Kerrang!'s 50 Best Albums of 2021

“We decided to call it *Radical* because it cuts a couple of different ways,” Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley says about the title of the Buffalo metalcore band’s ninth album. “It’s radical as far as the personal beliefs I’m expressing as the lyricist of this band, but it’s also radical because it acknowledges that radical changes may need to be made in order for things to ever get better.” Of course, Buckley is aware that “radical” also means different things to different people in 2021. “I was trying to find things that most people in the world can agree on, and what I came up with was ‘fuck cancer’ and ‘I just want to feel good,’” he says. “I don’t think this record will help in the fight against cancer—although I wish it would—but we tried to write something that acknowledges the idea that human beings all long for goodness. But it’s going to require some big leaps of faith in order to make things good.” Below, he discusses some of the album’s key tracks. **“Dark Distance”** “I wrote this in 2019 or maybe even 2018, when I was realizing where I wanted the record to go. I knew that I had an obligation to use my platform for positive things because the world is not a pretty place right now. So, I just had this idea that the whole thing needs to be reset. Pull out the Nintendo game, blow on it, put it back in. And what resets civilization? Historically speaking, a plague does that. So, I started by summoning a plague and then COVID happened. I apologize for that.” **“Planet Shit”** “This is about a kind of old-style French Revolution of the upper-class elite and ruling class. About two months after we recorded the song, the Capitol building was stormed on January 6. I wrote the song to seem like a newscast, so I will say that, yes, I did have some sort of clairvoyant image of the Capitol building being rioted. My guide for the song was Mitch McConnell. He’s the only person I ever see when I’m talking about evil old white people. That’s two clairvoyant things in a row now, so I’m looking into what that means.” **“Post-Boredom”** “I wrote this about what would happen if I died and was reborn. If I had another chance at life, what would I do differently? What would I do the same? It was written during the pandemic, when everyone was bored, so I started thinking about what was going to happen next. And then I actually did get a separation from my wife during the pandemic, so that was a very real second shot for me. But all the songs were written before I was separated, so it ended up having a bigger meaning.” **“Colossal Wreck”** “This one is so fast and so short that I just thought it would be really good to have really memorable, punchy lyrics. Obviously, we’re being ignored by whatever higher power has been looking out for us since the dawn of time. It’s time to realize that we need to make some serious peace here with whatever is running the show because we really fucked it up. It kind of falls in line with ‘Dark Distance’ in that way.” **“Desperate Pleasures”** “Like ‘Colossal Wreck,’ I was just kind of having fun with the imagery here. We’re all lost, so fuck it. Let’s give it back, let nature take over, let’s just stop even trying. Let’s just live with the shit we’ve created and let nature fix it. The mental image I had was of a building on fire. While I’m just standing there, all these people are running past me to the exit. We can fend this off if we want to, but everyone is just running away. Who’s stupider here? Me for standing there, or everyone else for running away? I don’t know.” **“AWOL”** “I thought this song was about something, but then I realized it was about something else. When I was writing it, I thought of it as my vision for what my life would be like when this record is released. But that version of Keith Buckley is not currently in this situation. Maybe he’s happy; maybe he’s not. I don’t know how to reach him because he doesn’t exist yet. But it’s actually not about that. It ended up being about a very specific person and a very specific time. I don’t think anyone reading Apple Music cares about this, so I’ll just say it’s a message to my future self.” **“Sexsexsex”** “That song is about me realizing that I am a very submissive person. That’s a personality trait I have. When most people think of the whole dom-sub thing, they think of whips and leather and stuff like that. The only reference point they have is sexuality. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the power exchange of a dominant and submissive. So, I made this song seem like it’s about sexuality, but it’s not. It’s about an energy exchange.” **“We Go Together”** “Everyone is born into a very specific set of circumstances—a certain time, a certain place, a certain astrology that has never been replicated. Your experience on this earth has never happened before. In a way, you are the only one alive. Everything that you see is your set of conclusions. In a sense, that makes you the source of it all. So, the song is about feeling like you might be at the center of everything. How does that change you?”

Taking its name from a computer virus developed by the NSA and leaked by hackers in 2017, the debut album from Canadian alt-metal trio Spiritbox has nothing to do with cyberattacks. Instead, vocalist Courtney LaPlante uses the term to describe the mood that permeates the record. “The story of the computer virus is fascinating—especially how it came into existence and how much it messed with people’s stuff,” she tells Apple Music. “But I latched onto it because of how cool the phrase is. Now, the words mean something completely different to me than when I first heard them.” Below, she describes each track on *Eternal Blue*. **“Sun Killer”** “We wrote this in January of 2020, and we instantly knew that it would be the intro of the album. This has the drama that I look for when I’m listening to an opening of an album—it’s like when the band is walking out onstage for a show. When I hear this, I’m surprised by the flexibility of my voice because I’ve had a vocal cord injury for a long time. It’s finally healed itself up in the last couple of years, so this performance is like a mini-celebration that I feel like myself again.” **“Hurt You”** “All of our songs have a narrative, but they’re more about the feeling of the song. To me, this feels like the ups and downs of a toxic relationship. We always write the music first in this band, but I think it’s fun when you can have the lyrical content mimic the vibe of the music. The working title of this was ‘Heavy Clown,’ like Clown from Slipknot, because a lot of our favorite nu-metal references made it into this song.” **“Yellowjacket” (feat. Sam Carter)** “This is one of my favorites on the record. I think it’s a double drop-D guitar tuning, so it’s inhumanly heavy. I don’t do a lot of screaming on this song, but it definitely has some of the lowest, scariest screams I’ve ever gotten out of me. The rest of the song is me talking, and my inspiration for that was a lot of the alternative music of the ’90s—bands like Butthole Surfers, that had all this weird spoken-word stuff in their songs. And then, we had Sam Carter from Architects do some vocals on it, which sound amazing.” **“The Summit”** “I have this fantasy in my mind where there’s this new genre of music that doesn’t make sense, but it’s almost like the parameters are pulled off some genres that I like. And that’s where ‘The Summit’ lives. It’s hard to classify it as a metal song, but the guitar is so low and clear. Vocally, I took a lot of inspiration from The Weeknd and Charli XCX, especially the way she lets the last line of a chorus descend in a really playful way.” **“Secret Garden”** “This is one of the first ones we wrote back in the summer of 2019, but it wasn’t quite ready back then. The working title was ‘Chino’ because it reminded us a little bit of Deftones, who we are very inspired by. I think the song has such a nice vibe to it—it feels romantically sorrowful. Lyrically, it’s me being introspective and advocating for myself. I think a lot of musicians fear losing who they are as their star rises, but I think anyone who’s in any transition period in their life can understand that feeling.” **“Silk in the Strings”** “A lot of the songs on this album are heavy and open and slow, but all the more intense songs—like this one—were written later. When \[guitarist\] Michael \[Stringer\] first showed me this one, I wasn’t sure what to do because I always feel like the vocals need to match the energy of the song. So, whenever there’s something bouncy, I try not to think about what a metal vocalist would do. I look more to what I think good rappers would do. For this song, I was like, ‘How would the Wu-Tang Clan do this song?’ I would absolutely never be able to rap, but I really admire how important the flow is.” **“Holy Roller”** “We don’t really have a lot of other music that sounds like this song, but we just wanted something selfishly heavy. The narrator in this song is clearly not a good person. A lot of times in metal music, a song about a bad person is very on the nose—very graphic and explicitly violent. I wanted to explore something more insidious, like the religious cultism of someone like Jim Jones. I find those kinds of people so much scarier than a song about cutting someone’s head off or something like that.” **“Eternal Blue”** “This is one of the first tracks we wrote, and I think it’s my favorite. Our producer, Dan \[Braunstein\], really helped us dig a little deeper with the synth part of it, taking a lot of reference from New Wave acts from the ’80s, like Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode. I just love how heavy and beautiful the song is, and it has a very rare Michael Stringer guitar solo in it, which I love. Lyrically, it’s about someone who is at rock bottom but is trying not to romanticize that. Many people seem to glamorize depression, but I think it’s important not to get caught up in that.” **“We Live in a Strange World”** “Every time I listen to this song, I feel different about it. We first wrote it before the pandemic, before the band started gaining success. When I recorded it in February 2021, I had a lot more to say about how weird the world is. It feels like I’m just watching this stuff happen to me like a viewer—rather than it actually happening to me—because I’m just sitting in my house watching all of these people online starting to know who the band is. It’s a bizarre feeling, and you worry about messing it up.” **“Halcyon”** “This one’s Michael’s favorite song. Like ‘Sun Killer,’ I just love how dramatic it is. It’s a big heavyweight of a song, and it gives me a lot of room with my singing range. Most of these songs are me thinking about not wanting to mess up and not wanting to get my little spirit crushed. This one is me looking at all those successful people and the version of me that’s going to compromise everything so that they can be one of those people.” **“Circle With Me”** “This is the newest song on the record, and it was written in the studio. Michael wrote it in an afternoon. Some of the darker and dramatic parts remind me of Evanescence, but on the chorus I took reference from Tears for Fears. So, it’s this weird little song, but it really kind of unlocked a lot of creativity in us to make all of our songs better. We ended up putting it out first because it really represents how we’re feeling about our band right now.” **“Constance”** “Just as ‘Sun Killer’ was always to be the opener and ‘Holy Roller’ was always meant as the middle point, followed by ‘Eternal Blue,’ ‘Constance’ was always meant to be the last song. But the lyrics didn’t really start to form until last year when my grandma passed away. Writing this song just helped me think about the feelings of losing someone, and it’s dedicated to her because she always wanted me to put out a song that doesn’t have screaming in it.”

