Kerrang!'s 50 Best Albums of 2022

When a DIY ethos is baked into your core, your intuition is always likely to guide you right. Since forming in 2014, Nova Twins have established themselves as alt-rock explorers constantly crossing genre boundaries to absorb ideas and recast them in their own vision. The London-based duo of Amy Love and Georgia South approached their second album by dialing up both the brightness and heaviness of their debut, 2020’s *Who Are the Girls?*, operating on gut feel. “We have label support now, but it’s all still about us,” Love tells Apple Music. “It’s the shit we’ve always done, but they’ve helped us to facilitate the things we need to make the sound even bigger. There was no pressure, no schedule; we were just writing because we wanted to.” Written broadly during the pandemic and from within the Black Lives Matter movement, *Supernova* centers on the duo’s experiences of grief, heartbreak, erasure, and the empowerment of self-owned sexuality, as they battle their way through darkness to find light. The result is an album of intensity, energy, and enough fighting spirit to share around. “Life isn’t perfect, and we all have shit times,” says South. “But with *Supernova*, we want to give people that extra skip in their step, to feel like they can push through. Whatever you have going on, there is always a way to come out as a winner.” Let Nova Twins guide you through the album, track by track. **“Power (Intro)”** Georgia South: “We wanted a word that set the precedent for how we wanted the album to make people feel, and that word was ‘power.’” Amy Love: “It feels like a new beginning, a new era for the Nova Twins world. By putting this as the beginning and then ending on ‘Sleep Paralysis,’ it’s a wake-up call, like being born again.” GS: “It was just a nice little way to introduce the album and bookend the world that we created. If you were to be transported through a vortex, this is what it would sound like.” **“Antagonist”** AL: “This one came after the heavy lockdown. It felt so good to be able to finally meet up in person, and that energy and sense of connection is audible. It was just us together in a room, having fun.” GS: “We worked with Jim Abbiss again on production for the record, but in lockdown, we got really into Logic, the nitty-gritty of making beats and doing vocal production and sound effects ourselves. We learnt so much more about quality this time that a lot of the demos were good enough to go right on the album, and then, with Jim’s production style and live drums, we could focus on building up that really big sound.” **“Cleopatra”** AL: “The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was a traumatic time. It was so dark and depressing and terrifying, but when we all started unifying and marching, it felt like there was some sort of hope. It spurred us on to write something that would make people feel good, to feel powerful and proud of where they’re from. ‘Cleopatra’ was written in that moment of feeling truly part of something; we’re confident Black women, but it’s only when you start talking with others that you shine light on areas even you didn’t understand properly. We wanted to have a song that reflected the times, but also something which would give hope in the future.” **“K.M.B.”** GS: “With ‘K.M.B.’ \[Kill My Boyfriend\], we homed in on the sassy ’90s R&B that we both love. We love groups like Destiny’s Child, and we also love heavy music, so we thought that if we paired the two, we’d have the sassiest, most badass thing ever.” AL: “So many people can relate to the idea of getting revenge on a ex. When we read the lyrics back in isolation, we were like, ‘Is this a bit much?’ But then we were like, ‘Nah, it’s a joke. Right?!’” GS: “That’s why we made the music video so bright and colorful, to really get the joke across. The day of filming was so fun; the woman who owned the house came in and was like, ‘Can we rename the song “Kill My Husband?”’” AL: “He had cheated on her 47 times! She was like, ‘This video is the perfect send-off.’ She definitely saw the sense of humor in it.” **“Fire & Ice”** GS: “‘I tend to start with drums and then write riffs on top of the beat, building up in layers. We didn’t use any synths on the album, just bass, guitar, drums, and a bunch of pedals, which will make it a lot of fun to play live. I’m going to need a third leg!” AL: “Conceptually, it’s about all our moods as human beings. People assume that we’re scary or we’re this and that, but we’re all those things and the opposite. As women, we’re never just one thing; we can be moody, upset, loving, happy, vulnerable, sweet. It’s just about being a normal girl today—it’s not always pretty, but that duality is always going to be something you love about us.” **“Puzzles”** GS: “‘Puzzles’ puts us back in our ’90-2000s era. When you’re in a club, there’s those classic sexy tracks that you just want to dance to, like Khia’s ‘My Neck, My Back’ or ‘Pony’ by Ginuwine. We all want to feel sexy, to feel good about ourselves. We wanted it to be heavy—something you can mosh to but get down to at the same time.” AL: “It’s a fun song, but it’s also there to challenge people who are still living in the dark ages. There’s no line with Nova; we might like wearing baggy tracksuits, but at the same time, we also know how to let loose and have fun with our sexuality. If people are still uncomfortable about that, then a song like this is needed.” **“A Dark Place for Somewhere Beautiful”** AL: “We don’t always share our personal home truths in our music. Time is the biggest healer, and if something is still quite fresh, you can only talk about it so much. People can read between the lines and take what they want from it, but we all experience grief in our lives at some point, and this song is just describing what it feels like to go through that. A part of you disappears, but you also grow so much. Loss really does change you.” **“Toolbox”** GS: “It’s all about flipping the script on all the social pressures and beauty ideals that are usually aimed at women—changing up the roles so we’re singing it to a man. We’ve had to say, ‘Fuck you’ to so many men all the way along our career, and it’s built us into these strong women as a result. I’m grateful for it because it comes across in tunes like this.” **“Choose Your Fighter”** GS: “This was the last song we finished; we only had 24 hours to do it because of vinyl lead time. We were in the home studio writing, really tired. Whenever one of us was lagging, we’d have a tea break, put ‘Work Bitch’ by Britney Spears on, and then be like, ‘OK, we can do this.’ We truly have to thank Britney for this one—without her, we would have just slept.” AL: “In lockdown, we were sending songs back and forth, and then, suddenly, this was one where we were like, ‘I guess we’re writing an album.’ Lockdown was terrible, but it really helped us to find our way to this body of work, to say all the things that we wanted to say.” **“Enemy”** AL: “‘Enemy’ is about the time in our career where people weren’t quite getting it. We’ve seen other people be able to walk through so much easier because they fit the mold of what people perceive to be a riot grrrl. This was our kick back to the people who said that we look like we should only be doing hip-hop.” GS: “It’s pure rage, but we were also laughing so much while making it, putting people on our imaginary hit list. Obviously, we’re not trying to promote violence, but people can relate to that feeling in the moment. They can listen on their headphones going to work with their horrible boss, or at school if somebody’s picking on them. It’s a song about standing up for yourself.” **“Sleep Paralysis”** GS: “We were playing with different dynamics. It feels like you’re on a crazy loop because it joins back with the intro, and it’s a bit trippy and chaotic. It was definitely reflective of where we were at the time. We were locked down, BLM was going on, there was so much loss, and it was just like, ‘This is a full-on nightmare.’” AL: “We created this world where it almost felt like *Stranger Things*, The Upside Down. Everything seems really peaceful and calm and then, suddenly, the chorus hits. That gnarly hellscape feeling truly felt like what we were living through. It shows that we’re not afraid to not be super loud, that we don’t put boundaries on ourselves. Everything we’ve done with this band, we don’t plan; we just jump and see what happens. It’s always worked for us, so we’re going to keep jumping.”

Contemplation and self-awareness run throughout Celebrity Therapist. “The whole album is about history repeating itself and how we kind of move in circles. It’s two steps forward and three steps back with a bunch of people in my life. The album is me reflecting on these people but realizing I’m guilty of the same at the end of the record. There are a lot of ‘fuck you’ songs because every heavy band likes writing those. But overall, the lyrics are more introspective and quite loving.” The Callous Daoboys come from the school of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die, and The Chariot, with a heightened degree of theatricality as one of the methods to their madness. Think Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy getting slapped around good-naturedly by Glassjaw. Celebrity Therapist even indulges in a bit of drone and avant-garde post-rock a la Sigor Rós and Radiohead.

Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge was in a Seattle bookstore in 2014 when he came across what would become the theme for the Swedish occult rockers’ fifth album, *IMPERA*. “I saw this book called *The Rule of Empires*,” he tells Apple Music. “I’ve always been quite interested in history and politics, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that every empire eventually ends. Right then and there, I knew that at some point I was going to make a record about the rise and fall of empires.” At the time, Forge was already planning to make a record about the bubonic plague, which became Ghost’s startlingly prescient 2018 album *Prequelle*. “I felt like those two subjects represented two completely different threats of annihilation,” he says. “One feels a little bit more divine, and the other a little more structured and fabricated. So I compartmentalized the two themes and made two different albums.” Below, Forge details some key tracks from *IMPERA*. **“Kaisarion”** “The story this song tells, or the perspective it shines light onto, is basically stupid people destroying something that they don\'t understand with a frantic smile on their face. This has happened many times and unfortunately will probably happen many times in the future, because unfortunately things that we don\'t understand or that we cannot control have a tendency to arouse those feelings. We want to kill it. We want to destroy it.” **“Spillways”** “In ‘Kaisarion,’ we have the en masse, frenetic, frantic buzz of being in a group. In ‘Spillways,’ we have a very internalized pressure that builds up to the next song, which is a distant call that ends up being a voice in your head—the insulated person who’s being communicated with from a higher power. That’s loosely how we move geographically between these three songs. If the leads remind you of Brian May, that’s because I like stacking solos and adding harmonies, which automatically puts you in Brian May territory.” **“Call Me Little Sunshine”** “This is similar to our song ‘Cirice’ in the sense that you have this betraying hand that leads you into the night pretending to have a torch in the other. Which is interesting, because we’ve placed ourselves in the devil’s corner, pop-culturally, so it becomes this paradox. Myself and other peddlers in the extreme metal world use a lot of biblical or diabolical references, and up until recently we felt we were doing it with a distance from history—like this was in the Old World, when people were stupid. But no—this is real. This is now.” **“Hunter’s Moon”** “This song was written specifically for the *Halloween Kills* soundtrack, which made it so much easier to write because I knew the context. If ‘Call Me Little Sunshine’ is a voice inside the head that’s actually coming from outside, ‘Hunter’s Moon’ is inside the empire of the brain of a maniac: ‘I’m coming to get you because you belong to me. Can’t you see I’m doing this as an act of love?’ It’s absolutely illogical, but if you place yourself inside the head of a maniac, it makes sense. It’s burning love.” **“Watcher in the Sky”** “This reverts back to the imperial world of Flat Earth Society members, basically. The narration is calling upon the scientific community to use whatever science we have here within this empire to stop looking at the stars and look for God instead. Can we reverse the tools that we have to watch the stars to communicate with the Lord? And is there any way to scientifically prove that the world is actually flat? Because it looks awfully flat from where we\'re standing. So it’s a song about regression.” **“Twenties”** “This is a machine disguised as a leader talking to liberal persons because we need their manpower, and without them there is no society. So it’s this cheer about the twenties, saying that it will lead to an even more hopeful thirties—but 1900s-style. It’s meant to give people hope, if you’re bent that way. It’s similar to our song ‘Mummy Dust’ in that both are more primally aggressive and have an element of greed.” **“Grift Wood”** “I love Hollywood rock like Van Halen and Mötley Crüe, and it just feels fitting to have an uplifting track towards the end of the record. Musically, one thing that inspired the more Sunset Strip elements of the song was knowing that it was going to throw you off with a really long curveball that felt like something no Sunset Strip band has ever done. And that enabled the more glossy bits to be even more in line with the traditional elements of an early-’80s Sunset Strip song.”

With their follow-up to 2019’s *We Are Not Your Kind*, masked metal battalion Slipknot keeps pushing the limits of what the mainstream can withstand. You can hear bristling chunks of death metal, black metal, and funk metal on singles “The Chapeltown Rag,” “The Dying Song (Time to Sing),” and “Yen” as the band continues to transcend the nu-metal genre they’re often lumped in with. “After *We Are Not Your Kind*, we looked at each other like, ‘Man, did we push too far? Did we not push it far enough?’” vocalist Corey Taylor tells Apple Music. “So this album is another extension of boundaries, into territory the listener has never been before. How much further can we take them, but that we feel totally comfortable doing?” As for the album’s semi-apocalyptic title? “There\'s nothing I hate worse than a typical clichéd album title,” Taylor says. “For me it was like, ‘Where are we right now? What\'s happening?’ It felt like this was the second stage of our career and we were coming to the end of the tone of the albums that took us out of the original run.”

“Belly fat in the bio bin/The penis now sees the sun again.” This soon-to-be-immortal couplet comes from “Zick Zack,” the hilarious plastic-surgery send-up and single from *Zeit*. Given the decade-long gap between Rammstein’s untitled 2019 album and its predecessor *Liebe ist für alle da*, the relatively quick appearance of their eighth record comes as quite a surprise. Clearly, the German industrial overlords took advantage of the enforced downtime every touring artist was saddled with during pandemic lockdown and emerged with their famous sense of humor intact. *Zeit* (German for “time”) boasts plaintive yet soaring piano ballads (“Schwarz,” the title track), odes to big boobs (“Dicke Titten”), and even a raucous cock-rock-style banger in “OK.”

In blending black metal with African American spirituals on Zeal & Ardor’s 2016 debut *Devil Is Fine*, Swiss American artist Manuel Gagneux broke new musical ground. On his third album, he takes an industrial detour with lead single “Run,” which channels Ministry and early Nine Inch Nails, and “Götterdämmerung,” which he sings in German. Elsewhere, “Bow” plunges gospel chants into an electronic dirge, while “Golden Liar” sets soulful melodies and spoken word to a dark country twang. “It’s fun messing around with sounds and seeing what sticks to the wall,” he tells Apple Music. “That’s how I approach music—I’m just playing with different elements for the gits and shiggles of it. And then sometimes it turns out sounding good.” Below, he discusses each track on his self-titled album. **“Zeal & Ardor”** “We decided early on that our sound is basically just our atmosphere, and within that realm we can do whatever we want genre-wise. So it was pretty important to set the tone, to establish that atmosphere thoroughly. I think this summarizes the intent. It starts with a broody synthesizer and then one element after the other comes in. By the end, you should be in the Zeal & Ardor world.” **“Run”** “We wanted the have the first proper song on the record be kind of relentless. That’s also why we put it out as the first single. This is a nonstop aggressive song, and we’ve never really done anything in this manner. It felt like a good way to be off to the races.” **“Death to the Holy”** “I really like this track because it kind of summarizes what we’re all about in just three minutes. You have the bluesy stuff, some piano in there, and then that groove goes directly into this almost metalcore-type breakdown part with evil synthesizers. It’s the most Zeal & Ardor song on the record. It has the elements people kind of expect from us, so we wanted to get that out of the way early on so the record can get weird later.” **“Emersion”** “This starts off with a really relaxed kind of hip-hop beat. We always play with contrast, so to have the heavy part sound heavy, you have to precede it with a really mellow soft part. And I think this is the most extreme in that regard, because it starts super low-key and kind of dreamy—and then out of nowhere, this wall of black metal comes in. We also put some flavors of post-rock in there, some hopeful melodies, just to offset the abrasive contrast.” **“Golden Liar”** “I was looking into ways to make the atmosphere a bit thicker, and of course a master of atmosphere is Ennio Morricone. So I liberated some elements of his music—I stole them. I did it to have this kind of slow-burn song, and I think it’s one of the longer ones. I really like this track because it conveys heaviness without being really heavy in the instrument department.” **“Erase”** “This is one of the more proggy ones. I only noticed this after the fact, but all of the songs are rather simple when it comes to how many parts they have. But this one is an outlier in that regard, and there’s also a lot of modal changes. I think we started in D, and it goes to a different key in a way that you don’t really notice. But if you skip from the beginning to the end of the song, we have the same guitar lick in a different key. It’s like a teleportation for the listener without them noticing, like a little magic trick.” **“Bow”** “My influences are really showing here, because I listen to a lot of industrial and electronic stuff like Woodkid. I just wanted to explore different kinds of heaviness, which is not just double-bass drums and guitars but sounds that are awe-inspiring. So there’s a distorted horn section in there which I came up with, and not Woodkid or Hans Zimmer. That was totally me by myself. I just wanted the most grandiose sound.” **“Feed the Machine”** “Funny story about this one. I do demos on my computer, and I program the drums for those. When I showed it to our drummer Marco, he was like, ‘That’s too fast, man. I can’t play that.’ So this song would’ve been even faster were it not for that. But the whole gag of this song is that there’s a really harsh, Ministry-esque part which sounds like a machine pumping away—which is where the title came from, I’m afraid.” **“I Caught You”** “We’re kind of the outliers in this whole black metal thing, because people think we’re phonies or whatever because we do different stuff. And the biggest sin you could commit in black metal is to have nu-metal influences. So that’s what we did with this song. We even slowed down the speed of the song just for those sequences so they would sound as Deftones-y as possible. So that’s a fun one. I can’t wait to play it live.” **“Church Burns”** “The intent with this was to have the most potentially controversial lyrics of the album be in the most poppy or pop-adjacent song we have. And seeing how this was on the front page of Apple Music recently, I think we kinda made that happen. I’m actually in disbelief that it worked that way, because in itself it’s just a pop verse, and then the breakdown, if you wanna call it that, is kinda ZZ Top-ish honky-tonk. I was kind of worried about that, because it’s so un-metal, so I was relieved that people ended up liking it.” **“Götterdämmerung”** “This is the title of a movement in a Wagner opera, and Wagner was heavily used by not-so-great people in the ’30s and ’40s in Germany. So I wanted to reappropriate and reclaim Wagner, even though he himself was a huge dick, too—but dude wrote brilliant music. And here’s how idiotic I am: I was really worried about the German lyrics, like can people even emote to this? I was totally blanking on the fact that Rammstein is a huge thing at this point. So, duh. But German just sounds metal, and it’s a fun language to scream in.” **“Hold Your Head Low”** “This is an older song that wasn’t written for this album specifically, but it kind of fit in. I think this is us at our bluesiest, and it’s also kind of a slow burner. Here’s where my Opeth influences show in guitar writing. When we were on tour with them last December, I elected not to play it because I was afraid Mikael \[Åkerfeldt\] would say, ‘You fucking ripoff!’ But we put it on the album because it feels like a little breather after all that harsh abrasiveness.” **“J-M-B”** “I tried to put some jazz chords to metal, which I thought was kind of an idiotic endeavor at first, but when I presented the songs in the studio, we felt we should put it on the record. It almost became like a secret hidden track, which is impossible to do these days. But since I write all these demos alone, I give them all these little project names. This one was ‘Jazz Metal Blues,’ but you can’t put that on the record sleeve, so: ‘J-M-B.’” **“A-H-I-L”** “This is more somber. The title stands for ‘All Hope Is Lost.’ In black metal, the atmosphere is basically everything, and it’s like that hopeless, drab rainy day in Norway, like ‘my father just got killed by a pack of wolves’ kind of vibe. I just wanted to try and emulate that with synthesizers, as far removed from actual black metal as possible. It felt like an appropriate outro after ‘J-M-B.’ This is back to serious business and it’s time to go to bed.”

