounds f\*\*king decent in our language, but maybe not so much in yours.” **“Het Gloren”** “The title means something like ‘the dawning,’ a new beginning. Structurally, the song has a very abrupt switch in the middle. It starts off with a very long, repetitive wave and then, in the bridge, it opens up before repeating itself musically as the first part. Then it abruptly stops and switches into an acoustic storytelling part. The voice is talking about the only one, the ever-existing one. It all has sort of a religious sounding weight to it, but I was trying to talk about life’s pains.” **“Voor Immer”** “This means ‘forever.’ It was the first song written for the album and was probably the catalyst that made the rest of the songs possible. Lennart said he was always kind of torn between the two bands he was in, Oathbreaker and AMENRA. When he was writing, he always had difficulty judging riffs. When he was writing this song, he said that in the past he would have categorized it for Oathbreaker, but now that he’s been with us for so long, he understands that there was also a place for this within AMENRA. Lyrically, it’s about putting things to rest.”
As of 2021, Cannibal Corpse is 15 albums deep into a career that has made them the biggest death-metal band in the world. With *Violence Unimagined*, the Floridian masters somehow muster new levels of brutality and technicality—due in part to new guitarist (and longtime producer) Erik Rutan, also of veteran death-metal trio Hate Eternal. Given that Cannibal Corpse’s lyrics are almost exclusively about violence, it’s stunning that they haven’t actually used the word formally before. “I thought *Violence Unimagined* just had a great ring to it,” drummer and co-lyricist Paul Mazurkiewicz tells Apple Music. “I think it also sums up what the band is about.” With four of the band’s five members contributing lyrics, Mazurkiewicz, Rutan, bassist Alex Webster, and guitarist Rob Barrett give a rundown on the tracks they wrote. **“Murderous Rampage”** Mazurkiewicz: “This is a song Rob wrote, and he also came up with the title. I just wrote the lyrics about someone who does just that—goes on a murderous rampage while collecting body parts from the killing spree and putting them on display in his house.” **“Necrogenic Resurrection”** Webster: “This song is about a cult that worships a notorious deceased murderer and seeks to resurrect him through human sacrifice. Even though I don’t believe in the supernatural, I’ve always enjoyed supernatural horror movies and novels, so the inspiration for lyrics like these probably comes from being a fan of that sort of stuff. I can’t think of a specific source, though—it’s just an idea for a story that I had.” **“Inhumane Harvest”** Barrett: “‘Inhumane Harvest’ takes a look inside one of organized crime\'s more sinister activities: the human organ trade. Desperate buyers will pay a high price for a much-needed organ transplant to either save themselves or a loved one from certain death, which makes for a lucrative business in underground crime rings.” **“Condemnation Contagion”** Rutan: “As the pandemic began in early 2020, I was watching a lot of movies like *28 Days Later*, *Dawn of the Dead*, *It Comes at Night*, *I Am Legend*, and *Contagion*. I also had the news on in the background for hours on end. I became obsessed with the chaos of it all. That combination inspired the fictional writing of the lyrics and the depth and heaviness of the music.” **“Surround, Kill, Devour”** Webster: “This song is about a situation where society has completely collapsed and people are starving to death. The desperation drives some people to form cannibalistic hunting groups, preying on other survivors who are weak or alone. I had recently read an article about wolves and it talked about the teamwork they use while hunting. I thought that it would be interesting to have the human antagonists in this song hunt in a similar way.” **“Ritual Annihilation”** Rutan: “With ‘Ritual Annihilation,’ I really wanted to create a complex song that was aggressive, attacking and pummeling. Then, as I was writing, it took a different turn onto a heavy and dark path. There is a lot of two-guitar-part harmony and counterpoint going on that definitely represents some of the insanity of when I was writing it in the first quarter of 2020.” **“Follow the Blood”** Barrett: “This was the last song that I wrote the music for on this record, and I intentionally wanted to make it a slower, more mid-paced song compared to the other three that I had already written. The lyrics are about a wartime scenario.” **“Bound and Burned”** Barrett: “This is