In a genre that can be unkind towards too much change, Architects\' ninth album aims to challenge that mindset. \"We can do whatever we want,\" drummer and primary songwriter Dan Searle tells Apple Music. \"The ultimate question is, do we like it? And the answer is yes.\" *For Those That Wish to Exist* showcases the British quintet taking new risks, such as incorporating an orchestral approach into their abrasive sound (\"Dead Butterflies\" and \"An Ordinary Extinction\"), expanding vocalist Sam Carter\'s range beyond just screaming (\"Flight Without Feathers\" and \"Demi God\"), and focusing more on accountability and less on nihilism. \"I just realize that there might be a universe that prevents us from having control, taking the reins to see what\'s going on in the world,\" explains Searle. \"I wanted it to be something a little bit more responsible. I began to question why I was so passive in my role in making the world a better place.\" Below, Searle walks us through *For Those That Wish to Exist*\'s 15 tracks. **Do You Dream of Armageddon?** “It\'s lyrically alluding to a sense that we\'re all in the same boat, and we\'re heading in that direction. And it doesn\'t feature anyone in the band except Sam.” **Black Lungs** “I really felt like it was the only way to open the record. I love the chorus. It really is like a showcase of every style. It\'s easing you into the record, because we stray from the usual path a number of times.” **Giving Blood** “When the song originally came together, it was just drums and synth. The guitars came later. Obviously, a lot of it is still a heavy rock song. But this is sort of your first taste of the band moving into new water, so to speak.” **Discourse Is Dead** “This is a good song to make enemies with because it\'s kind of a critique of just not speaking to each other and trying to move forward. But I know that compromise is not popular at the moment. People are more polarized than ever. And it\'s leading us further away from creating a better world.” **Dead Butterflies** “It starts just with the strings and the bass. We planned around those ideas and developed it into something that worked for the band. It sat around for ages on the shelf, and eventually we sat down with it and worked it out. I think it\'s one of the best songs on the record.” **An Ordinary Extinction** “Probably the heaviest part of the record despite the trippy nature of this song. It\'s still very Architects, but then you get tossed into the verse straight away and it\'s something completely different again. It\'s super heavy and it\'s in a key that fits Sam\'s voice.” **Impermanence** “It just felt like a stompy end-of-the-world song. And kind of thematically leading on from where we left off in \[2018\'s\] *Holy Hell*, a little bit more concentration about mortality and the nature of our existence.” **Flight Without Feathers** “This is like the pit stop on the record almost. I wanted to write a song that was just basslines, so I wrote all the vocals and built the rest of the song around it. It’s one of three songs on the record without any drums—without me actually performing on it at all. So it\'s really got to shine just on the quality of the basic parts in it.” **Little Wonder** “We all see what is wrong with the world, but at the same time we avoid wanting to see it because we all want an easy life. I think the lyrics are a little bit of a cheeky nod to the fact that this song is so stylistically different for us.” **Animals** “This song went from text message to done in about 48 hours, and it was just one of those magical moments. And if we tried to make an 11-track record, we would have never gotten to this song. I\'m so glad that we did, because I think it is probably the best Architects song.” **Libertine** “We thought the record needed something like this—something big and aggressive, something with a little bit of space in it. And in the end, it\'s an absolutely cool album track.” **Goliath** “I thought this sounded just like a metal Biffy Clyro song and we\'ve got to try to get Simon \[Neil\] on it. We just thought it\'d be cool to have the singer of one of UK\'s biggest rock bands singing over one of the heaviest parts of the record. It\'s kind of all over the place.” **Demi God** “It\'s really dark and it\'s a bit of a late jam on the record that I\'m really proud of. I felt like I didn\'t want to create a long record that just fizzles out, I wanted it to stay stronger and still be providing interesting surprises throughout.” **Meteor** “There\'s no point in pretending that this song isn\'t an arena rock song, because it is an arena rock song. We typically play in a genre where arena rock is forbidden and taboo. So this song is probably the boldest track on the record. And yes, this song is very much about us knowing that we\'re heading for disaster.” **Dying Is Absolutely Safe** “I decided that it should be an acoustic track because it felt like something that the record hadn\'t stepped into. But I think fans will get it. I think there\'s something in there that\'s pretty special.”

The gothic folk musician’s pitch-dark compositions are typically electric guitar-forward and swathed in reverb. Her fifth solo album, instead, focuses on the piano, an instrument that serves as a portal to Rundle’s childhood, minus the cozy nostalgia: “Down at the methadone clinic we waited/Hoping to take home your cure,” she sings on the downcast “Blooms of Oblivion,” and elsewhere, on “Body,” she watches her grandmother’s corpse be wheeled away. Plumbing the depths of a lifetime of trauma makes for a devastating affair, haunting in its vulnerability; that the collection was recorded live and acoustically, without any added effects, only adds to its intensity.

On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”

“It happened by accident,” Halsey tells Apple Music of their fourth full-length. “I wasn\'t trying to make a political record, or a record that was drowning in its own profundity—I was just writing about how I feel. And I happen to be experiencing something that is very nuanced and very complicated.” Written while they were pregnant with their first child, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* finds the pop superstar sifting through dark thoughts and deep fears, offering a picture of maternity that fully acknowledges its emotional and physical realities—what it might mean for one’s body, one’s sense of purpose and self. “The reason that the album has sort of this horror theme is because this experience, in a way, has its horrors,” Halsey says. “I think everyone who has heard me yearn for motherhood for so long would have expected me to write an album that was full of gratitude. Instead, I was like, ‘No, this shit is so scary and so horrifying. My body\'s changing and I have no control over anything.’ Pregnancy for some women is a dream—and for some people it’s a fucking nightmare. That\'s the thing that nobody else talks about.” To capture a sound that reflected the album’s natural sense of conflict, Halsey reached out to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “I wanted cinematic, really unsettling production,” they say. “They wanted to know if I was willing to take the risk—I was.” A clear departure from the psychedelic softness of 2020’s *Manic*, the album showcases their influence from the start: in the negative space and 10-ton piano notes of “The Tradition,” the smoggy atmospherics of “Bells in Santa Fe,” the howling guitars of “Easier Than Lying,” the feverish synths of “I am not a woman, I’m a god.” Lyrically, Halsey says, it’s like an emptying of her emotional vault—“expressions of guilt or insecurity, stories of sexual promiscuity or self-destruction”—and a coming to terms with who they have been before becoming responsible for someone else; its fury is a response to an ancient dilemma, as they’ve experienced it. “I think being pregnant in the public eye is a really difficult thing, because as a performer, so much of your identity is predicated on being sexually desirable,” they say. “Socially, women have been reduced to two categories: You are the Madonna or the whore. So if you are sexually desirable or a sexual being, you\'re unfit for motherhood. But as soon as you are motherly or maternal and somebody does want you as the mother of their child, you\'re unfuckable. Those are your options; those things are not compatible, and they haven’t been for centuries.” But there are feelings of resolution as well. Recorded in conjunction with the shooting of a companion film, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* is an album that’s meant to document Halsey’s transformation. And at its conclusion is “Ya’aburnee”—Arabic for “you bury me”—a sparse love song to both their baby and partner. Just the sound of their voice and a muted guitar, it’s one of the most powerful songs Halsey has written to date. “I start this journey with ‘Okay, fine—if I can\'t have love, then I want power,’” they say. “If I can\'t have a relationship, I\'m going to work. If I can\'t be loved interpersonally, I\'m going to be loved by millions on the internet, or I\'m going to crave attention elsewhere. I\'m so steadfast with this mentality, and then comes this baby. The irony is that the most power I\'ve ever had is in my agency, being able to choose. You realize, by the end of the record, I chose love.”