“We live in a bleak spot,” Architects vocalist Sam Carter tells Apple Music. “We’re in a world where basically 90% of news is bad news. We are surrounded by it, where it is all-encompassing and it can eat away at your fucking soul. And I think this record is really trying to get that across and explore that level of where we\'re at—and we\'re just fucked, really,” he says of the British quintet’s 10th album. Sonically daring and seething with discontent, *the classic symptoms of a broken spirit* is a compulsively engaging dissident in Architect’s 16-year pilgrimage from progressive metalcore to the most abrasive of electrified alt-rock. “We’re not the band we were on our first record, but if you listened to the last record, it’s a logical progression,” Carter says. “We were talking so much about change and how important it is that we all need to start doing more and looking around. We’ve always discussed these elements. This is the first time we’ve shown the reality of that—which is that it can be really exhausting to feel and be open and awake.” Here, Carter talks through the themes and ideas behind each track on the album. **“deep fake”** “It’s leading on from ‘Animals,’ one of the last songs we wrote on \[2021 album\] *For Those That Wish to Exist*. It’s definitely leaning into this industrial world that we wanted to take the record. Like, we’re not going to use strings. We\'re going to make sure that everything is led by these synths and led by these weird things that we were doing in the studio. This really shows where it\'s going to go. It was also really fun to have a breakdown like this and show that we’re still a heavy band.” **“tear gas”** “This song really epitomizes the story of the record. The state of the world is just fucking insane. It\'s absolutely insane. And it\'s almost like now, especially this year, the powers that be can do and say whatever they want and it just happens. It\'s almost like they\'re not even trying to hide some of the insane things that they do, especially in the UK: We are fucked. So this record and in particular this song is a real kind of ‘You\'re not alone in your frustrations and your anger, and we are here to be your soundtrack for that.’” **“spit the bone”** “We had it all. It was so simple. Then we just kept evolving and then super-evolving and then everything became about convenience. So there has to be 500,000 cars driving stuff around and planes dropping stuff off and everyone has to have the exact meal that they want, ready to go. And now we\'re just cannibalizing each other to get what we want and standing on people in less privileged positions: The amount of greenhouse gas that we are putting out into the fucking world in the West is destroying lesser economies with fucking tidal waves and fucking climate change.” **“burn down my house”** “Me and Dan \[Searle, drummer\] have always been very vocal about our struggles with mental health, especially since Tom \[Searle, former guitarist\] passed. I think it\'s important to discuss it onstage, so it was important to have a song that showed off that side of where anyone can be at; to really humanize it. I always want to reach out about it, especially when I\'m talking to crowds. I’d rather upset somebody and ask if they\'re okay than have them not be here tomorrow. I\'ve lost a few friends to suicide and it\'s fucking difficult and it\'s really fucking hard.” **“living is killing us”** “This song feels like a rave to me; really loud and live. It was important coming off the back of ‘burn down my house’ to pick things up again. I love the production on this song. It is massive. It\'s really in your face. And I love how much the verses drop out and it’s almost like you\'re in a club or something or in a rave and you just go into a different room. The verses are you literally walking into another room and being like, ‘Fucking hell, it\'s intense out there.’ Then you go back in for the chorus and you’re like, ‘Oh Jesus.’” **“when we were young”** “This one came later on in the record when we were all in the studio together. It just seemed to happen. I\'d spoken to Josh \[Middleton, guitarist\] about how I thought the record could have benefitted from a really full-on song. I just gave him a real rough idea. The next day he turned up to the studio and demoed what he’d come up with while we were having breakfast. It has its place on this record because we still put a lot of layers in there, bringing in the synths and the sub-bass and really filling it out.” **“doomscrolling”** “The feeds that we see on our phones are decided by what we engage with the most. And I think the things that we\'re always going to engage with the most are shocking news stories. They’re the first thing you see when you wake up. They’re the last thing you see when you go to bed, and it\'s like, ‘Oh my fucking god. This is real life, this is fucking horrible, this is fucking terrifying.’ It\'s so easy to just get lost for an hour or so in just that. It’s a reminder to put your phone down.” **“born again pessimist”** “I think it\'s probably inspired by all of us a little bit. It\'s really rocky and gives me a sort of Oasis vibe in the chorus, which is obviously a band that we’ve all listened to a lot for our entire lives because we\'re from England. I love the breakdown. Dan\'s drums are really good and the verses have got so much energy. I think that was the thing that we really wanted to get across with this song.” **“a new moral low ground”** “This is my favorite. It\'s a really, really cool song that showcases so much of where the band is now. The chorus gives me a kind of Jimmy Eat World sort of party vibe in a weird sense. By the time the vocals count to three, you\'re like, ‘Oh fuck, where\'s this four, five, and six going to go?’ That middle bit is so stonery. It sounds really clubby and then it almost drops into this Pink Floyd moment. I think it\'ll be one that will be in the set for a long time. It also has the first guitar solo we\'ve ever had on a record.” **“all the love in the world”** “We worked with Choir Noir on this one. They\'d done the last record as well, and were also on ‘tear gas.’ I think they really added to the drama here, too. It\'s a really cool, big-sounding rock song. My memories of making this are fun as well, because there\'s a beat that goes on underneath everything. It’s made up of someone slamming the dishwasher, someone hitting a fire extinguisher, someone stamping on the floor. We edge it all together to make this weird beat.” **“be very afraid”** “It’s the only time on the record where you really get to hear that sort of low, growly-type vocal. This song is relentless the whole way through. We pushed ourselves to the extreme here. It’s kind of like a ‘fuck you.’ We can still do this. We are never going to lose this side of our band. It\'s what\'s important to us. That said, The Beatles are one of my favorite bands and I always loved the way that they managed to finish records—hence the birdsong, which I recorded on my phone in Devonshire.”

When Lorna Shore brought in Will Ramos to replace their previous vocalist in 2020, he had his work cut out for him. The New Jersey deathcore crew already had three albums and three EPs under their collective belt—not to mention a significant fanbase. Ramos made his studio debut with the band on their 2021 EP, *…And I Return to Nothingness*. “Writing the EP, I overthought the crap out of everything,” he tells Apple Music. “I had a million different ideas but wasn’t sure what to do. In the end, the band was like, ‘Do whatever feels most comfortable.’” Their advice paid off when the EP’s “To the Hellfire” went viral. So, Ramos trusted his instincts when it came time to write lyrics for *Pain Remains*. “I wanted to write an adventure that starts with the first song and ends almost back at the beginning with the last song,” he explains. Inspired by some of his favorite anime and manga, *Pain Remains* is a concept album that takes place in a dreamworld created by someone who wants to escape their reality. “A lot of deathcore albums are about anger and ‘fuck this, fuck that’—very monotone,” Ramos notes. “I wanted to do something that creates an emotion that, maybe, you haven’t felt in a long time.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Welcome Back, O’ Sleeping Dreamer”** “There’s a narrator explaining the potential of dreams and lucidity, the opportunity for exploration of the infinite, and a deeper dive into the human psyche. The whole song is about falling into this place that feels familiar, but it’s somehow not familiar at the same time. It’s a concept album, so this is the first chapter.” **“Into the Earth”** “This is where the character starts to realize that they’re lucid dreaming—and they’re able to control almost all of this world that’s around them. In the first song, they’re falling into place. In this one, they’re becoming aware of their abilities. Lucid dreaming—becoming aware of dreaming during the dream—is one of the hardest things to do. Usually, when you do that, you wake up immediately. But this person is realizing they can manipulate their dreamworld.” **“Sun//Eater”** “In this one, the character starts to realize that they’re almost like a god. When you start to lucid-dream, you become the god of your dreams. You can control everything. The chorus talks about being omnipotent: ‘I am the one/Icarus/I’ll touch the sun,’ whereas Icarus could not touch the sun. He tried so hard. In this song, the person is saying, ‘These are the things I’m going to do.’ It’s optimism. ‘I want to create. This is where I’m at.’” **“Cursed to Die”** “In this song, the character is fully immersed in a dreamlike state. After realizing that they’re a god in the last song, now the person who controls this dream universe ends up making people in his own image, so he’s not alone in this world. He’s creating man, essentially, from his memories. He’s basically just trying to fill a void inside that can’t be filled. At this point, he starts second-guessing everything. ‘Did I do this for fulfillment? Am I feeling fulfilled?’ He’s not exactly sure. But he’s learning that reality is whatever you make it to be.” **“Soulless Existence”** “This is where the main character, who has become the god of his own world, starts to realize that there is no point. ‘I’ve done all this shit, and I’m still not happy.’ His emptiness is filling up this world. He himself is nothingness. He’s lost his purpose. He’s found no significance in himself or anything that he has created. He’s lost. He starts to feel like he’s in an endless, almost inescapable purgatory. The lyrics are basically saying he’s in a place where nobody could ever find him.” **“Apotheosis”** “The character starts to see something in the distance that gives him a glimpse of hope. It may be a person or a thing, but he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. He’s like, ‘This is going to be fine. Everything is going to work out.’” **“Wrath”** “When we were putting the album together, this one got moved around. ‘Wrath’ was supposed to be before ‘Apotheosis’ in the story, but the songs flowed better sonically this way. The song is about being pissed and wanting to destroy everything. He’s basically at the point where he wants to see the world he’s created go down in flames. But, like I said, this was supposed to be before he finds any glimpse of hope. So, the story is a little jumbled here.” **“Pain Remains I: Dancing Like Flames”** “I used to have dreams where I would have this fantastic relationship with somebody, and I can’t even tell who this person is at all because that’s how dreams are. Unfortunately, you can’t make out a lot of things—dreams are so vague. But in your mind, it makes sense. You’re falling in love, and then you’ll wake up from the dream and be like, ‘Shit, that never really happened at all. This sucks.’ In the story, the character has a moment like this. They begin to love in their dreams, which returns meaning to their dreamworld. But they can’t quite find solace.” **“Pain Remains II: After All I’ve Done, I’ll Disappear”** “He’s beginning to realize that, after everything, he’s at the end of this whole world he made. It’s all a ghost in the breeze, like fading memories. He wants to disappear, to escape from this dreamworld.” **“Pain Remains III: In a Sea of Fire”** “This is the conclusion, but it’s also the part where he is most angry. He’s at the bottom of the barrel and desperate. The world he made, he’s going to burn it all down and disappear. He’s ready to go back to wherever it was that he came from. It’s the idea that God has left us and the world he made. He’s bored, he’s sad, and nothing he’s done has brought him any purpose. So, he leaves the world and goes back to the reality he came from. The ending is a bittersweet tragedy.”