the first song that I wrote the music for on this record. I basically built all of the riffs around the middle section where the vocals and solos keep going back and forth. When it comes to the lyrics, I prefer not to explain them, as I\'d rather have the individual determine what they\'re about or what they mean to them.” **“Slowly Sawn”** Webster: “This song is told from the point of view of the victim, a man who has been captured and is being tortured to death by methodical dismemberment. We usually write the music for our songs first and the lyrics second, and sometimes the former can help inspire the latter. That was the case for this song. It’s hard to explain, but the song’s slow, grinding riffs made me think of something bad happening to someone in a protracted way. In particular the bridge section of the song, which shifts into an even lower gear, evokes a torturous vibe.” **“Overtorture”** Rutan: “The origins of this song started one morning in February 2020. Leading up to recording the album, I was on a strict regimen where I would wake up, drink water and coffee, have breakfast, check emails, ride the bike, and then play guitar and work on songs all day, every day. That morning, I just had this maniacal melody floating around in my head and it would not leave. This ended up being the first riff of the song, and it all took off from there.” **“Cerements of the Flayed”** Mazurkiewicz: “This is a song that Alex wrote and also came up with the title for. I wrote about someone who gets buried alive wearing the skin of another human that is also still alive. The person survives the ordeal only to succumb to this horrific act in the end.”
It’s been 13 years since the last album from electronic-metal experimentalists Genghis Tron. Though much of that time was an extended hiatus, founding duo Hamilton Jordan and Michael Sochynsky have completely revamped their lineup with new vocalist Tony Wolski and the band’s first-ever live drummer, Nick Yacyshyn (also of extreme-metal favorites Sumac and Baptists). The result is *Dream Weapon*, a decidedly more spacious and hypnotic album than the band’s frenzied, critically acclaimed 2008 opus *Board Up the House*. “We wanted the instruments and arrangements to have a little more breathing room so the listener could hear all the details,” Jordan tells Apple Music. “Having Nick and Tony involved really helped us arrive at a more cohesive, streamlined set of songs that really flow together. They really elevated everything.” Below, Jordan discusses each track on *Dream Weapon*. **Exit Perfect Mind** “We knew we wanted an intro track on the album, and we knew we wanted an interlude. At some point about halfway through the mixing process, Michael stayed up late one night and put together the core components of what would become ‘Exit Perfect Mind.’ He had the idea to pull the same melodies that conclude the last track on the album, ‘Great Mother,’ and use them to start the record. So that was a cool way to bookend the album, by starting and ending with a similar vibe.” **Pyrocene** “Many of our songs—and not just on this album—start with drums, and this is one of those songs. ‘Pyrocene’ started when I was visiting my wife’s family in the Arizona desert and I just wrote this funky little drumbeat that I really liked. I sent it to Michael and he added some more synthetic-sounding samples on top and a deep, heavy bass synth stab. Then we just kind of tricked it out over a two- or three-week period. It was exciting writing this song because it was our first full demo for this album—the first real song we wrote in, at that point, 12 years. It’s also the song we used to entice Nick into playing with us.” **Dream Weapon** “This is the first song we started writing, but the last one we finished. I wrote about half of the guitar parts on this song in the summer of 2008, a couple of months after *Board Up the House* came out. It was also a couple of weeks after my dad died, and this was the first thing I’d written since his death. But I really liked those riffs, so we held on to them for a long time. We always knew that if we were going to do another album that it would show up in some form. Fast-forward 12 years and we had a lot of ideas over that time that didn’t age well, but this is one of the few that Michael and I still really loved.” **Desert Stairs** “This was based on something that Michael had written a while before we entered the studio, but we were having trouble coming up with tones that really worked. When we were at GodCity with \[producer\] Kurt Ballou, he busted out a guitar and a metal slide and recorded some really nice guitar