As Amyl and the Sniffers came off the road in late 2019, they moved into a house together in Melbourne. “It had lime green walls and mice,” frontwoman Amy Taylor tells Apple Music. “Three bedrooms and a shed out back that we took turns sleeping in. We knew we were going to come back for a long period of time to write. We just didn’t know how long.” Months later, as the bushfires gave way to a global pandemic, the Aussie punk outfit found themselves well-prepared for lockdown. “We’ve always kind of just been in each other’s pocket, forever and always,” Taylor says. “We’ve toured everywhere, been housemates, been in a van, and shared hotel rooms. We’re one person.” With all rehearsal studios closed, they rented a nearby storage unit where they could workshop the follow-up to their ARIA-winning, self-titled debut. The acoustics were so harsh and the PA so loud that guitarist Dec Martens says, “I never really heard any of Amy’s lyrics until they were recorded later on. She could’ve been singing about whatever, and I would have gone along with it, really.” And though *Comfort to Me* shows a more serious and personal side—as well as a range of influences that spans hardcore, power pop, and ’70s folk—that’s not necessarily a byproduct of living through a series of catastrophes. “I was pretty depressed,” Taylor says. “It’s hard to know what was the pandemic and what was just my brain. Even though you can’t travel and you can’t see people, life still just happens. I could look through last year and, really, it’s like the same amount of good and bad stuff happened, but in a different way. You’re just always feeling stuff.” Here, Taylor and Martens take us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Guided by Angels”** Amy Taylor: “I feel like, as a band, everyone thinks we’re just funny all the time. And we are funny and I love to laugh, but we also are full-spectrum humans who think about serious stuff as well, and I like that one because it’s kind of cryptic and poetic and a bit more dense. It’s not just, like, ‘Yee-haw, let’s punch a wall,’ which there’s plenty of and I also really love. We’re showing our range a little bit.” **“Freaks to the Front”** AT: “We must’ve written that before COVID. That’s absolutely a live-experience song and we’re such a live band—that’s our whole setup. We probably have more skills playing live than we do making music. It’s the energy that is contagious, and that one’s just kind of encouraging all kind of freaks, all kind of people: If you’re rich or poor or smart or fat or ugly or nice or mean, everyone just represent yourself and have a good time.” **“Choices”** Dec Martens: “\[Bassist\] Gus \[Romer\] is really into hardcore at the moment, and he wanted a really animalistic, straight-up hardcore song.” AT: “Growing up, I went to a fair handful of hardcore shows, and I personally liked the aggression of a hardcore show. In the audience, people kind of grabbing each other and chucking each other down, but then also pulling each other up and helping each other. I also just really like music that makes me feel angry. I constantly am getting unsolicited advice—or women, in general, are constantly getting told how to live and what to do. Everybody around the world is, and sometimes it’s really helpful—and I don’t discount that—but other times it’s just like, ‘Let me just fucking figure it out myself, and don’t tell me what kind of choices I can and can’t make, because it’s my flesh sack and I’ll do what I want with it.’” **“Hertz”** AT: “I think I started writing it at the start of 2020, pre-lockdown. But it’s funny now, because currently, being in lockdown again, I’m literally dying. I just want to get to the country and fucking not be in the city. So, the lyrics have really just come to fruition. I was thinking about somebody that I wasn’t really with at the time. It’s that feeling of feeling suffocated—you just want to look at the sky, just be in nature, and just be alive.” **“No More Tears”** DM: “I was really inspired by this ’70s album called *No Other* by Gene Clark, which isn’t very punk or rock. But I just played this at a faster tempo.” AT: “And also inspired heaps by the Sunnyboys, an Australian power pop band. Last year was really tough for me, and that song’s about how much I was struggling with heaps of different shit and trying to, I guess, try and make relationships work. I was just feeling not very lovable, because I’m all fucked in the head, but I’m also trying to make it work. It’s a pretty personal song.” **“Knifey”** AT: “It’s about my experience—and I’m sure lots of other people’s experience—of feeling safe to walk home at night. The world’s different for people like me and chicks and stuff: You can carry a weapon and if somebody does something awful and you react, it comes back to you. I remember when I was a kid, being like, ‘Dad, I want to get a knife,’ and he was like, ‘You can’t get a knife because you’ll kill someone and go to jail.’ But so be it. If somebody wants to have a go, I’m very happy to react negatively. At the start, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do these lyrics. I don’t know if I’d want to play that song live.’ It’s probably the only song that I’ve ever really felt like that about. It hit up the boys in the band in an emotional way. They were like, ‘Fuck, this is powerful. Makes me cry and shit,’ and I was like, ‘That’s pretty dope.’” **“Don’t Need a C\*\*t (Like You to Love Me)”** AT: “It’s a fuck-you song. When I’m saying, ‘Don’t need a c\*\*t like you to love me,’ it’s pretty much just any c\*\*t that I don’t like in general. There could be some fucking piss-weak review of us or if I worked at a job and there was a crap fucking customer—it’s all of that. I wasn’t thinking about a particular bloke, although there’s many that I feel like that about.” **“Snakes”** “A bit of autobiography, an ode to my childhood. I grew up in a small town near the coast—kind of bogan, kind of hippy. I grew up on three acres, and I grew up in a shed with my sister, mom, and dad until I was about nine or 10, and we all shared a bedroom and would use the bath water to wash our clothes and then that same water to water the plants. Dad used to bring us toys home from the tip and we’d go swimming in the storms and there was snakes everywhere. There was snakes, literally, in the bedroom and the chick pens, and there’d be snakes killing the cats and snakes at school—and this song’s about that.”

Most Mastodon fans probably knew it was only a matter of time before the band dropped a double album. The Atlanta metal squad’s intricate songs and dazzling prog tendencies have been begging for the Pink Floyd treatment for years—and the pandemic’s enforced downtime provided them with the window to do it. “With the extra time to work on material, we just kept writing,” Mastodon drummer, co-vocalist, and lyricist Brann Dailor tells Apple Music. “When we got to the point where we had 20 ideas that were pretty fleshed out, we said, ‘We need to stop now.’ From there, it was hard even narrowing it down to 15 songs, so I’m not sure what we would’ve done if we’d needed to make a single album.” Thematically, *Hushed and Grim* largely deals with the death of Mastodon’s longtime friend and manager Nick John, who was taken by cancer in 2018. “It’s definitely a representation of the time period we went through,” Dailor says. “The pandemic, Nick John’s passing, and other things that transpired for us during that time.” Below, he details some key tracks from the record. **“Pain With an Anchor”** “I think that\'s probably one of the first songs that came about for the album. I strung a couple of riffs together, and then \[guitarist\] Bill \[Kelliher\] and I sat down in his basement and combined a few more. He came up with that big, heavy riff at the end and all that cool stuff in the bridge. I added these weird vocal swells—and some thunderclaps—underneath to make it more evil and sinister. The drum intro didn’t come until much later, when we were about to cut it for real. I just had this idea to do this quads intro thing, which sort of cemented it as being the first song on the record.” **“More Than I Could Chew”** “That’s a big Bill riff. I really drove it straight on the drums and I didn’t deviate too much from that, which is a little bit different for me. I’m more of a frantic player, usually. The kick pattern also opened up a lane for me to sing over the top of it. I don’t think Bill was really expecting there to be this higher, soaring vocal over that. \[Bassist\] Troy \[Sanders\] came up with that last riff, the one that \[guitarist\] Brent \[Hinds\] solos over. I just love that part. Troy hasn’t really been a big writer in the band, but this time around he wrote four or five tracks.” **“The Beast”** “This is one of Brent’s, and I wrote some lyrics for him. It’s got that opening country guitar lick and then it goes into what seems like a blues shuffle to me. Brent’s voice is just awesome there—I think it’s really soulful and bluesy. And then it moves into sort of a proggy King Crimson-type part that leads into Marcus King’s solo, which I love. Brent and Marcus are good friends, so it was cool to bring Marcus in to do that. To me, it’s a real proggy-sounding solo and it really flexes Marcus’ talents as a masterful guitar player. And it’s cool for Brent to hand the reins over like that, being an amazing soloist himself.” **“Teardrinker”** “This is a simple two-part guitar thing I came up with on an acoustic. I’m not the most talented guitar player, so most of what I write is pretty simple—and then I turn it over to Bill to get the magic happening. I wrote this at a time when it wasn’t going well for me. I was in a dark place. I was actually living in this apartment that had no sofa, no TV—just an acoustic guitar and a bed. I was hijacking a bit of service off my phone so I could try to watch some shows on my iPad. It was a rough time, but I’m okay now. So it’s a big emotional song, but it turned out pretty catchy.” **“Pushing the Tides”** “There’s not a lot of rippers on this album, but this is a ripper that just feels good to play. It’s another one that came from sitting in Bill’s basement. The first riff reminds me of early AmRep stuff like Chokebore, Guzzard, or early-’90s Barkmarket maybe. There’s some prog influence there, some Killing Joke—all that stuff we’re into, being kids of the ’90s. We sort of came from that whole scene of underground, mathy stuff that was below the upper echelons of grunge. So it’s cool when that stuff pops up. It’s a fun song with a big chorus.” **“Dagger”** “Once you’ve decided that you’re making a double album, you can sprawl out a bit. I don’t know that this song would’ve been as cool as it ended up being if we didn’t go down the rabbit hole with it. We got a sarangi player, and my friend Dave Witte from Municipal Waste came in to do some percussion on these tribal drums and hunks of metal. Then we had our buddy come in and play some crazy Moog at the end. I’m stoked on it, but if it wasn’t for Troy’s voice, you’d have a hard time convincing even a Mastodon fan that this was a Mastodon song.” **“Had It All”** “This is an important song, and very Nick John-centric. He probably shows up in the lyrics of every song, but this one is specifically aimed at his situation. To have Kim Thayil do the solo was amazing, because Soundgarden was one of Nick’s favorite bands. And what a cool turn of events that Troy’s mom got to virtually jam on French horn with Kim on this one. Kim did a really beautiful, heart-wrenching solo, and then Troy’s mom added another beautiful texture with a nice little horn arrangement. This is the closest I think we’ve come to a ballad, I think, but it’s an emotional song for us. The only bummer is that Nick isn’t here to hear it.” **“Gigantium”** “This is another one I wrote when I was in that apartment. I call it the Sadness Hole. I don’t want to get into why I was there, but just to be clear, I wasn’t strung out on drugs or anything like that. It was a personal time. But the last riff really sounded like the end of something. It’s sad-sounding, but there’s also some hope there. So we put some string arrangements on it and Brent did this really beautiful guitar solo. The last line is for Nick John: ‘The mountains we made in the distance will be with us forever.’ I think it’s a beautiful farewell.”