Since completing their farewell tour in 2012, Southern Ontario post-hardcore heroes Alexisonfire have done a pretty terrible job of staying apart. Even as its members committed themselves to other bands—singer/guitarist Dallas Green with City and Colour, resident screamer George Pettit with Dead Tired, guitarist/vocalist Wade MacNeil with Gallows, drummer Jordan Hastings with Billy Talent—the everlasting power of what they created as Alexisonfire kept pulling them back together. Festival reunion dates in 2015 had, by decade’s end, given way to a string of stand-alone singles. Still, the prospect of a new full-length Alexisonfire album—following 2009’s *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*—was never a sure thing. That is, until COVID shutdowns presented them with a rare opportunity to make music without deadline pressures or looming tour dates. “This was just a bunch of guys getting back together and just creating for the sake of it,” Pettit tells Apple Music. “We\'re all very different people than when we wrote *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*, but I think that benefited us in a lot of ways, because there\'s been 10 years of us consuming different music and being inspired by different things.” Arriving 20 years after their self-titled debut album, *Otherness* reintroduces a band that’s lost none of its intensity, and shortens the aesthetic distance between Alexisonfire’s circle-pit strikes and the graceful balladry of City and Colour. And that’s not just Green’s doing—for the first time, Pettit eases up on the throat-shredding to actually sing a handful of verses and harmonize with his bandmates. “This album came to us without a lot of struggles,” Pettit says proudly. “On *Otherness*, we\'re all pulling in the same direction.” Here, Pettit gives us the track-by-track rundown of Alexisonfire’s new beginning. **“Commited to the Con”** “The con is conservatism. It\'s this notion that if we dismantle government for the sake of giving tax breaks or funneling money into billionaires’ pockets without regulation, that\'s somehow going to deliver us to some new utopia of freedom. That\'s just horseshit, and a lot of people are buying it. There are people out there that are committed to this con, this thing with no working models in the world. But when we band together, our tax dollars can prop up the cornerstone of civilized society—they pay for hospitals and schools and emergency services and infrastructure. So when we ask, ‘Which side are you on?’ it\'s like: Are you on the side of working together as people to make things better for everyone, or are you on the side of every-man-for-himself libertarian hypothetical nonsense?” **“Sweet Dreams of Otherness”** “The idea of \'otherness\' can be interpreted in any sort of way. The way that it applies to Alexisonfire is that we were all kids who grew up trying to find the secret corners of culture. I grew up in Southern Ontario, a third-generation Canadian with no ties to any sort of real culture from my ancestry. So you have to make it yourself and figure out the things that you want to represent your generation. And the things that were being presented to us through major media didn\'t appeal to us—we had to go and find those weird spaces. It could have been a CAW \[Canadian Auto Workers\] union hall where there was a punk show happening, or an independent record store, or the indie cinema that was coming out at the time. So the song is kind of about that, but it also has all sorts of implications for people who are nonbinary, or people who are LGBTQ. It\'s about finding strength in the fact that you\'re very different.” **“Sans Soleil”** “I\'m kind of a key component to Alexisonfire with all my screaming, but there have been times where we\'ve shoehorned that into songs just to kind of keep me in the band. But this is a beautiful song, and there\'d be no point in trying to have me scream for the purposes of keeping that in. So I took a back seat—I was just doing backup vocals with Dallas on this one. It\'s the type of song that we might not have put on one of our earlier records, but we felt like it was an Alexis song, for sure.” **“Conditional Love”** “This is about love as a choice, as opposed to it being some uncontrollable thing. And in some ways, that, to me, is better: the idea of being an active participant in my love and not have it be something that I\'m being dragged around by. That\'s the sentiment of the lyrics—but they just kind of fell into this ripper kind of rock song.” **“Blue Spade”** “\[Bassist\] Chris Steele started contributing lyrics on this record. Chris is a very remarkable individual who has been through a considerable amount, so having his perspective on a song felt right. Dallas took a section of his lyrics and found a way to turn it into a chorus. We have demos of the song where I’m screaming the verses, but when we got into the studio, I thought, \'I\'m gonna attempt to sing this.\' I\'m not quite confident in my ability as a singer, so I was like, \'Is this good?\' And then Wade walked in the room and was like, \'That\'s it! That\'s what this song needs.\' We had a really intense moment where we were just like, \'Okay, well, now there\'s nothing that we can\'t do!\' It just felt like we had unlocked a new gear within the band and found a new way to inject me into a song.” **“Dark Night of the Soul”** “The lyrical content is about Wade having a psychedelic experience on DMT, and the song matches the lyrics. We were really expanding this song, and there\'s that moment in the bridge—where it goes to that shuffle beat—and I thought, \'Let\'s do something jazzy here.\' We found a way to really make that song unique—it goes full Goblin. There were grand designs at one point to approach the remaining members of Rush to do like a 15-minute bridge for the song.” **“Mistaken Information”** “Dallas is the best singer that I\'ve ever known, so it was nice to actually sing \[harmonies\] on a track with him. After I was done recording my vocals for this, I was almost sad, because I was enjoying it so much. I think this song was actually in play for City and Colour’s new record, but Dallas was discussing it with his wife, and she was like, \'I feel like this is an Alexisonfire song.\' It\'s about the war on the truth, and how it\'s hard to understand what the truth is now because there\'s so much misinformation out there. But when we were recording it, I remember Dallas saying, \'Are people just going to think this is a breakup song?\' And I said, \'If they interpret it that way, it\'s valid.’ I feel like it works that way as well.” **“Survivor’s Guilt”** “I work in emergency services, and this song is naming a phenomenon that I see, where you see something horrible and then you go about the rest of your day like nothing happened. You have the ability to kind of detach, and it\'s not a particularly heroic quality, but it is, in some ways, a very necessary quality. I\'m not sure that necessarily comes through in the lyrics—I purposely tried to make it a bit more open for interpretation, but that\'s where the ‘survivor’s guilt’ sentiment came from.” **“Reverse the Curse”** \"We had a version of this \[for *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*\] that was extremely Kyuss-heavy, and at the time, we were uncomfortable with that—we felt like we were doing something that wasn\'t us. As a group of people who have great respect for the stoner-rock world, we didn’t want to disrespect it. It\'s the same reason why I would never make a reggae album, even though I love Jamaican music. But now, in the \'Dark Night of the Soul\' era of Alexisonfire, things are a little more open and we can kind of do whatever we feel like now. \[City and Colour touring member\] Matt Kelly got to play Hammond on it, and that really leveled the song up in a way that we hadn\'t been anticipating.” **“World Stops Turning”** “This is a love song Dallas wrote about his band, Alexisonfire. We had the most beautiful moment where he brought us up to his cottage and we sat at his dining room table and for three hours, we just talked, and discussed the history of the band. He let us in on things that had been going on in his life, and it was just a very introspective moment for all of us. And at the end of it, he presented us with a demo he\'d been working on of this song, and we just knew that this is going to be the new set-closer. We’ve always ended our set with \[2004\'s\] \'Happiness by the Kilowatt,\' and we turn it into this 12-minute version. And this song felt like the new version of that—we\'re gonna have this big sprawling epic, and I could envision it just blowing everyone’s hair back. It\'s a perfect album-ender—we went full Floyd on this one.”