ambience where he was moving the slide over the neck and getting harmonics. Then Michael chopped them up and made these samples that sounded more like a synth pad. They really brought track together and made it sound warmer.” **Alone in the Heart of the Light** “My wife and I drove to visit Michael in upstate New York, and we were staying in a motel in Virginia the night before. I had a little MIDI controller with me, and I came up with this arpeggiated melody that I really liked. We ended up with like a 20-chord progression that you can’t really follow, but it doesn’t matter. You can just lose yourself in it. This is also the first song we sent our new vocalist, Tony, when we were in the exploratory phases of working with him. What he came up with really subverted our expectations, and we knew we had to work with him.” **Ritual Circle** “I have a super vivid memory of this song, because my wife and I were staying in Colorado for a family funeral when I woke up one morning to this idea that Michael had sent. It ended up being one of the more challenging songs to write because we didn’t know what that idea needed around it. So there were a lot of different versions of this song before the one you’re hearing. Our goal was to keep the listener engaged, because you\'re hearing new melodies and textures and sounds, but you\'re still in that same driving rhythm. Hopefully you get lost in it.” **Single Black Point** “This is another one that started with a drumbeat. And it\'s another song, kind of like ‘Ritual Circle,’ that has a very distinct part A and part B. The second half of the song is all Michael, and to me it’s more of a classic Genghis Tron electronic jam-out.” **Great Mother** “This is another one that has some really old elements in it. I think the opening pulsating synth and some of the other synth melodies toward the end of the song, before the last loud chorus comes in, came from a demo that Michael wrote in 2011 or 2012. But we had trouble turning it into a song until I came up with the main guitar riff and started sketching out a new arrangement. So I kind of stripped his old demo for parts and rolled it into something new. At first we felt maybe this had too many parts, but then Tony came into the picture and his vocals were the glue that brought the song together.”
SEAL-012 RUDIMENTARY PENI - Great War MLP Recorded several years ago before Rudimentary Peni engaged in another mysterious hiatus, Great War has finally emerged to kiss the gas-tinged light of a mustered morn. Expanding on the skeletal sounds and subject of 2009's “Wilfred Owen” single the band has seen fit to concentrate on a more mechanized approach doing away with even more of the humanizing aspects in their music this time delivering ten painful familiar shards fraught with brittle anxiety and anguished simplicity. Great War cements new phase in the ever-crawling metamorphic madness that is Rudimentary Peni. The record comes with brand new Nick Blinko Artwork on the sleeve and Inner Sleeve. (Jensen Ward) Forthcoming in 2021 and 2022 Death Church LP and CD EP's of RP LP and CD Cacophony LP and CD Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric LP and CD Echoes of Anguish 12" The Underclass 12" Archaic EP 12" No More Pain EP 12" More EP's of RP CD (Compilation of Echoes of Anguish 12". The Underclass 12", Archaic EP 12" and No More Pain EP 12")
Deafheaven’s fifth album might seem like a drastic departure from the blackgaze sound they helped pioneer, but to anyone paying attention, it shouldn’t be. The foundation for *Infinite Granite*’s more traditional song structures, nearly metal-free shoegaze, and clean vocals was laid—or at least hinted strongly at—on the band’s 2018 album *Ordinary Corrupt Human Love*. The lyrics also reveal a new level of poetic nuance from frontman George Clarke, as he weaves a narrative marked both by family history and the time the songs were written in. “*Infinite Granite* was originally centered in my relationship with extended family, but because it was written during various social and environmental anxieties of 2020, more immediate reflections were included,” he tells Apple Music. “Throughout the album there is a double narrative: one that highlights familial issues and one that reflects the current world at large.” Below, he comments on each track that contains vocals. **“Shellstar”** “‘Shellstar’ deals with questioning one’s objective feelings toward emotional situations. That idea is coupled with allusions to California fires and Gulf floods.” **“In Blur”** “A song about futility. A nonbeliever, in the wake of having lost a child, reaches out to God for solace