After releasing their ninth album in April 2020, Floridian metal veterans Trivium were faced with the same touring prospects as everyone else at the dawn of the COVID era: none to speak of. So, they hunkered down and began work on *In the Court of the Dragon*. “Knowing that it was going to be album 10, we all realized it was very significant,” bassist Paolo Gregoletto tells Apple Music. “We knew it was a milestone, so it had to live up to that.” As such, Gregoletto and his bandmates—guitarist/vocalist Matt Heafy, guitarist Corey Beaulieu, and drummer Alex Bent—settled on a sufficiently epic lyrical theme: creating their own myths. “We took inspiration from existing mythology and made our own thing,” he says. “We wanted the whole album to feel as though the themes and characters are all part of one story.” Below, he details each track. **“X”** “We opened the last record with ‘IX’ because it was our ninth album, and I feel like this record and our last one are connected in some way—almost like a double album—because that one was released at the beginning of the pandemic and this one was made during it. We had worked with Ihsahn before on the intro for *Silence in the Snow*, and he created the incredible intro for this record too. He also helped us with orchestration and synths to give the other songs some textures as well.” **“In the Court of the Dragon”** “We had this melody from a live soundcheck we did in Tokyo in 2008 or 2009, and Corey really wanted to use it on a new song. That melody led to the main riff, the one that kicks in right away. Then we wrote the rest of the song and realized that we didn’t need that melody anymore, because it didn’t fit. So, it inspired the song and then went away. Once the song came together in the jam room, it became very apparent that it would probably be the opening track and the title track.” **“Like a Sword Over Damocles”** “This was how we got into the whole mythmaking theme. Corey had a demo called ‘Sword Over Damocles,’ and I remembered reading the story of Damocles when I was in school. Once we realized we were going to be creating our own myths for the lyrics, we wrote about a character dealing with the weight and anxiety of power—having those things hanging over you and always having your life in the balance of the actions you take. So, it’s not a retelling of the story of Damocles, but we used those themes.” **“Feast of Fire”** “The song that you hear as ‘Feast of Fire’ on the album came out of the middle section of the demo, which was much faster. We started changing it in the studio, which is way late in the process for us and not something we would normally do. But I’m glad we did because it became something a little different for us—we took this trashy riff and slowed it down, so it feels like something new. Then that melody singing part just kind of came out of nowhere and it started feeling like a definite single.” **“A Crisis of Revelation”** “This is a song that Matt brought in. The first time we jammed it, it was a little more \[2003’s\] Ember to Inferno style. If you know our band, you probably know what I’m talking about. We recorded a demo that way, but when we came back a month later, I felt like the song was calling out to be really fast—more of a thrashy Ascendancy style mixed with the newer style that Alex really brings to our band. So, we scrapped the demo and started playing it more intense, which really made it come together. There’s also a cool key change at the end, which makes the part feel bigger.” **“The Shadow of the Abattoir”** “I had the middle-section riffs for this when I was still living in Chicago in April of last year. We were stuck at home like everyone else, not touring, so I was writing a lot. Then I moved back to Florida, and I was on my Twitch stream, and I started playing these bass chords that I really liked. This song was calling out to be a big epic, so we got Ihsahn to add some layers in the first half.” **“No Way Back Just Through”** “This came from a demo I did for the last record that we never jammed, because we pretty much had all the songs we needed at that point. It’s got a real driving double-bass part that reminds me of ‘Painkiller’ by Judas Priest. Lyrically, nothing on this record deals with any of the things that have been happening in the real world because I think we wanted to steer clear of that stuff. But I did see an article about the pandemic that said there’s no way to turn back through this. We just have to get through it and continue forward. It just felt right for this song.” **“Fall Into Your Hands”** “This is the first song we worked on together, so it really set the pace for this record. I think the reason we have so many epic proggy parts on this record is because we realized how much fun that stuff is to write when we put together this song. At the time, we didn’t have any touring set up, nothing on the horizon except making this record, so maybe this song reflects that. And the drum part on the intro is just crazy. I watched Alex record it, and I still don’t know how he plays it because it sounds like there’s more hands hitting things than he has.” **“From Dawn to Decadence”** “Matt brought in some of the riffs for this one, and I got the title from a history book. It was a later song in the process, and those are always the toughest songs to figure out, because you’ve got so much material already and you’re trying not to step on any of the other songs. You’re trying to be creative and dynamic, so we did a lot of experimenting with this one as far as the tempo and the vocals. Even up to the last minute, we were experimenting with production tricks for the vocal sound on the verses. It was a very tough song to finalize.” **“The Phalanx”** “Anyone who thinks this song reminds them of something from the \[2008\] *Shogun* album, well, you are correct. It comes from a demo from that album, and it was almost on the record. The original middle section, however, was taken out and put onto the song ‘Torn Between’ on that album. So, we were left with a really cool Part A and Part C. When we decided to write a new middle section, it became a total riff-fest—Corey, Matt, and I all came up with riffs that flowed together. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, it’s a good metaphor for where our sound has settled in for the last few records—a good link between the old and the new.”

“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.”

**RELEASE DATE AUGUST 27TH** LA-based rockers The Bronx return for their sixth studio album 'Bronx VI' which comes out worldwide on Cooking Vinyl August 27th. Bronx VI builds on the legacy The Bronx has established in its near two-decade existence, but which definitely proves the door to what’s next has not just been kicked down, but chopped up and burned to a cinder. Yes, the first four tracks – “White Shadow”, “Superbloom”, “Watering The Well” and “Curb Feelers” – bristles with the wild and untamed energy that’s defined the band from the off, but then – all of a sudden, as “Peace Pipe” kicks in – the pace and mood shifts to something a little less aggressive. Elsewhere, “Mexican Summer” and its (relatively) chilled-out mariachi vibes serve as an homage to the band’s alter-ego, Mariachi El Bronx (and was written while that incarnation of the band was on tour), while fatalistic closer “Participation Trophy” masks the Caughthran’s existential dread behind searing riffs and a catchy, defiant and exuberant melody. “The feelings I got when writing for this sixth record is the same type of feeling I got writing “Heart Attack American”. It all comes from the same place and it’s all still 100% genuine and real. Believe me – I’m still feeling the raw emotion that I felt when this band first started. That’s just who I am, that’s who we are as people. You can’t fake stuff like that when it comes to music or art. You have to stay connected. You’ve just got to be real” - Matt Caughthran, vocalist. Bronx VI was produced by Joe Baressi (Melvins, Tool, Bad Religion).

*The Myth of the Happily Ever After* is a bold name for the follow-up to Biffy Clyro’s 2020 album, *A Celebration of Endings*. But that’s just how things played out. If *A Celebration* explored the band’s optimism that things could only get better—socially, politically, and for our planet—*The Myth* is about realizing, with the arrival of the global pandemic, that rock bottom hadn’t been reached after all. “There was a strength to *A Celebration of Endings* but also, looking back, a naivete,” the band’s frontman Simon Neil tells Apple Music. “This album is a lot more vulnerable, a lot more in the middle of mayhem. It’s about trying to make sense of it all. It felt important to put this music out while we’re still going through this, because it’s a record of the moment.” Released just over a year after *A Celebration*, *The Myth* was unexpected—not least for the band, who had only initially been planning to turn some leftover tracks into a companion piece. But working alongside *Balance, Not Symmetry* collaborator Adam Noble from their farm-studio in Scotland, the band realized in late 2020 that album number nine was taking shape. “We didn’t tell the record label or anything that we were working on new music,” admits Neil (Biffy’s other members are twin brothers Ben and James Johnston). You’ll hear that liberation all over *The Myth of the Happily Ever After*, as the band lets loose on sprawling, multi-act tracks (“Holy Water,” “Separate Missions”) and strides toward new territory via synths and electro. “It was really just about friends being in a room together,” says Neil. “Things can become complicated when you’ve been doing it for so long. To know that we still have that magic together, and that joy, is just fantastic.” Read on as he guides us through Biffy Clyro’s ninth album, track by track. **“DumDum”** “This was one of the tracks that kick-started the record. Musically, it’s something out of left field for us. I sampled all my vocals and created these soft sounds, which was a different way of writing. The song is about my exasperation that people are so sure of themselves. Especially in this world that we live in, I don’t know how anyone can be so convinced that what they believe is the only way to live.” **“A Hunger in Your Haunt”** “The title of this song was a phrase I heard a couple of years ago, and it just stuck with me. I just thought it was a beautiful way to describe your inner fire—your get-up-and-go. If life’s tough, you can find yourself just digging your way down. This song is about shaking off that negativity and finding a reason to get a smile on your face and be there for the people you care about. I’ve never done any talk-singing, and this was the song to do it on, because whenever I found a melody, it felt like it was taking away from it.” **“Denier”** “It’s the story of abusers in general: They do horrific things and then pretend that they’re the victim. A real manipulator can really twist things, and I fucking hate that. That’s what this song is about, and it’s got those sinister aspects to it.” **“Separate Missions”** “I was listening to a lot of The Cure over lockdown and it’s always two and a half minutes before Robert Smith starts singing. I thought, ‘We’ve never done that.’ The birth of this song was the idea of making mood music for a while, something a bit sinister, a little bit tense. And the song is, lyrically, probably closest to some of the sentiments in *A Celebration of Endings*, which is just about finding out that you and someone that you’ve been close to your whole life are on different paths. It felt like a new step for us, musically.” **“Witch’s Cup”** “This is a carnival song about cults. Like everyone else in lockdown, I watched a lot of shit telly, and I went down a lot of cult wormholes on YouTube. I’m in awe—and also feel a bit sorry—for people who can put their life into someone else’s hands, who can selflessly give themselves over. I find that extremely dangerous. A theme in this whole record is people who are convinced of shit and have blind faith, and nothing existing out of that.” **“Holy Water”** “I had the full first half of this written about 18 months ago, but it wasn’t quite ready for *A Celebration*. I already had the lyrics about ‘Sinner’s in a hospital room/The saint is in the bed.’ When the pandemic happened, it was like the universe had talked to me. Suddenly, the song seemed very important. It was originally about climate change and running out of resources, but then it evolved into something about the moment we were in and lockdown. I wanted the ending to sound the exact opposite to the start. I wanted it to sound like the world was falling down. Because, at points, it was.” **“Errors in the History of God”** “This is a bit of a misanthropic song, to be honest. Humanity, we’re our own kind of disease: We take everything, we use up all the resources, and then we move on to the next thing. I include myself as well, but it’s just like, ‘That’s not what we’re here for.’ I don’t want this to be an oppressive song, but the attitude is, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ I do feel like we\'re trolling our own planet, which is insane.” **“Haru Urara”** “There was this wonderful story of a horse in Japan, and it lost, like, 130 races. It was the worst-performing racehorse in the history of the world. But in his last race, everyone was convinced it was going to win, so thousands and thousands of people from all over Japan went to this small town to see the horse win in its final race. Of course, it came dead last. But what a wonderful, optimistic outlook. Nothing’s a write-off—that’s what this song’s about.” **“Unknown Male 01”** “I was just sitting at the piano one day, playing around, and then just had these simple chords and melody. Not every idea you come up with feels special, but this did. This song is about losing people and about male suicide. Unfortunately, our friend Scott \[Hutchison, of Frightened Rabbit\] passed away, and that’s something that’s been sticking with me a lot. I think that’s why this song ended up mattering so much to me, and why I wanted it to be something more than just a two-minute piano song. It’s got every single part of what we do: loops, acoustic guitars, piano, riffs, weird shit. Because if I’m talking about my depression or having lost someone, I want to show every aspect of what that is. Darkness and depression aren’t linear things.” **“Existed”** “This is a simple song musically, and it’s about forgiveness and trying to grow to be a better person. It’s about not being afraid to make mistakes in life, because that’s what life is. Unless people have done something truly heinous, I think they deserve second chances. This song was another one that made me realize something new was coming out of me. This song came out really fast—literally in one day. I just felt magic in it.” **“Slurpy Sleep Sleep”** “I wanted people to finish this song and laugh. It follows some real moments of self-doubt and some really heavy subjects. I wanted the musicality of this to carry people home. But this song is also about making the most of what we have. Because what the last year has taught me is that we can’t take anything for granted.”