“The album represents a journey through the darkness,” Parkway Drive lead vocalist Winston McCall tells Apple Music about the Aussie metalcore band’s seventh record. “It was never designed to be a concept album, but the way we make music is always album-based. We’re not a singles band. We write a cohesive piece of art, and this one happened to be centralized around the concept of the dark night of the soul.” Considering that the pandemic lockdown in which the album was written was essentially a global dark night of the soul, McCall’s lyrics on *Darker Still* will likely resonate far and wide. From Parkway Drive’s perspective, it’s also their pinnacle achievement. “This is the album where our ability and experience finally caught up to the imagination that we’ve had for 20 years of being a band,” he says. “This is the kind of music that always inspired us, but we’ve never had the ability—or the time—to actually create it until this record.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Ground Zero”** “We wanted to write an album opener that was anthemic and had those big riffs that you’ve come to expect from Parkway, and really captured that live energy and that bombastic feel. The choruses are lifted up in a way that we’ve probably never even hit before, in terms of it being accessible and something that will get stuck in people’s heads. The idea for this was to give people something that they would feel is a safe, expected Parkway sound—but improved. This is the safe space before the twist around the corner.” **“Like Napalm”** “This is where the rage begins. It’s the beginning of the spiraling process of this album. We wanted something that just smashed from start to finish. This is when the groove and the rhythms of this album really start to kick in. It just goes the entire time—bang, bang, bang—and then you get about four bars of bass reprieve before it smashes you in the outro as well. But the choruses still have that melody which really lifts it through the roof with Jeff \[Ling\]’s signature lead guitar accents, which are a real staple of the entire album.” **“Glitch”** “This was one of the first songs we started working on. For such an accessible chorus and an accessible song, the layering that we put under it is quite creepy and unnerving. When you put headphones on, you pick out different chants and whispers and strange stuff going on, because essentially the song is about dealing with sleep paralysis and nightmares and insomnia. That\'s a very strange, dark, creepy concept, so weaving all of that stuff into something which was so palatable—and which was going to be a single—was another step down the spiral.” **“The Greatest Fear”** “The song is about death, plain and simple. It’s about redefining the greatest fear that we all share. It\'s the element of every person\'s life on this planet which unites us. Every single person that you know and love will one day die. And the fear of losing someone we care about was omnipresent through all our lives during COVID. But the idea of this song, lyrically, was to frame death as not a bad or evil force in itself—it simply marks a time of transition into a point of unknowing.” **“Darker Still”** “This is possibly the most different song we\'ve ever written. It took us three albums to be able to execute this song. We wanted to do a ballad for quite a long time, and we couldn\'t figure out how to actually do it. But Jeff came to us with an acoustic version of the main refrain, the main riff in the song, with a whistle attached to the front of it. And we knew immediately that it was too epic to just be a rock song. It had to be this massive ballad, which we\'ve never done before. For us, this is really the marker of how far we’ve come as a band, because I think it’s one of our biggest achievements to be able to execute a large, intricate composition like this.” **“Imperial Heretic”** “This one is an anthem for the times we live in. It was written mid-COVID, when it became quite apparent that we were going through something that was uniting everyone worldwide in fear and desperation. We watched the wheels come off our perceptions of the world we live in, in terms of equality and democracy and civil rights and everything going up in flames. We were realizing how fragile everything is, and how powerful the people in power actually are. So, this is an anthem written for the billions of people around the world who had the blinders lifted off them for probably the first time.” **“If a God Can Bleed”** “You’re definitely very far down the dark rabbit hole by the time this track comes along. If ‘unnerving’ has been the word to set the tone so far, you can couple the word ‘menacing’ along with it on this song. The idea for this one is based around the concept of complacency and becoming soft. It\'s kind of a rallying cry to us as artists to continue pushing. At this point, you can’t look away from the dark place where the album is trying to take you, but this song has these jagged little edges that will hook in your brain, and a narrative that will set your skin crawling a little bit.” **“Soul Bleach”** “This one is unrelenting, unbridled rage based around the concept of trust broken and positioning of a person as the embodiment of a villain in someone else’s eyes. This is taking all of the misunderstanding and the hurt and the reality that sometimes you are the villain to someone, no matter how good you are. Sometimes you have to embody that just to be the person that you are. And this song is spat out as hard and viciously as possible. This is the point in the album where everything goes to 11. There’s nothing subtle about this one, and that’s the entire point.” **“Stranger”** “This is one of the most peculiar little pieces that we\'ve ever put on a record. It\'s as minuscule and isolating as possible. It’s another one of those moments where we wanted to wrong-foot people, especially after something like ‘Soul Bleach.’ We wanted to give a moment to breathe and reflect. And it is a real reflection because the lyrics represent where we were at that point in time and where everyone was—which was completely isolated from every point in society and reduced to communicating on screens. All of a sudden, we all became strangers and the world became a strange place to live in.” **“Land of the Lost”** “The first riff we had for this has an industrial edge to it, so we chose to lean into that. The song plays off between the engine of that industrialized riff running at 100% capacity in the choruses with that chain-gang chant of ‘keep digging’ over the top of it. And the verses are played off with a triple layer of a computerized voice, which we programmed to sing the verse lines with a distorted human voice and then a real human voice. The concept is that you go from being a computer representation of a human to a real human full of emotion by the time you get to the last chorus.” **“From the Heart of the Darkness”** “This song represents the closest thing that there is to light at the end of the journey. It’s basically built around one powerful riff, one powerful refrain, which drives that rhythm so hard. It builds from a place of subtlety to a place of incredible complexity based around that one riff. Lyrically, it represents the acknowledgment of what the journey through the darkness provides—the reemergence of self and the repositioning of self within a world that was confused and destroyed.”

Behemoth leader Adam “Nergal” Darski borrowed a fitting term from Carl Jung for the title of his extreme-metal band’s 12th album. “Jung had his own agenda attached to it, but for me, it’s a work of art against the nature of things, the order of things,” the Polish guitarist and vocalist tells Apple Music. “It defines my approach to music.” As a vehemently anti-Christian artist who’s been repeatedly hauled into court on charges of blasphemy and “offending religious feelings” in his institutionally pious homeland, Nergal is especially attuned to censorship in all its forms. “There’s a set of standards that’s being imposed upon people, and especially artists, where you cannot talk freely,” he says. “To me, art has no limits. As we speak, I have three lawsuits happening simultaneously, for blasphemy and mocking this or that. There are people who watch my shows or read my lyrics and think, ‘This guy is a villain. We should put him behind bars.’ *Opvs Contra Natvram* is yet another middle finger I’m throwing against those cunts’ faces.” Below, he comments on each song. **“Post-God Nirvana”** “It’s an intro that’s also a song. There are just two proper verses, so it makes it a very weird, different song. Some of what I write is wishful thinking, like I’m projecting some kind of dystopian or post-apocalyptic or whatever future where things are going to be my way, or they’re not going to be my way. In this case, I imagine a world, let’s say 50 years down the road, where the world is free of God, free of religion. There’s no abortion laws. There are no chains anymore. People are basically free.” **“Malaria Vvlgata”** “After ‘Post-God Nirvana,’ I wanted to come out with something absolutely blistering, something polarizing. ‘Malaria Vvlgata’ was deliberately done as a hit between the eyes with an iron first. It’s almost punky—a burst of anti-Christian, anti-religious feeling. There’s no nuances. It’s a hate anthem, just completely uncompromising. It’s one of the most brutal songs I’ve ever written and definitely the shortest one I’ve ever written.” **“The Deathless Sun”** “This song reminds me of how I felt about ‘Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer’ when we did *The Satanist*. When we wrote that song, I thought, ‘OK, it’s strong, it’s a banger, but it’s probably not the strongest song on the record.’ But then, holy shit—it really took crowds by storm. People went totally nuts when we played it live. When we started playing this album for people, a lot of them were saying ‘The Deathless Sun’ is the strongest on the record. It took me a while to realize that, but now I’m thinking it’s one of my absolute favorites.” **“Ov My Herculean Exile”** “It’s probably the most mellow track on the record, and it was also the first one we made a video for. Every other band, when they release their first single, it’s always a banger. They’re just fucking flexing the muscles, like, ‘We are the heaviest, we are the fastest.’ But I wanted to do it the other way around. I wanted to serve an aperitif first, rather than the main course. I’d say this is our storytelling song. It’s rather epic and midtempo. A lot of people were complaining, ‘Where’s the speed?’ But I’m dying to read the comments when they hear how fucking intense the full record is.” **“Neo-Spartacvs”** “I love this one. It’s very catchy and brutal. The message behind the song is quite crucial because everyone knows who Spartacus is; he’s probably the most-known rebel in history. I’m telling people there are many things that you can rebel against that are objectively wrong. I think the invasion of Ukraine by Russia is wrong, and I don’t give a fuck if you agree with me or not. I think the righteous thing is to be a Spartacus about that. Please support Ukraine. Make people aware of what is happening. There is an obvious invader and an obvious victim. There is no gray spot.” **“Disinheritance”** “Again, this is one of the most brutal songs I’ve ever written. I really hope that people will find it as the hidden treasure of the record. It’s a really strong, powerful song that this record needed. I’m particularly proud of the midsection—it’s one of the craziest parts I’ve ever come up with. It’s like a complete fucking tornado, almost going out of tune. It gets to the point where it sounds cacophonic. It’s the sickest, most bizarre part I’ve ever written for this band.” **“Off To War!”** “It\'s a banger of a song with punky vibes. I started exploring those vibes on the previous record, and I think I kind of perfected it on this album. When Ihsahn from Emperor heard this, he said it has that ’90s black-metal feel to it. Maybe it does—I don’t know, but I really like the song. It’s super powerful to play live. The lyrics are very existential. There’s a lot of questions I’m throwing into the ether, but I’m not answering them. There’s no fun in giving answers. I’m not clever enough to answer those questions.” **“Once Upon A Pale Horse”** “I’ve never done anything similar to this before. It has a groove that I believe can really do a lot of damage live. It sounds almost rock-ish, but we turn it into our black metal, and it’s fucking sharp and dangerous. There’s a conquering riff with almost a power-metal vibe. I’m not afraid to say that I was a big fan of Manowar, and if there is a power-metal moment on this record, it’s in the chorus of this song, which is some of my words mixed with Aleister Crowley’s most famous quote ‘do what thou wilt,’ which I’ve had tattooed on me for 20 years.” **“Thy Becoming Eternal”** “When it comes to fast songs, this is my favorite. The first section is fucking relentless. It never stops. I did the choirs, and my friend Zofia from the Polish band Obscure Sphinx added those really weird-sounding female vocals on top of it. \[Bassist\] Orion also backed me up with the vocals. It doesn’t leave any room for breath, and then it just opens up. When you watch the video that accompanies the song, it’s the moment where the world opens up and they’re ready to receive the knowledge from the fire seeker. He’s carrying the Torch of Heraclitus, and he’s just giving it to the world.” **“Versvs Christvs”** “I wanted this to be a stand-alone monument, something that does everything—like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is everything. Of course, I’m not competing with fucking timeless Led Zeppelin classics, but some bands release songs that are just fucking bigger than everything, you know? Like \[Iron Maiden’s\] ‘Powerslave’ or \[Slayer’s\] ‘Seasons in the Abyss’ or \[Metallica’s\] ‘Master of Puppets.’ I wanted to make something so bombastic, you couldn’t label it. It’s a song that takes different curves. It’s anthemic. It has choirs. It’s goth. I’m singing over a piano, and then it speeds up with a punky vibe, and then it goes into a blasting riff. It’s very adventurous and all over the place. Again, I’m not comparing this to classics. What I’m saying is that I’m aspiring.”