knowing nothing’s there.” **“Great Mass of Color”** “‘Great Mass of Color’ describes insomnia during the early-morning blue hour. The lyrics also reflect thoughts on boyhood—what it means to be a man, looking up to other men for a path and the constrictions and conflicts in that experience.” **“Lament for Wasps”** “A love song filled with direct references to insomnia. Blue represented a warm, safe feeling while making this album. It is also the favorite color of my partner, who I use as a character in this song—someone that represents benevolence. I exemplify this benevolence using wasps, as they\'re an irrational phobia of mine.” **“Villain”** “I thought about my family’s history with alcoholism and abuse, how that past affects future generations and what it means to share blood with cruel and violent people.” **“The Gnashing”** “‘The Gnashing’ looks at new parents, state violence, and an idea of taking care of who takes care of you. Like ‘In Blur,’ this song references losing a child, but focuses on a mother figure instead of a father.” **“Other Language”** “While recording ‘Mombasa,’ we were told a friend of ours had died. We stopped the session and went home. That night he was in my dream. We were in a large passenger van and I was sitting on a bench behind him as he told a story to people around us. I put my arm around the front of his chest, holding him by the shoulder while we laughed. When I woke up, I saw thick smoke from the wildfires had come in through the open windows. I laid until I had to leave for the day’s session, writing most of the lyrics in bed.” **“Mombasa”** “My grandfather lived with me for a few years while I helped take care of him. When it became too difficult, my father and I worked to get him into an assisted care hospital. He would speak about how he’d become a burden. He would apologize for having not died. This song is about the kindness and freedom of death, one in which an afterlife reveals itself to be aloneness in cosmic love.”
"World of Sorrows" is 5 tracks and 30+ minutes of pure brutal melodic death metal. It is focused with laser precision upon a singular musical idea and goal: to create melodic death metal with a higher emphasis on the traditional death metal elements often neglected by so called melodic “death metal” bands, like blasting drums, lower vocals, and percussive & low morbid tremolo riffs, inspired by bands like ROTTING CHRIST, INTESTINE BAALISM, MI’GAUSS, MOLESTED, VEHEMENCE, EUCHARIST, and SADISTIC INTENT, as well as the earliest works of AMON AMARTH and KATAKLYSM. This disk is 30+ minutes of pure old-school, anti-trend, melodic death metal savagery sure to please any fan of the aforementioned bands.
***IMPORTANT*** LPs, CDs, Tapes, and all other merchandise for KNOLL and INTERSTICE are available for purchase on our Big Cartel store which is linked on our page here.
Nineteen albums in, Darkthrone is still playing by their own rules. In recent years, the Norwegian metal legends have been writing albums with fewer and increasingly longer songs. After the six-track opuses *The Underground Resistance* (2013) and *Old Star* (2019), they’ve returned with *Eternal Hails......*, which features five sprawling tracks spread across 42 minutes. Though drummer/vocalist Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell and guitarist/vocalist Ted “Nocturno Culto” Skjellum have created revered albums in the black metal, death metal, and punk styles over the decades, *Eternal Hails......* is very much in keeping with their recent penchant for epic, doomier tracks, as Fenriz explains below with tongue firmly planted in cheek. **“His Masters Voice”** “Fusing ragtime with an overtly blaring brass section and K-pop is a daring move. Ted made the music for this, and the title itself is a known musical brand, but in the setting of Darkthrone/black metal it suddenly warps into another vibe entirely. The art of it, to me, is to feel that everyone will understand all my work exactly like I do—but knowing that most do not. The lyrics are awful in the sense that they portray several layers of hell and suffering, and it hurts to even glance upon them.” **“Hate Cloak”** “As our single, I wouldn\'t have thought that a Nickelback cover sprinkled with the peppy audacity of ‘Gangnam Style’ would create such positive feedback from the seasoned underground metal crowd. The opening line is a direct hail to Roberta Flack and her beautiful song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.’ This was supposed to be only for those in the know, so blowing that wide open right here makes me feel like an enormous tit and I want to just hide for the rest of the week. Believe me, it\'s the absolute last time I will ever do something remotely like this ever again.” **“Wake of the Awakened”** “Who would have thought it would actually be a splendid idea to merge the overtly organic-sounding 1960s Bollywood style with the brazen obliviousness to quality that is 1990s Eurodance? Not me. As the first verse is easily conjurable by the mind\'s eye—at least by me when I now painfully revisit my words—the refrain totally destroys any cinematic potential with its psychological sense of stifling terror and pure crushing of all that is sympathy. If you write a crude word in a lyric, it gets censored out there on album covers or platforms. But lyrics like these should not be turned loose on anyone that hasn\'t fully developed their frontal lobes—which means no reading until 25 years of age. It is really paralyzingly depressive in a way I have never seen before.” **“Voyage to a Northpole Adrift”** \"I am surprised no one ever thought of mixing the Godflesh/Pitchshifter style with brisk Tyrol yodeling before. Here we are dealing with the struggle again—the struggle of your future when knowing that we die. A classic theme, and in Darkthrone’s catalog almost wholesome compared to the previous three songs! By the way, the lyrics are written completely unrelated to the songs. When the music is recorded and I leave, Ted does vocals alone and chooses what lyric will go to each song. You do not write these kinds of lyrics to a song—it would be unheard of. The title is beautiful to lure you into the mind chambers of death-pondering, but as I said, it is also about how to—or maybe not to—continue living. Ted made the riffs and they are extremely epic and varied.” **“Lost Arcane City of Uppakra”** “Never have tango and early grindcore melted into such a lovely amalgamation. I was on holiday in Gothenburg when Jonas Svensson told me about the mysteries of Uppåkra’s pagan city and mounds. I thought it would be a sweet thing to enhance the feeling of holiday that I seldom have into a song, but mostly it harkens back to the days of early Darkthrone, when I read about ancient history and wrote lyrics about it—for instance ‘Iconoclasm Sweeps Cappadocia.’ Sorry, rulers of forgotten Uppåkra, that I drag you into a Midgard-snake of my own creation here, but probably no harm done. The lyrics are extremely anti-Christian with a short Norwegian pagan poem I wrote to introduce the strangest musical endpiece we ever did for Darkthrone—done in the spirit of the endpiece of ‘Starship Trooper’ by Yes 50 years ago. The music is by me—epic and heavy but also sassy and spaced out. I hope you never die, Ace Frehley!”
In a way, Rivers of Nihil’s fourth full-length is about the work that went into the album itself. As a concept, *The Work* grew out of the progressive death metal band’s transition into full-time touring with the success of their previous LP, 2018’s *Where Owls Know My Name*. “When that happened, we got a taste of what it was like to do this as our job,” bassist, lyricist, and co-vocalist Adam Biggs tells Apple Music. “It changes your relationship with your art and what you love when you attach a monetary dependence to it. In that way, success is a bit of a violation of art. *The Work* is sort of a metacommentary on what we do when art in general and just the nature of the world becomes a lot of…work.” Below, he discusses each track. **“The Tower (Theme From ‘The Work’)”** “I had the idea of this record being a cinematic experience. When we were first putting together this track, it sounded like it had a dreary, opening-credits type of feel. It has a lot of musical themes that I felt were easy to latch onto, and I felt they were delivering the bigger musical picture of the record. The idea of ‘The Tower’ itself is based on a tarot card. It’s a signifier of tumultuous times, but also an opportunity for regrowth. That’s what the lyrics touch on.” **“Dreaming Black Clockwork”** “This song is actually one that I contributed a lot to musically, which is kind of an outlier for the band. Typically, I’m not really a riff writer. I stick to writing the lyrics and the basslines—everything else has pretty much been \[guitarist\] Brody \[Uttley\] for the last few years. This has a kind of dark, grinding feel with a lot of crazy sounds and an industrial kind of clanking. It represents the beginning of the grind of your day, after you’ve just woken up and come to grips with what your life is going to be like today. The lyrics are pure existential dread and a desire to escape, but there’s also a will to live.” **“Wait”** “This is an interesting track for us and for