In March 2020, Beartooth founder Caleb Shomo had almost all the music written for the Ohio metalcore band’s fourth album. But he hadn’t begun writing lyrics when the pandemic triggered lockdowns around the globe. As a result, *Below* took on a very different lyrical tone than it otherwise might have. “This album really is like a timestamp of lockdown in a way,” he tells Apple Music. “It’s about all the stuff that gets buried inside you that you don’t really deal with, but that comes boiling back up due to all the isolation. It’s about slowly losing your mind over time.” To mirror this mindset, Shomo sequenced the songs to gradually get darker as the album progresses. “I tried to reflect my mental state during lockdown,” he says. “As it went on longer and longer, I was breaking down more and more.” Below, he discusses some key tracks from *Below*. **“Devastation”** “I was in a hotel room on a day off on the Motionless in White co-headlining tour, and my buddy gave me this distortion pedal. I had this little recording setup, and I just remember making this guitar sound, and then the next thing I know, the music for the song is written. It really captured everything I was going for—the energy and the speed, but also the big riffs and the breakdown-y stuff. But the lyrics are just incredibly defeating. I wrote them knowing this song was written for the live show, but we had no idea when that was ever going to happen again. So, it’s just me coping with that.” **“The Past Is Dead”** “This was the first complete song I wrote for the album, in November 2019, so it’s been around for a while. It was kind of the discovery of what I wanted to do sonically with the album. I found all the guitar tones, and musically it felt really well-built. It was the catalyst for the rest of the songs. In the video, we have Barry, who is our new mascot dude. He represents all the things that are buried below, all the stuff that came out of lockdown and this whole insane year. He’s very heavily influenced by Iron Maiden’s mascot, Eddie.” **“Fed Up”** “I had a really fun time making that song. I’m a really big Foo Fighters fan, and I like that ’90s, garage-y, just driving-the-whole-time kind of sound. It’s got pretty much one drumbeat throughout the majority of the song. I just wanted it to sound kind of dirty, grungy, too loud, and over the top. Like the majority of the songs, the lyrics came out of one of those days in the middle of lockdown where it’s like, ‘I’m so sick of this, and all I want to do is rock again.’” **“Hell of It”** “This was another very live-centered one. I wrote that on that Motionless in White tour as well—at least all the music. I was probably listening to Motörhead and wanted something with that kind of groove. I just wanted the guitars to kind of growl, so I wrote really simple riffs in the breakdowns and stuff. It’s got a super-basic drumbeat behind it and it’s just a good time, plain and simple.” **“The Last Riff”** “This is my favorite song on the record, and probably my favorite closing track we’ve ever done. It’s the first time Beartooth’s ever done a fully instrumental song. With all the previous records, the final song takes a big shift. It’s usually some sort of super-deep, personal, emotional song that’s all focused on the vocals. But I just wasn’t in the mood for that. I felt so beat down that I didn’t have anything left in the tank, lyrically. So, I just wrote a really long, slow instrumental. And in a weird way, it is an incredibly emotional song. To be able to do that without any lyrics was really cool.”

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.”

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.”

Soon after completing their biggest-ever tour in early 2020, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes (Carter and bandmate Dean Richardson) sought to capitalize on the jubilation and went off to Thorpe Forest in Norfolk to begin writing a new record. “Within two weeks of that session, the whole world had started shutting down and it was just chaos,” Carter tells Apple Music. From there, the duo decamped to locked-down London and got to work on their fourth album. Titled *Sticky*, it’s a record that pairs the feeling of triumph from the UK Top 5 success of their third album, 2019’s *End of Suffering*, with a punky defiance, offering up snapshots of pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, and mid-pandemic Britain in the form of anthemic, rattling rock. “I was constantly writing about energy and everything that was lost,” says Carter. “I always wanted it to be more of a celebratory album rather than a lockdown album. That was the most fun part: figuring out what I wanted to talk about that I was really fucking excited about getting back in my life—essentially all the ways that you can get sticky.” Making a record while the world was at a standstill had an effect in other ways. It’s Carter and Richardson’s most collaborative effort, featuring guest appearances from Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, IDLES’ Joe Talbot, experimental pop artist Lynks, and Essex rocker Cassyette. “We saw the opportunity to be like, ‘If we call people now, they won’t be on tour, they’re at home,’” says Richardson. “I produced the record, so we had the ability to stay late and get someone down. We had no restrictions.” Let the duo take you through the world of *Sticky*, track by track. **“Sticky”** Frank Carter: “This is about me doing this slow transition from the countryside to Hoxton, London, in the middle of a pandemic. Moving further away from my family but closer to my work—and moving into the belly of the beast at a time when there was no one else around. The song takes a pretty brutal look at who I was when everything was taken away from me, just kicking around with too much time on my hands, up to no good at three in the morning with all the other fucking foxes. If you’re going to put that anywhere on the record, you might as well put it at the front.” **“Cupid’s Arrow”** FC: “This is about falling in love with someone a little bit quicker than they fall in love with you—and by that, I mean they never do. We\'ve all had those weird dating app dates where you find yourself at one in the morning having a panic attack in someone’s bed, like, ‘Have you got any CBD or anything?’ It’s about how emotions are thoughts and feelings but they can feel so physical.” Dean Richardson: “This is one of the ones that came from the early cabin sessions. When we made it, we were like, ‘This is what this record should sound like.’ It got us really excited.” **“Bang Bang” (feat. Lynks)** FC: “It’s about how class A drugs just have such a tremendous effect on your life in good and bad ways. I was writing it from the perspective of this office worker who’s just biding his time, gets to Thursday and he’s already tipping a bit, and by Friday at 8 pm, he’s already off the rails, and then 8 am Monday morning, he’s still off the rails, but he’s back in the office. Lynks just got it. His lyrics are some of my favorite on the album, and that is incredibly frustrating.” **“Take It to the Brink”** DR: “This one technically predates the album. We’d written this wild psychedelic version of the verse, and took a second dive at it when we were in the midst of everything and got it to feel like it fits in the world of *Sticky*.” FC: “The song is about doing too much all the time and how if there’s one thing you’re consistently good at, it’s pushing it over the edge—and that’s us all the time.” **“My Town” (feat. Joe Talbot)** FC: “I was trying to find a decent analogy for the collective mental health of not just London, but all the smaller towns that I was nipping to and from during the pandemic to see family or pick up my daughter. Without life, you could really start seeing those places fall apart, and that was a good reflection of how everybody in those towns was feeling. I reached out to Joe Talbot because I really needed someone to help me push it.” **“Go Get a Tattoo” (feat. Lynks)** DR: “We always have one every record and it’s always the main single. For whatever reason, we are gluttons for punishment and we fight against it, but it finds its way on.” FC: “The resistance is because we just know: We can hear that it’s probably the closest we’ll get to a hit, that’s got all the right things in the right place. Francis Bacon used to dismantle and destroy his most perfect paintings. Set it on fire and throw it in a bin.” **“Off With His Head” (feat. Cassyette)** FC: “It’s about the patriarchal chokehold on the world and how brutal it is to watch in yourself. It’s so ingrained in me and I’m having to do quite a lot of work to undo it all the time and there are times where I completely fail and it is really frustrating. So naturally I was like, ‘We’ve got to do it with a really strong female vocal, or at least someone that is actively trying to chop up the patriarchy every day.’ Cassyette is walking, talking rock ’n’ roll. She’s got the greatest voice, the greatest look. She just embodies it. She rocked up at 9 am, smoked a fag, and just went in and started howling. She nailed it and I hadn’t even had my breakfast.” **“Cobra Queen”** FC: “This kind of goes hand in hand with ‘Cupid’s Arrow.’ It’s about when you’re chasing down this unrequited love and falling in love with the wrong people. You never know when that’s happening until it’s happened. It’s about the intoxication, it’s like a cobra being in the room. It’s beautiful. It’s fucking deadly, but you just don’t take your eyes off it.” **“Rat Race”** FC: “‘Rat Race’ is about the first year of lockdown and how savage and *Groundhog Day* it was for everybody. The pandemic was an equalizer for most humans. When we get to the end of the pandemic, it’s as if every rat has completed the race and now they’ve got a choice: Do you want to go back in the maze or do you want to go into something else? The sad thing is a lot of people will go back in the maze.” **“Original Sin” (feat. Bobby Gillespie)** FC: “Bobby Gillespie is a fucking living legend. He’s a hero, the ultimate rock star. He’s just pure inspiration. Primal Scream have written some of the best rock ’n’ roll songs ever.” DR: “Whether we mean to or not, we leave our records on this kind of tease of what might come next. If you go through all our records, the last track is always where I think we’ve started moving into our future.”