Lzzy Hale started writing Halestorm’s fifth album in the period she calls “B.C.”—Before Covid. When the pandemic hit and the world shut down, the guitarist and vocalist found herself having an identity crisis. “I went from being Lzzy Hale, the rock star onstage, to Elizabeth Hale in my pajamas for three days, sitting on the couch, not knowing what the future holds,” she tells Apple Music. “What I don’t think I realized before is that all of the things I do with the band—traveling, live shows, writing songs—are the forward movement of having a mission. When all that is stolen, you look in the mirror and ask, ‘Who am I without all of this?’” Despite the deep anxiety and unease that question presented, Hale persevered and wrote her most revealing album yet. “I had to kick myself in the butt and write my way out of it,” she says. “There’s something that happens when you write a song that helps you work through those issues. It’s truly a form of therapy. And now when I hear it, I realize I wasn’t alone in those feelings. My most personal album also became our most universal.” Below, she discusses each song on *Back From the Dead*. **“Back From the Dead”** “This is the song that blew the doors open for this album. We\'d written some others, and we liked a lot of them, but this one became a keystone. It became the road map for the other songs. But it’s really a song of survival. It’s a war cry. It’s about that bravery you have to have in order to get yourself out of that dark place, to pull yourself out of that grave you’ve been digging for yourself. I’m singing the craziest I’ve probably ever sang. My little brother is going nuts on the drums. Everyone is on 11.” **“Wicked Ways”** “This is probably one of the heaviest songs on the record. It’s about acceptance, but not just acceptance of the things you like about yourself. It’s also about acceptance of your dark side. Something that I realized over the past couple years is that I can be really mean when I want to be, and I make huge mistakes. And I say things I don\'t mean. Does that make me evil? Probably not. But in seeing both sides of myself, I can form a truth. I can accept those two sides of myself and not pretend I have everything figured out.” **“Strange Girl”** “This song was directly inspired by a conversation that I had during lockdown with a young fan, about 15. She ended up coming out to her parents shortly before lockdown and they were not having any of it, so it was really hard for her to be stuck there with people that weren’t supportive of her being her truest self. I took this conversation into one of my writing sessions and wrote her an anthem. Not a ballad, but an anthem saying that she could wake up every morning and just be proud of her most authentic self.” **“Brightside”** “Ironically, this is probably the darkest, most sarcastic song on the album. It was kind of a boiling point for me. It was written during the pandemic that we’re still going through, and it’s just me looking at the world and seeing that there’s so much hate for hate’s sake. There’s so many people arguing over petty bullshit that doesn’t matter. And then there’s personal questions like, ‘Are we ever going to go out again?’ It all boiled down to, ‘I’ve got to keep looking on the bright side because it only gets darker.’” **“The Steeple”** “With this song, I’m trying to recreate that fellowship and that community that I love so much about the live show and just being surrounded by people. We all get to put our fists in the air and celebrate together, and what’s going on in the outside world doesn’t matter for that moment. I just really wanted to create this celebratory song that we could all sing together—that’s why there’s so many voices on it. I wanted it to be like we’re all part of the same choir. Basically, I’m creating the church for the Devil’s music.” **“Terrible Things”** “The first version of this was ‘I Am Terrible Things,’ and I was talking about all these things that I find disparaging about myself. Then I had this moment when I decided it wasn’t about me. And also, I don’t want to have a song reminding me of all my past mistakes. So, it became about me looking at the world we live in and asking how you maintain hope in humanity when you see so much destruction and war and people starving. I feel like we’re taking these huge steps backward in evolution. So, it’s hard to maintain that faith in humanity, but I have to. Or else what am I doing this for?” **“My Redemption”** “When I wrote this song, I had made some mistakes. I had done some things I said I’d never do, and I was having a hard time forgiving myself. This song needed to happen in order for me to get over that. One thing I learned through writing this song is that I am still the only person in this world that will truly ever be in my way, and I’m also the only person that can save me. I can’t just sit around and wait for someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me, ‘Everything’s going to be OK’—I have to do that myself. So, this was, indeed, my redemption song.” **“Bombshell”** “This was one of the earliest demos we put together for the album. When we were making the *Reimagined* EP a couple of years ago, one of the guitar techs broke the Les Paul my guitar player, Joe \[Hottinger\], was playing. The high-E tuning mechanism failed, but Joe was still plugged in and started playing the limp string as a joke. It sounded gnarly, and he recorded it on his phone. That’s what the intro is based on. We used the double meaning of ‘bombshell,’ as far as it’s a girl but it’s also an explosive. It’s one of my favorites.” **“I Come First”** “OK, this started out as a sex song, but then I decided that some of the lines were really cheesy. I had whips and chains in there at one point, and I was like, ‘Man, I can’t do that.’ So, I decided to take all the sex lines out, and all of a sudden, it revealed itself as a self-love song. It’s saying you can’t give to anybody else until you fill your own cup first. I still kind of think of it as the sex song because that’s where it started, but it doesn’t have to be that. Unless you feel so inclined…” **“Psycho Crazy”** “Apparently, this is my dad’s favorite song on the album, which surprises me. I’m like, ‘Dad, are you all right?’ But I’ve been told many times over the course of my life that I’m crazy for doing this, or crazy for being gung-ho about the band and the music or myself—that I’m too passionate about certain things. And in those moments, I’m like, ‘Well, this isn’t even my crazy. If you really want me to go there, I can.’ It’s about taking the negativity that people offer you and using it as your superpower.” **“Raise Your Horns”** “A few years ago, my friend Jill Janus from the band Huntress committed suicide. I felt very helpless about it. When you know someone who does that, you think, ‘Could I have done something? Maybe I should have reached out.’ On a whim, I put together this hashtag, #RaiseYourHorns, and I basically said, ‘If you’ve been touched by mental illness or know someone who is, take a picture of yourself and raise your horns.’ It was this grand effort in real time to show everyone that they’re not alone. And it took off like gangbusters. So, I wrote this song as a way to say the same thing—that we’re not alone in our struggles.”

From his formative days associating with Raider Klan through his revealing solo projects *TA13OO* and *ZUU*, Denzel Curry has never been shy about speaking his mind. For *Melt My Eyez See Your Future*, the Florida native tackles some of the toughest topics of his MC career, sharing his existential notes on being Black and male in these volatile times. The album opens on a bold note with “Melt Session #1,” a vulnerable and emotional cut given further weight by jazz giant Robert Glasper’s plaintive piano. That hefty tone leads into a series of deeply personal and mindfully radical songs that explore modern crises and mental health with both thematic gravity and lyrical dexterity, including “Worst Comes to Worst” and the trap subversion “X-Wing.” Systemic violence leaves him reeling and righteous on “John Wayne,” while “The Smell of Death” skillfully mixes metaphors over a phenomenally fat funk groove. He draws overt and subtle parallels to jazz’s sociopolitical history, imagining himself in Freddie Hubbard’s hard-bop era on “Mental” and tapping into boom bap’s affinity for the genre on “The Ills.” Guests like T-Pain, Rico Nasty, and 6LACK help to fill out his vision, yielding some of the album’s highest highs.

Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date. Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap. To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.