people who are familiar with the band. I think it’ll probably throw some people for a loop, but it’s a fun track off the back of the last one. The way the tracks butt up against each other felt like an homage to a classic band, but I don’t want to say exactly who. It’s just about getting high and forgetting your worries for a while, so it’s a little break. The way that Brody put the solo together at the end felt like Guns N’ Roses to me, which I thought was an interesting direction for us.” **“Focus”** “A lot of these songs are drug tracks, if you break them down. If ‘Wait’ was more of a marijuana song, this would be an Adderall song. I grew up in the age when kids were being prescribed amphetamines like candy. I was one of those kids, for better or worse, and when you’re that age you don’t really understand that you’re being set up for a particular relationship with mind-altering substances. You feel dependent on them to function in society, but also sort of resentful towards them.” **“Clean”** “If you’re just looking at the lyrics of this track, it seems it could just be about drugs, and you wouldn’t be wrong in assuming that, but it’s also more about poverty. It’s about struggling and having to scrape by in life. When you do that, nothing around you is clean. Everything is dirty and dingy and spoiled. People don’t understand that if you can’t take a person out of a bad situation, they’re never really going to get themselves out of that hole.” **“The Void From Which No Sound Escapes”** “I came up with the elaborate title before I even knew what the song was going to be about, but it talks about the artist’s struggle. You have an audience that expects something of you, so you kind of have this monster you need to feed. You don’t want to betray what they want, but you also want to be yourself. A lot of times when I’m writing lyrics, I’m putting my worst feelings down—and then I’ll hear people sing them back to me at a show like it’s nothing. So, you’ve got people repeating these painful things you feel, and you wonder what that does to everyone involved.” **“More?”** “This is sort of like the delivery on the promise of the last track. It’s probably the only straight-up death-metal song on the whole record, which is odd for us. Lyrically, it’s kind of sarcastic, like, ‘Yeah, this is exactly what you want. We know how to give it to you, but we don’t always want to. We have other ideas that we can’t ignore.’ So, it’s a little angry at the expectation, but we’re having a good time with it.” **“Tower 2”** “The first ‘Tower’ is that intuition link with the record. It’s pulling you into the topic of the album. ‘Tower 2’ exists as a little bit of a comeback to that situation. It’s a fun little song, kind of a country tune. I get to croon for you a little bit. I like it a lot, but there’s not a whole lot more to say than that.” **“Episode”** “I think this was the first song Brody wrote the music for, but it was a hard one to put together lyrically. It’s about the stress of putting all this stuff down—and reconciling with it. We have to weigh all of this stuff that we’re making against the rest of our lives. There’s relationships in my life that have come and gone throughout this whole thing. So much of my life has to be a certain way to make this thing endure. But I think it’s common for touring musicians to make certain sacrifices. So, it’s about little moments in your life ending, and you just have to keep working through it.” **“Maybe One Day”** “We listen to a lot of theremin-based music on tour. Brody started messing with some of that stuff, so we decided to incorporate some of that kind of tone into this song. Lyrically, it’s a continuation of ‘Episode’ in a way—it’s asking if it’s maybe a better option to just move on. But it’s also a little ambiguous as to what you\'re moving on from. As someone who works a lot, do you make better choices for your life at home or on the road? It’s also saying that it’s OK to contemplate these things but maybe not worry about them so much.” **“Terrestria IV: Work”** “In the same way that ‘The Tower’ is sort of the opening credits, this is the ending credits. The curtain is closing—not only on this record, but also on the entire four seasonal concepts thing that we’ve run with throughout our whole career at this point. Because this record explores so much other territory sound-wise, we thought it was time for something a little more immediately crowd-pleasing. We’ve finished the work and the whole concept, and this song is asking what’s changed and if we’re happy with what we’ve done. It’s an invitation for the listener to look back with us.”