The title of twenty one pilots’ sixth LP is a play on “scaled back and isolated,” words that summed up frontman Tyler Joseph’s world as he wrote and recorded in his Ohio basement during lockdown. “It just felt very confined,” he tells Apple Music. “I had this little dragon figurine that I kept on my desk during the entirety of the writing process, and I just knew that when you focus on even the tiniest little detail in your room—or wherever you\'re confined—that thing can come to life and fly around your room. That dragon on the cover really represents what can be accomplished with that sort of imagination.” And as has been the case for everyone, the challenges of pandemic living had a noticeable impact on Joseph’s work—but maybe not quite how you’d expect. “I was actively trying to push against that natural inclination to come in darker,” he says. “The idea of adding to the pressure of what\'s going on in our world, it didn\'t feel right.” Instead, *Scaled and Icy* finds Joseph pushing his genre-defying alt-pop into brighter, more hopeful territory. “It felt like I needed to go the opposite direction,” he says. “I wanted to escape a little bit more and provide people with that opportunity to escape too.” Here, Joseph takes us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Good Day”** “I designed it to feel like something was coming to life. If you really listen to the song, it\'s so upbeat and shiny on the surface, and then lyrically I\'m talking about trying to cope with the idea of if I were to ever lose my family and friends. I would probably go through a period in the mourning process where my reaction to anyone asking me how I\'m doing would be like, ‘I\'m fine. Everything\'s great, I don\'t even know why you\'re asking me.’ Making them feel stupid, like, ‘Why would you even ask me that?’ That\'s what this song is.” **“Choker”** “I come from a basketball background, and choking is: You’re standing at the free-throw line and you need to make one of those two, and if you miss them both, you choked. I think for me, with certain friendships and relationships, there were moments that I could have risen to the occasion and I didn\'t, and that\'s something that I\'ll have to live with. I think that everyone has those moments where they feel like they choked. The song is trying to work that through and trying to figure out if that’s someone that I was born to be. Can I shape this? Is this something I can turn around?” **“Shy Away”** “My brother said, ‘Hey, I just want you to show me, from the beginning, how you start a record. How do you start writing a song?’ So I had him over at the studio. A lot of times when I sit down to start, I\'ll tap into my phone and I’ll have a bunch of voice memos of ideas that have hit me randomly. Sometimes it’s just a single word, sometimes it\'s a melody. I started to build up the track from there, and it turned out that it was talking about wanting him to pursue his dream of chasing music. Most of my songs are very inward, but this is one of the few that I feel like the message is outward, coming from me. The only thing harder than figuring out what your purpose and identity is, is watching someone that you love trying to figure out theirs.” **“Saturday”** “When you strip away what day of the week it is, you lose your rhythm. You lose your sense of what is up and what is down. And that\'s a lesson that \[drummer\] Josh \[Dun\] and I learned pretty quickly on tour, because a Friday night and a Monday night could feel the exact same, whether or not we had a show. When the pandemic happened, everything\'s shut down, everyone was starting to learn that same lesson, where the days of the week lose their meaning, and it was messing with people\'s reference of time. You feel like you\'re swirling and your feet aren\'t planted. The song is really, I\'m talking to my wife, hoping that she sticks with me, even though I\'m working through this, even though I\'m kind of tumbling into nothingness.” **“No Chances”** “I recruited my brother and a few of his friends to come over and record gang vocals. You have this microphone in the middle of the room and I have everyone in headphones and I\'m kind of directing them in what to say and what to yell. That was the first time I\'d ever really produced a room full of people. I was thinking of athletics and college sports specifically, where there\'s overwhelmingly this hometown crowd, and how intimidating that can be and powerful that is in the face of opposition. I definitely was writing from that—I felt the energy of a gymnasium or a stadium and was wanting to capture that.” **“Redecorate”** “I had a friend of mine whose son passed away and they would keep his room the same way that he had left it. I remember thinking how crazy powerful a story that is, and how it makes me wonder, like, ‘What will people do with my stuff?’ It can actually bring you back down to earth, make sure that you don\'t make any horrible decisions. I\'m realizing now how difficult it is to talk about, but this song is really important to me. I love the messaging of it, and I hope that our fans hear what it is I\'m trying to say in it. Because it is a bit delicate, but it\'s one of my favorite tracks and it\'s pretty powerful if you let it.”

Political punk squad Rise Against has always maintained a strong connection with their fans, and their ninth album is a result of that connection. *Nowhere Generation* comes partly from the band’s conversations with their Gen Y and Z supporters who feel society’s deck has been stacked against them. From crippling college debt and poverty-level wages to labor automation and political malfeasance, the album seeks to voice the frustrations of the increasingly disenfranchised. “Much of this was written before the pandemic, but if the pandemic hadn’t happened, I don’t think the lyrics would hit as hard,” vocalist Tim McIlrath tells Apple Music. “A lot of the cracks in civil society—the stuff we were writing about anyway—were made bigger during the pandemic. The ugliness rose to the surface and a lot of our weakened support systems became apparent to everybody.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Numbers”** “‘The Numbers’ is the classic punk-rock message of reminding people how much power they actually do have. Anybody that\'s in a position of power—any of the global elite that run the world—they still rely on people falling in line. They rely on people to approve of what they do, and they still exist at the whim of the people—even though they would like to create an illusion that they don\'t. I think every generation needs that reminder that this power does come from people, and people do have power.” **“Sudden Urge”** “This song is tackling an age-old question: Is the system something that can be reformed, or is the system something that should be torn down to its foundations and then rebuilt? That\'s something that I think a lot of us wrestle with when we look case by case at different institutions that run society. I think there are days when we just want to burn the whole thing down, and there are days where we\'re like, ‘Let\'s try to fix this.’ But ‘Sudden Urge’ is about the days when you feel like you need to burn the whole thing down.” **“Nowhere Generation”** “This song definitely came from conversations and interactions with our own community of fans and friends—people that are existing in a society where it feels like it\'s harder and harder to get ahead. I grew up at a time when a single-income family could live a middle-class lifestyle. Now we\'re normalizing the idea that someone can work a full-time job and still live below the poverty level. I think young people are trying to figure out what tomorrow looks like for them, because the finish line has become blurrier and even further away, but they’re being asked to run the same race.” **“Talking to Ourselves”** “This is about that feeling you get when you\'re trying to shake somebody awake and they\'re not listening—you feel like you\'re just talking to yourself. It\'s also a comment on how we feel as a band—we never thought of ourselves as radical or controversial. We’re just saying things that make sense to us. The more it seems that people are listening, the louder we get. That’s Rise Against: We’re getting loud and disturbing the peace to get your attention.” **“Broken Dreams, Inc.”** “It’s certainly touching on the changing landscape of labor, how it\'s affecting people and how people are getting alienated from what it is to work. They\'re trying to figure out what that looks like, and they’re getting left behind. In some ways, technology is making lives better for people and erasing some really dangerous jobs—but it’s also eliminating other jobs, too. So this is kind of like a big, complicated worker’s anthem.” **“Forfeit”** “This is our acoustic song on the record, and it’s about not surrendering, not giving up on somebody no matter what—even when they want you to give up on them. It’s just about that commitment—knowing somebody needs your help and committing to being there, either in that moment or letting them know, ‘When you\'re ready, I\'ll be here,’ or ‘You can say whatever you want to say to me, but you\'re not going to push me away.’” **“Monarch”** “There’s a little bit of a double meaning in this title. It\'s talking about someone who has complete control over you, that you\'ve listened to for far too long, but then something snaps and you figure out you don’t need them anymore. I like the idea of ‘Monarch’ being that person with total control, but also a monarch butterfly, where the person in the song grows wings and becomes someone different, someone that can’t even be recognized because they’ve changed so much.” **“Sounds Like”** “As cliché as it might sound, this song is about living in the moment. It’s about embracing the time you are living in right now and not waiting for something to happen. Everything is happening right around you at this moment and you don\'t need to waste time waiting for something that might come or may never come.” **“Sooner or Later”** “This song talks about reaping what you sow, how the things that you do have consequences. If you live life with a very short-term attitude and you don\'t plant seeds for the future, bad things happen. There’s some obvious environmental imagery, so it’s alluding to that, but it really is talking about making sure that you\'re not just ripping the crops out of the ground, but you\'re also planting seeds for tomorrow.” **“Middle of a Dream”** “This is about the chase that we all feel sometimes. Sometimes we know what we\'re chasing and sometimes you have no idea what you\'re chasing—you just wake up with that instinct to go after something. ‘Middle of a Dream’ is talking about that through the lens of a dream, where you’re chasing something that you don’t have a clear idea of, but you just feel this compulsion to move forward.” **“Rules of Play”** “I like that this song is the closer, because I’ve been kind of boldly coming at you with all these lyrics, like, ‘Here’s what’s going on,’ and I think there are times where it may sound like I must have the answers. But ‘Rules of Play’ is reminding you that I don’t have it figured out. Almost all of these songs are questions. They aren’t road maps to success. They’re questions about what the world looks like, what we want it to look like, and how we can get there.”

When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”

Recorded, mixed and mastered by Tue Madsen at Antfarm Studios in November 2020.