When Thursday drummer Tucker Rule sent Circa Survive and Saosin vocalist Anthony Green some songs to check out during COVID lockdown, the singer wasn’t aware that he was being recruited for an emo supergroup. “When the pandemic hit, every band out there was trying to figure out how to stay alive,” Green tells Apple Music. “I was freaking out, so I was trying to stay busy. Tucker said he had a project with a couple friends and asked me to sing on it. The songs were really good, so I went for it.” It wasn’t until after Green had recorded vocals for a few songs that Rule revealed the rest of the band’s lineup: My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero, Coheed and Cambria guitarist Travis Stever, and Thursday bassist Tim Payne. “I’m glad he didn’t tell me,” Green says. “I would’ve felt so much more pressure.” Below, the singer details each track on L.S. Dunes’ debut. **“2022”** “It’s definitely one of the most personal songs I’ve ever written. I guess all the songs are personal, but the heaviness of that song is about wondering if I would’ve been better off dead than alive. I know a lot of people go through that—it’s not just me—but it’s a hard song for me to play because it makes me feel all the feelings I had when I wrote it. All that insecurity and all that fucking heaviness comes back. If I could not play it, I would, but the band really loves that song.” **“Antibodies”** “That was one of the first songs I put vocals to for Dunes. It was at the beginning of quarantine, everyone was isolated, and there was a rift between people who were like, ‘I’ll do whatever I can to try to make this thing less brutal on people with compromised immune systems and people that are more susceptible to getting bad COVID’ and people who were like, ‘I don’t give a shit, and I don’t think it’s that bad.’ So, the song comes from feeling isolated and trying to get my head around the idea that some people didn’t give a shit if someone’s grandma or father or mother was gonna die.” **“Grey Veins”** “I’ve been in a lot of projects with a lot of people, and when I sat down to write this song, I was thinking a lot about whether or not I was doing too much. Sometimes I wonder, ‘Am I going to make people sick of me? Am I doing too many things?’ I kind of answered that question with this song being like, ‘Fuck, no.’ I’m just going to fucking play and make as much music as I can here, and I don’t have to explain it to anybody or to live up to anybody else’s standards. I just need to do what makes me happy and to do it as fearlessly as I possibly can.” **“Like Forever”** “I’ve been going through addiction stuff my entire life. As you get older and the more you work on it, you get a little time clean and then something happens, and you relapse. That’s not part of everybody’s story, but it was part of my journey—and man, it sucks. Having to explain it to somebody, having to deal with the hurt and confusion you cause other people when you relapse…maybe some people don’t want to talk to you after that. They don’t want to be in your life because they don’t want to deal with the stress of loving you. This song deals with that shame and trying to figure out how to get back on a healthy path.” **“Blender”** “This song is so stoney and heavy. Lyrically, it has to do with my mental health issues and being bipolar. It’s funny because the song is bipolar in and of itself because the verses are very low, and then the choruses are at the very top of my range. It’s not an accident that it goes from one extreme to the other. It very much symbolizes the theme of the song, which is me wrestling and coming to grips with the nature of my mood swings, my personality, and my fears.” **“Past Lives”** “This song was inspired by the statues of Confederate soldiers and Christopher Columbus coming down, and the idea of history writing itself rather than going down this lane of total bullshit. Being able to change the narrative in schools so that people are learning the truth about the foundation of this country and the violence at the core of it. It should be taught in school that we massacred people and decimated cultures. I have to deal with parents in my kids\' school who think that it’s bad to teach kids about slavery. It’s wild that people don’t want to teach the truth about something.” **“It Takes Time”** “I wrote this song about Frank. He was in an accident and really fucked up his wrist and hand, and he had to get surgery during the recording of the album. We had to take a big break from sharing music because he couldn’t play guitar. I don’t think he knew if he was ever going to be able to play again. So, I was thinking about him and his relationship with his instrument. The song opens up with, ‘Hello? I’m not sure if you remember, we connected a long time ago.’ That’s him talking to his guitar and his muse. I don’t always write a song for someone else from their perspective, but I did that with this.” **“Bombsquad”** “This is another one that came up around politics during COVID. I was thinking about how people were lying through their teeth about stuff just to save face—just making shit up, essentially. And the ability that some people had to just detach from reality and pretend that their shithead president was actually helping. It has a lot to do with QAnon and some of the people in my life that were falling for that shit.” **“Grifter”** “This is one of my favorites. I wrote this song about trying to start over. With each of these projects that I’m doing, I’m digging and I’m trying to find something. Music is a religion to me, and I think that ‘Grifter’ is questioning whether I’ve made it into a religion in a way that’s unhealthy. I center everything around music and rely on it a lot, and it’s turned into something I worship. I’m sort of questioning whether or not that’s a healthy thing.” **“Permanent Rebellion”** “This is another song that’s 100 percent about trying to drop the baggage of our old bands and trying to do something a little bit different with different people.” **“Sleep Cult”** “I did an interview where I talked a little bit about suicide, and then I realized that my kids were going to see that. There’re things that I’m realizing my kids are going to see and hear, and I want to jump in front of it and go to them and explain myself and really let them know me, so they don’t ever see or hear anything where they’re like, ‘Oh shit, this is really heavy.’ I just want to make sure I’m creating an environment for them where they know me and they can talk to me about anything they need, so they don’t ever feel like they’re alone in this world.”

Luminaries from rock's thriving post-punk, and hardcore scenes, guitarist Frank Iero (My Chemical Romance), guitarist Travis Stever (Coheed and Cambria), vocalist Anthony Green (Circa Survive), bassist Tim Payne (Thursday), and drummer Tucker Rule (Thursday) have joined forces to create L.S. DUNES. Unshackled from the expectations and aesthetics of their already successful careers, L.S. DUNES super-charge their heavy anthems with punk energy into a sound unlike anything that has come before it. From the gripping, theatrical opener "2022," and the crunchy, frenetic earworm "Like Forever," to the pummeling, expansive "Permanent Rebellion,” and the disarming album closer, "Sleep Cult," Past Lives is an electrifying and emotional ride. Past Lives was produced by Will Yip (Turnstile, Circa Survive, Quicksand) and recorded at his Studio 4 Recording in Philadelphia, PA. Going deep on issues of fearlessness, dependency, nonconformity, and impermanence, writing for the album was a collaborative effort. After the shock of the pandemic shutdown, the close friends and mutual admirers urgently realized that ‘tomorrow’ is not promised. “We never knew if we would ever get to play these songs together, in fact none of us lifelong musicians really knew if we’d ever be able to play music for a live audience ever again,” Iero recounted. “Permanent Rebellion” is about taking back what is rightfully yours.” Rule added, “We wanted to do something where you can hear all our bands in it and yet, not have it sound like any one in particular. Our roots are punk rock and hardcore, and the vibe is hope for all the lost souls.” The seeds of L.S. DUNES were planted during rehearsals for Thursday's Christmas livestream event in 2020 which included friends and acquaintances from some of their favorite bands. The chemistry at the serendipitous, impromptu jam sessions was instantaneous. With the addition of Circa Survive vocalist Anthony Green, it was organically clear, this time, the music formed the band. Original, aggressive, and intense, L.S. DUNES is the next great leap in rock's grand evolution.

WILLOW made her return to music in 2021 with her infectious pop-punk- and indie-rock-style fourth album, *lately I feel EVERYTHING*, a departure from the neo-soul and alt-R&B of her previous albums. For her fifth album (co-produced by singer-songwriter and guitarist Chris Greatti), the emo-punk star deals with heartbreak the best way she knows how: through catchy hooks rife with angst against crashing cymbals and sharp bass riffs, leaning into a grittier sound than its predecessor. The album opener “maybe it’s my fault” chronicles the rise and fall of a relationship, with WILLOW coming to terms with the possibility that her actions may have caused its downfall. The song begins with WILLOW reminiscing on the whirlwind early days over angelic background vocals, steadily intensifying to when the first fight happens. “I don’t know/How I can forgive you/It’s all in my mind, it’s all in my mind/I try to rewind and all of the while, I’m hurtin’ inside/It’s your fault/Maybe it’s my fault,” she sings. The album serves as a cathartic purging of emotions across each of its 11 tracks. Whether it’s about feeling the physical and mental isolation of moving through the world (“curious/furious,” “WHY?”) or reflecting on a fractured relationship (“Split,” “Coping Mechanism”), WILLOW showcases her vulnerability with ease.

Subtlety is not The Chats’ strong point. Exhibit A is the blunt-as-it-comes title of the Queensland trio’s second album, a 13-song record in which only two of its tracks surpass the three-minute mark. Add the fact that bassist-vocalist Eamon Sandwith sings like a chainsaw, snarling and raging over a series of tightly coiled riffs that rarely dip under hyper-speed, and you have the sonic equivalent of a swift boot to the face. Recorded in six days, the album finds Sandwith’s everyman lyrical focus taking in subjects such as the cost of cigarettes (“The Price of Smokes”), hoon driving culture (“6L GTR”), and being busted for buying an under-14s train ticket (“Ticket Inspector”), all with a turn of phrase that’s unquestionably Australian. (“Starin’ at the ATM/It says insufficient funds/That’s just not good enough/’Cause right now I wanna get drunk,” he growls in “Paid Late”.) More sober themes occasionally pop their heads over the bar (“Emperor of the Beach” lambastes surfers who view the beach as their own), but even they’re delivered as delicately as a headbutt. And if you don’t like it? Well…you know what you can do.