“I really wanted to make an album that was a love letter to old-school goth music and post-punk.” That’s what Perturbator mastermind James Kent tells Apple Music when asked about the inspiration behind his fifth album. “I wanted to make an album that would be more melody-based, less hard and aggressive than my previous works.” As such, *Lustful Sacraments* bathes in the dark and infectious sounds of ’80s luminaries like Depeche Mode, Killing Joke, and DAF while exploring lyrical themes of dissatisfaction, addiction, and self-destruction. “Before this album, I would make music about sci-fi and dystopian stuff,” the French musician says. “With this one, I wanted to do something more personal, more based on human emotions. It’s more of an intimate album that maybe more people can relate to.” Below, Kent comments on each track. **“Reaching Xanadu”** “It\'s a very short track, but it has a very complex drum pattern, and it sounds a bit technical in terms of rhythm. I wanted to make a bridge from my previous album, which was very complex and industrial-sounding, and almost trick the listener into thinking that it’s going to be more of the same. At the end, I put the sound of breaking glass to symbolize the switch of genres to post-punk.” **“Lustful Sacraments”** “This is the first one that I wrote for the album, and it\'s one that I\'ve been working on for almost three years now. It was my first attempt at trying to find my footing in this post-punk goth music genre—to find what sort of drum patterns they use, the snare sound, the guitars. Basically, I wanted this song to be kind of the flagship of the album. When you listen to it, you know what the rest of the album is going to sound like.” **“Excess”** “The yelling parts are from Maniac 2121, who is a very good friend of mine from a long time ago. I don\'t have a good yelling voice myself, so it sounded a bit weak when I did it. But he gave it his all, so I preferred to take his yelling part. This is one of the fastest-paced tracks on the album, in terms of BPM. And the lyrics for this are pretty blunt. I think they drive home the overall theme of the album, about dissatisfaction, addiction, and self-destruction.” **“Secret Devotion” (feat. True Body)** “It\'s definitely a love letter to Depeche Mode. It has a lot of the same very dry percussion and a DX7 synthesizer sound, like a very cold-sounding piano. I wasn’t sure if it would make the cut for the album at first, because it sounded a bit weird. But then I sent it to the guys in Truebody, because I could really hear the vocals of Isabel \[Moreno-Riaño\] in my head when I listened to it. I asked them to do something with it, and they asked if they could add more stuff—not just vocals. I told them to go for it, and I just really love the results.” **“Death of the Soul”** “At first, the album had eight tracks, and I felt it was very short. And also, I also wanted to explore a little bit more of an EBM or Berlin techno type of style—similar to DAF or, more recently, Boy Harsher. So I started this track with a very steady and simple bass and drum combo. Then I asked Belial to put vocals on it. She’s a good friend of mine, and she’s Russian, so I thought, ‘Let’s do a fucking track in Russian.’ She’s just talking, not singing, but it came out very cool.” **“The Other Place”** “With a lot of the tracks, you can almost pinpoint a band that I got inspired by. With this one, it was Killing Joke—the *Night Time* album. It\'s also the one that I decided to not put any vocals on, because the track already has a lot of things going on. I put a lot of guitars on this one and changed the rhythm and stuff like this. I can also say that the title was inspired by a *Twilight Zone* episode called ‘A Nice Place to Visit,’ which is about a guy who dies and thinks he’s in heaven but it turns out he’s in ‘the other place.’” **“Dethroned Under a Funeral Haze”** “People tell me that the title sounds like a Darkthrone reference. I do see that, but I didn’t do it on purpose at all. At first the track was just called ‘Dethroned,’ but then there’s this art book I have called *Under the Funeral Haze*. I really liked the title and wanted to use it. I just wanted to make something slow and doomy, but with synthesizers. And then my friend Maniac 2121 wanted to put some vocals on it. It turns out he has a very good singing voice, so I decided to keep it.” **“Messalina, Messalina”** “This is the second fast track on the album. I felt like a lot of the tracks previously were in the same sort of tempo range or going a bit slower. So just before the finale I wanted to make a track that would be very typical Perturbator—very fast, very energetic, with a lot of distorted synths. I think it\'s the only track where I have that. I did the vocals on this one, and I basically wanted it to be the climax of the album in a way—the most hard-hitting, so that the track after could be more of a slow burner.” **\"God Says\" (feat. Hangman\'s Chair)** “Hangman’s Chair are a doom band from Paris. When I started this track, I was supposed to do it with Farida \[Lemouchi\] from The Devil’s Blood, my favorite band of all time, so I made it with her vocals in mind. So the guys from Hangman’s Chair heard the track because we always hang out together, and they wanted to do something on it. It works perfectly because the singer has a similar vibe to Farida. It very quickly became one of my favorites, along with ‘Dethroned.’”

A decade after Willow Smith taught us how to whip our hair back and forth, the genre-bending artist is still just getting started. Her sound has evolved from bubblegum pop hits to alt-R&B to, now, a full pop-punk album. However, her transition into the genre shouldn’t be surprising, since rock runs in her blood: Her first introduction to the medium was from being on the road with her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom in the early 2000s. Then the multi-hyphenate talent experimented with rock-adjacent sounds on tracks like “Human Leech” from her 2017 album *The 1st*, and more prominently on her 2020 album *THE ANXIETY*. All of these moments set the groundwork for the singer’s fifth studio album. Created and recorded during quarantine, *lately I feel EVERYTHING* is an homage to the touchstones of 2000s pop-punk, such as blink-182, Avril Lavigne, and Fefe Dobson. The opening track “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” is an upbeat, energetic, angst-ridden anthem with a mix of clean and distorted guitars backed by booming drums courtesy of blink-182’s drummer Travis Barker, who assists on two other tracks on the album. For every angsty pop-punk like “Gaslight” and “G R O W”—which features none other than Lavigne herself—there’s a heavier metal-influenced track like “Lipstick,” “don’t SAVE ME,” or “Come Home,” showing WILLOW’s growth not only as a singer but as a songwriter.

On their second LP, Greta Van Fleet continues to bow at the altar of classic rock with a heavy dose of blues-soaked riffs and transcendent imagery. “Life’s the story of ascending to the stars as one,” vocalist Josh Kiszka sings with his gravelly tenor on “Heat Above,” an optimistic call-to-arms that soars high with flourishes of acoustic guitar and Hammond organ. But when they’re not pleading for divine unity, the Kiszka brothers—alongside drummer Danny Wagner—embrace stomping, self-empowering anthems (“My Way, Soon”), majestic hard rock with medieval motifs (“Age of Machine”), and pompous power ballads (“Tears of Rain”). Less urgent and more ambitious than 2018’s *Anthem of the Peaceful Army*, it’s an album that pushes ahead with technical prowess and lots of attitude. On the epic nine-minute closer “The Weight of Dreams,” the band ascends to the pearly gates as they proudly worship the almighty Zep: “Heaven sent us here to meet the hallowed shore/To claim the wealth that we had sold.”

The revelation on the London band’s second album isn’t how exquisitely they channel the shout-along camaraderie of classic British punk and oi (“It’s Me Who’ll Pay,” “Beat That Drum”), or even how they downshift into their ballads (“Take Me Home to London,” “Life’s Lemons”). It’s how their balance of melody and muscle captures a history of working-class music from pub rock to Northern soul, The Jam to Thin Lizzy (“Coming Up Tough,” “Life on the Bayou”). And if hardcore purists find them inauthentic or too poppy, it’s only because they’re more interested in entertaining a wider audience than nurturing their subcultural roots—a transition The Clash made 40 years earlier. Like its title, the music on *The Mutt’s Nuts* is clever, down-to-earth, rude, and a little salty. Bottoms up.

In January 2019, Royal Blood traveled to LA to record with Josh Homme at the Queens of the Stone Age frontman’s Pink Duck studio. The sessions produced “Boilermaker,” a track from the Sussex rock duo’s third album *Typhoons*, but it was also a trip that generated two important changes for singer/bassist Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher. Firstly, Kerr stopped drinking. On a weekend break from recording, he headed to Vegas. “I was at a real crescendo,” he tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I was a nutter. I was like Ron Burgundy at the bar, washed up. And I could hear the same old monologue going on. I could see I was bored of my complaints about myself. I had a very clear moment of ‘Something’s got to change. I can’t expect things to get any better if I don’t really take responsibility for this.’” Secondly, Homme encouraged Kerr and Thatcher to worry less about perfection and explore the untapped possibilities for their music. “There’s a lot of wigs, a lot of fancy dress,” says Kerr about Pink Duck. “It’s a place to have fun. He is very good at creating an environment where you feel comfortable putting forward an idea no matter how crazy it might be. I think he says, ‘What if?’ more than anyone I’ve ever met. That mantra got drilled into us and we’ve carried that into the rest of this record.” Both developments resonate through *Typhoons*. Across two previous albums—double-platinum debut *Royal Blood* in 2014 and follow-up *How Did We Get So Dark?* in 2017— the duo minted ferocious, divergent rock from just drums, bass, and effects pedals. Even more free-spirited, *Typhoons* retools their sound for the dance floor, marshaling riffs to four-to-the-floor beats. It’s a limber, swaggering sound they’ve nicknamed “AC Disco”—but factor in the big pop melodies on “Million and One” and “Trouble’s Coming” and you could also call it Black ABBAth. And like all the best disco, *Typhoons* bears plenty of emotional weight, with the songs unflinchingly tracing Kerr’s turbulent path towards sobriety. “It was the only thing I had to write about,” he says. “I got to the point where I *really* understood who I was, and having that kind of genuine confidence is crucial for being creative. It allowed me to trust myself with it rather than second-guessing anything. I felt a little less exposed: It almost felt like the lyrics were a bit disguised because the music was so upbeat and euphoric. I felt amazing and so positive that I was in a much better place, yet the only thing I had to write about was incredibly dark. So it’s a strange duality on the album.” Only at the very end do the music’s rigor and strut drop, when Kerr swaps his bass for a piano on the airy, psychedelic ballad “All We Have Is Now.” “Perhaps it points towards the unknown of where we’re going next,” he says. “It ended up on the record because \[we thought\], ‘That’s really great.’ It doesn’t matter whether it aligns with what we’ve done before or what people say we’re allowed to do. As long as we’re not trying to fight for someone we used to be, or trying to jump too aggressively forwards to be a band we’re not yet, as long as we stay true to who we are in the moment, then we’ll be OK.”

“I guarantee that most musicians have that groove or that vibe somewhere within them,” Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl tells Apple Music of the funk and disco rhythms that course through his band’s 10th LP. “They just may have never found the right time or place to let it out.” Recorded before the global pandemic took hold in early 2020, *Medicine At Midnight* is very much the sound of Grohl letting it out—a round of fleet-footed party rock inspired, in part, by ABBA, Prince, and David Bowie’s *Let’s Dance*, the 1983 Nile Rodgers-produced classic whose drummer, Omar Hakim, contributes percussion on several tracks here. Without breaking entirely from their highly reliable brand of stadium-ready slow burns (“Waiting on a War”) and riffy joyrides (“Love Dies Young”), the Foos make space for cowbell (“Cloudspotter”) and calls from the dance floor (the soulful title cut), handclaps and *na-na-na*s (“Making a Fire”). It’s a change that should probably come as no surprise. “I’m a drummer,” Grohl says. “I explained one time to Pharrell: ‘If you listen to *Nevermind*, those are disco beats, dude.’ If you’ve been in a band for a long time, you get comfortable in that place that people are familiar with. In some sort of attempt at longevity, you just have to be able to reach out and try things you’ve never done before.”

In early 2020, Weezer was forced to put the release of the guitar-driven *Van Weezer* on hold when the stadium tour Hella Mega, on which they would share the bill with Green Day and Fall Out Boy, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The veteran pop-rockers turned inward and decided to release *OK Human* instead—an unplugged orchestral album centered around themes of isolation and feeling alienated that felt more appropriate during lockdown. With the possibility of live shows ever-so-slightly looming on the horizon, they crank the Marshall stack back up and serve fun, gnarly riffs on their second album of 2021. Inspired by their shared love of hard rock and heavy metal bands of the ’70s and ’80s—after all, the album’s title is an obvious nod to Van Halen—the band’s 15th LP offers a nostalgic whiff of guitar histrionics (“Beginning of the End”), stomp-clap anthems à la “Beverly Hills” with more punch (“All the Good Ones”), and palm-muted power chords (“1 More Hit”). Clocking in at a snappy 30 minutes, the 10 tracks here are all killer, no filler—recalling the catchy immediacy of the Green Album, even if, sonically, it’s the equivalent of wearing spandex and lace rather than baggy khakis. But as it is with every Weezer album, they also embrace their pop side regardless of whatever gimmick they pursue. There are sparkling odes to the underdog (“Hero”), anecdotes about overcoming stage fright (“Beginning of the End”), and adolescent memories about raging to Aerosmith (“I Need Some of That”), each guided by frontman Rivers Cuomo’s dewy-eyed ruminations and tightly crafted power-pop hooks. And for the longtime faithful, Cuomo even throws in some fan service with “Sheila Can Do It”—converting an old demo he wrote in the mid-’90s into a revved-up rocker with bubblegum New Wave flourishes.

For some bands that get that far, a seventh album can turn out to be a landmark moment—the point in an artist’s career where they take stock of what’s gone before and map out a thrilling new path ahead. History is certainly dotted with era-defining examples from some of rock’s greatest acts. AC/DC’s *Back in Black*, U2’s *Achtung Baby*, Radiohead’s *In Rainbows*, Springsteen’s *Born in the U.S.A.*, and Dylan’s *Blonde on Blonde* are just a few lucky-number-seven records. That sense of reset and restart hangs over You Me At Six’s *SUCKAPUNCH*.“Maybe there’s something in the universe with the number seven that makes you want to shake it up a little bit,” vocalist and frontman Josh Franceschi tells Apple Music. “We really went into it with a no-fear mentality.” The follow-up to 2018’s *VI*, *SUCKAPUNCH* sees the British quintet inject their trademark rock anthems with an array of influences, eager to make their own music sound like the stuff they actually listen to. Across its 11 songs, the album takes in trap, rave drops, hip-hop beats, and electronic soundscapes as part of an ambitious sonic voyage. “When you’re making a body of work, you don’t want to put the same thing out again,” says guitarist Max Helyer. “As a creative you sit there and go, ‘How do I challenge myself again?’ And that’s taking inspiration from absolutely anything and everything.” Here, the pair take us on a tour of the group’s brave new world, track by track. **Nice to Me** Josh Franceschi: “This is Max’s brainchild. He basically had the song written musically, and from the moment that I heard that riff I was like, ‘Yeah, that needs to be the opening track of the record.’ Max had a very clear vision for the song, and when somebody in the band has just a very, very distinct direction they want something to go into, you just have to trust that.” Max Helyer: “It’s probably one of the best songs I’ve done, in terms of presenting to the band. I had a vision and wanted everyone to be part of making it as well. I was trying to emulate something like Radiohead, that kind of glitchy drum sound, but also kind of marrying it with a Guy Ritchie movie and how that would be interpreted. I just had that vision of it being like, ‘It’s got to be like building a chase into something, and then when the chorus hits, it’s just got to slap.’” **MAKEMEFEELALIVE** MH: “I’d been sitting on this riff for a while. It was in an angry phase of my life and I was reminiscing on some of the acts that I’ve seen and grown up with, from Marilyn Manson to The Prodigy. I think it was around the time Keith Flint passed away and I was inspired by that. I remember watching The Prodigy when we played with them at Isle of Wight festival and it was so insane. I was like, ‘We need something with energy and a raw breakbeat kind of thing.’ I took the idea to Dan \[Flint, drummer\], we spent a couple of hours on it and showed the rest of the guys. It came together so quickly.” JF: “I think I was just caught up in lots of things that were happening in society that made me angry and a little bit devoid of hope in the system that we’re intertwined with—whether it be politically, but also slightly culturally and socially. I wanted to write a song that felt would be like an anthem for the misfits.” **Beautiful Way** JF: “With the ‘We’re fucked up in a beautiful way’ line, I wanted that feeling where people would turn round to each other at our live shows and scream the lyric in each other’s face because it felt like it was their mantra. I think that’s a really powerful thing when people accept who they are and what they are. This song is a celebration of that.” MH: “The minute Josh came up with the tagline, it was such a statement, but the music wasn’t matching the lyric. It just felt ploddy. We needed to pick up the tempo. I was going back to when I was younger, watching all my friends go to \[London club\] Fabric and come back being drum ’n’ bass heads. I was like, ‘We need to channel that old-school sound, The Prodigy, Pendulum. Bring in that absolute beat where you can bop to and it can be a driving tune.’ The minute we started doing that, there was a groove, there was swag. It had movement but it also had pace and energy that kind of felt anxious, and you felt on edge.” **WYDRN** JF: “It’s an acronym for ‘What you doing right now?’ I was trying to get down with the kids, man. It doesn’t feel like a You Me At Six song that you’ve heard before. It was trying to emulate the stuff that we really enjoy listening to—J. Cole, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar. I remember turning to \[producer\] Dan Austin and saying, ‘Don’t you dare flood this song with guitars.’” MH: “I knew that was Josh’s angle on this song. Knowing the music that he liked, I approached this song as more, ‘I’m just going to track stuff that’s going to be sample-based, make it not sound like a guitar.’ It was a breath of fresh air to approach a song on this record that wasn’t the same way we normally approach a song.” **SUCKAPUNCH** JF: “We called the album after this track because it felt like it was the song that really embodied the ethos we had of no fear. And also, it feels like it’s a hybrid of so many of the things that we were trying to bring into the record across the board. It was the perfect mishmash of it feeling familiar but also foreign at the same time. There is a big You Me At Six rock chorus, but then everything else is very, very, like, ‘Oh, I haven’t heard them do that yet.’” MH: “The words that Josh was putting together for this song felt like the experience of making this record. It managed to articulate the whole entire process of this record, of making this record, but also in our individual lives and what we were going through. And that’s why it resonated with us so much.” **Kill the Mood** JF: “Max does this thing about two years before we eventually go and make a record where he’ll play a riff over and over and over again in sound check, every day in every country around the world, subliminally trying to tell us, ‘This is going to be a song, so you better fucking start liking it.’” MH: “We were in LA on tour and I was saying to Josh, ‘There’s some great studios here, I’d love to go and be productive instead of going shopping or walking about or just waiting to play a gig.’ We hit up our publishing company and they got us in a room with a couple of guys. We walked in and Josh was like, ‘Do you remember that idea that you always used to play in sound check? Let’s do that.’ And then this song just kind of fell out the sky. I think we were in the studio for four hours.” JF: “Even less. It literally felt like we walked in, Max played the idea on the guitar, and then we were like, ‘Okay, we want this to feel like classic rock meets West Coast hip-hop, like Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre. Whatever our interpretation of that is and what that means to us.’” **Glasgow** JF: “We always like to try and have a slow song on the album. And this one sort of presented itself in a way that was quite melancholic but without it being overly sad. I think if you put on a record and every song feels like the track before, you start tuning out. Something that we really spoke about was how can we have a bunch of islands, and approach the songs as their own thing, and then colonize them and make them feel like this overriding You Me At Six product. ‘Glasgow’ slotted in and took the role of the slow song.” MH: “It’s a payoff when you get to that part of the song where it lifts off. You feel a massive release of endorphins. That’s what this song was about to me, the journey. And I think Josh’s lyrics articulate that really well.” **Adrenaline** JF: “This is a song that Matt \[Barnes, bassist\] and Chris \[Miller, guitarist\] had written. We recorded the album in Thailand, and this was the first one we did. It was really exciting, because you’re getting a sense of what it’s going to feel like to record in this space. For me, this is the song on the record that pays a lot of homage to our past work—it feels like a quintessential You Me At Six song, but with a nice flex on it.” **Voicenotes** MH: “I jammed out an idea and a riff and presented it to the guys. I was really inspired by hearing the last Tyler, The Creator record, *IGOR*. I didn’t want it to become a rock song; I want it to have some feel, to embody some of that hip-hop sound and some of that groove.” JF: “The thing that we spoke about quite a lot was how none of us wanted to have things come across too ‘rock,’ we didn’t want it to be like middle-of-the-road rock music. It had to be rock that was tasteful, and that we could move into this new era of rock music, which is something that excites us to be part of.” **Finish What I Started** JF: “This song is fucking weird because we wrote it on tour in Germany when we were touring our record *Night People*. It was originally recorded in 2018 when we were putting together *VI*. I think there was a reluctance on my side to really push this song to get used because I said some pretty dark, deep shit that maybe I don’t want people to hear me say about myself. But we kept on coming back to it, and I think our manager was like, ‘Look, if you don’t use this song on this record, I don’t think it’s ever going to come out.’” MH: “This song feels like you are coming to the end of the record. That’s why it fits so well, because it’s a very exposing song lyrically, but I think there’s a lot of people who will connect with that.” **What’s It Like** JF: “I like the sentiment of leaving the album on a question mark. It hasn’t got a full stop. At the end of the whole thing, it’s like, ‘Well, what’s it like being perfect all the time?’ It signs off this love letter to our former selves in that sense. It’s also a song that does provoke conversation. And it has energy. I think \[that’s\] important as well, to finish on a high.” MH: “It was also the song for me that really did kick-start this writing period for the record. It was the starting chapter, but it’s at the end because the lyrical content sums up the whole entire record. So it’s like *Memento*—you’re finishing the record with something that actually started the record.”

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.”

“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”