The sophmore album from Conjurer

HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING will conclude a trilogy of albums by Backxwash which began 3 years ago. The series is primarily auto-biographical, with fragments of stories from her periphery. With every record, Backxwash travels farther back in time, reliving and experiencing the anger and despair that she had not granted herself at that time. God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It (2020) began as a candid processing of her experiences in her adult life in realtime, while her sequential record I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES (2021) was a reflection on her adolescent and early adulthood years. Whereas God Has Nothing was a study in mercy, in I LIE HERE BURIED Backxwash finds solace in being consumed by her malevolent behaviours. HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING (2022) delves into environmental influences during her youth and times pre-dating her existence, concluding this therapeutic practice with a return to the here and now with a stronger sense of self than when she began this therapeutic and cathartic trilogy.

The year 2022 marks a new beginning for Machine Head. Not only is *ØF KINGDØM AND CRØWN* the Bay Area metal band’s first LP with new guitarist Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka (also of Polish tech-death blasters Decapitated), but it’s also their first concept album. “The story is set in a futuristic, crime-ridden wasteland where the sky is stained crimson,” Machine Head vocalist, guitarist, and main songwriter Robb Flynn tells Apple Music. “It revolves around two characters, Ares and Eros. Ares loses the love of his life, Amethyst, and goes on a murderous rampage to avenge her death. Eros loses his mother to a drug overdose, spirals into a depression, and becomes radicalized by a charismatic leader. He goes on his own murderous rampage, which ends up killing Amethyst. The lyrics detail how their lives intertwine.” Inspired by sprawling concept albums like Pink Floyd’s *The Wall* and My Chemical Romance’s *The Black Parade*, along with the manga comics favored by his kids, Flynn decided to fuse his story with the type of songwriting he did back on Machine Head’s 1994 debut, *Burn My Eyes*. “One of the things I really focused on was simplifying vocal cadences,” he says. “We did the *Burn My Eyes* 25th anniversary tour in the lead-up to the writing of this record, and one of the things I realized was that I used a lot less words back then, and it worked really well. So, I took the same approach with this one.” Below, he details each track. **“SLAUGHTER THE MARTYR”** “This was the only song that could open the album. It’s the impetus of everything. I was trying to imagine it like a movie. My kids were really into manga, so I was reading manga and kind of storyboarding things in my mind like a manga—top to bottom. And this was such an epic opening. It’s so lonely and cinematic that it just seemed that the beginning was the only place it could go. And then, it goes into a classic Machine Head riff, double-bass groove, and sick fucking breakdown.” **“CHØKE ØN THE ASHES ØF YØUR HATE”** “Lyrically, this continues in a vengeful, violent mood. Exodus’ *Bonded by Blood* is such a part of my DNA at this point. Gary Holt’s solo in ‘Bonded by Blood’ is the first guitar solo I ever learned to play all the way through, so whenever I’m channeling thrash, it’s always through the eye of, ‘What would Gary Holt do?’ So, this is just a full-on Bay Area thrash metal song—and probably the second-fastest song on the record.” **“BECØME THE FIRESTØRM”** “Another absolute face-melter. We wanted to have the first three songs be just a murderer’s row punching you in the face. I think this might be the fastest song we’ve ever written. There’s kind of like a black metal-style riff going on in there, but with classic Machine Head grooves in it as well. Lyrically, it’s just about conquering all and fucking smashing through obstacles, but it’s told in this violent, futuristic, crime-ridden landscape.” **“ØVERDØSE”** “The first three songs are about character number one, and now we’re switching over to character number two. ‘Overdose’ is an interlude that captures his mother overdosing and him freaking out.” **“MY HANDS ARE EMPTY”** “After his mother overdoses, he starts down this path trying to heal, trying to find redemption. This song is his tipping point in the story. We had already written a lot of songs when we came up with this one, but I remember thinking this was really something different and special—that we could build the whole album around this one song. It became an anchor for the record and became this wild turning point for us in writing the storyline.” **“UNHALLØWED”** “Character two is in the darkest depression of his life. He’s wandering through this crime-ridden wasteland trying to figure out his lot in life and what he’s going to do. He’s lost, he’s suicidal, and he’s feeling guilt. He’s just trying to process all of it and get through this moment. Musically, it’s a very midtempo song, and our guitar player, Vogg, wrote a bunch of sick riffs for this. I felt like we’ve got a bunch of fucking ragers at the beginning, but I wanted to have more of a head-banger.” **“ASSIMILATE”/”KILL THY ENEMIES”** “‘ASSIMILATE’ is an interlude that’s basically the intro to ‘KILL THY ENEMIES.’ We’re still going down character number two’s path. Here, he meets this charismatic leader and becomes radicalized by this person. And this is kind of the beginning of his dark path. Musically, my bass player, Jared \[MacEachern\], wrote the main riff. He’s really the unsung hero of the record—he wrote a lot of awesome riffs, cool vocal melodies, and some great lyrics. This one has that pounding, tribal, ’90s Machine Head kind of groove, for sure.” **“NØ GØDS, NØ MASTERS”** “This is the two characters coming together. I think it’s one of the most melodic tracks on the record—it’s got a really haunting melody. This one was the result of these Electric Happy Hours we did during the pandemic, where we did 130 live streams just playing cover songs, and a lot of them were way outside of our box—like Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, and Bob Marley. That process opened up these new avenues for what we could do and got our harmonizing really locked in, and I feel like we really brought that to the forefront on this song.” **“BLØØDSHØT”** “This is another full-on rager. There’s no clean singing, and it’s just a killer uptempo groove. This is another song that Vogg contributed to. He brought some awesome riffs to the table and some sick leads, so this was definitely a collab between him and I.” **“RØTTEN”** “This is a song that I feel really came out of the *Burn My Eyes* anniversary tour. When I was coming up with these riffs, I just wanted to have one of those fucking old-school, early-’90s chugs. In my mind, it’s got a kind of *Fabulous Disaster*-era Exodus feel. I don’t wanna say anything about this one lyrically—I’d rather let people figure that out for themselves.” **“TERMINUS”** “I wanted the storyline to kind of go into an area where the listener is like, ‘Wait, what happened?’ I wanted this last interlude to put the listener in a place where, if they hadn’t been engaged in the story up ’til now, they’ve really gotta listen to the words and engage.” **“ARRØWS IN WØRDS FRØM THE SKY”** “This is arguably the most melodic song we’ve ever written. It’s all harmonies, nearly all clean singing, and maybe one of the most epic songs we’ve ever done. I also think it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written—I’m really proud of this song. I feel like it ends the record on a little bit of a hopeful note. It’s weird because I’ve never wanted to do that in my life. I always want to end records on fury and anger or depression and death and sadness because that’s where our lyrical topics kind of hang. But I’ve never written about love and how it makes you do crazy things.”

Now well into his seventies, Ozzy Osbourne is metal’s unlikeliest survivor. After decades of hard living, tragic band member deaths, and numerous health scares, the Prince of Darkness delivers his 13th solo album fast on the heels of his 2020 mainstream smash *Ordinary Man*. Like its predecessor, *Patient Number 9* was produced by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Watt and boasts a head-spinning array of guest stars—including return appearances from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith alongside Metallica bassist (and Ozzy’s former sideman) Robert Trujillo and late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins (in one of his last recording sessions). But it’s stellar guitar cameos from the likes of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, and Ozzy’s longtime collaborators Tony Iommi and Zakk Wylde that really give the record a varied, multigenerational feel, as each guitarist lends his signature sound to the respective tracks. “Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck are megastars,” Ozzy tells Apple Music. “I didn’t think they’d want to play on my album. But they both did.” The tasteful tonal differences between singles “Degradation Rules” (featuring Iommi), “Nothing Feels Right” (featuring Wylde), and the title track (featuring Jeff Beck) help make *Patient Number 9* one of Ozzy’s most diverse albums yet. “I’ve been doing it 54 years,” he says. “If I don’t know what I’m doing now, I shouldn’t be doing it.”

When Los Angeles grrrl-punks The Regrettes broke through in the mid-2010s, they were known for their ferocious riffing and unapologetic attitude. On their third album, *Further Joy*, they lean into the light, pairing their withering observations on modern life with exuberant choruses and gleaming guitars. It\'s a move that shows off how Regrettes anchor Lydia Night\'s songwriting has evolved since her band\'s DIY days; the eff-the-world attitude that animated earlier Regrettes releases is still there, but songs like the buzzy disco cut \"Barely on My Mind\" and the bubbly shuffle \"Rosy\" channel that spirit into directions that go beyond three-chord punk and into pop\'s groovier, hookier outer dimensions. *Further Joy*\'s brightness also makes The Regrettes\' more pointed lyrics, like those of the world-weary recovery rebuke \"Step 9,\" leap out of the songs with increased intensity—a jolting combination that reminds listeners how, sometimes, smiles might not be expressing what they seem.

“If anybody paying attention to the state of the world over the last few years isn’t angry, I have nothing to say to them.” That’s the sum total of what Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe offers about the generally pissed-off tone of the Grammy-nominated metal band’s ninth album. And while songs like “Grayscale,” “Ditch,” and “Ill Designs” practically drip with sociopolitical venom, guitarist Mark Morton notes that one doesn’t have to be in personal turmoil to write vitriolic songs. “I wasn’t angry when I made this record at all,” Morton tells Apple Music. “I’m in a great place in my life. I love making music with my best friends. But there’s plenty of negative stuff in the world to write heavy metal songs about, and we certainly tapped into that—as we always have. We’re being marketed and sold falling skies, doom and gloom and all this end-of-days material. That stuff makes wonderful fodder for metal music.” Below, he and Blythe discuss the songs on *Omens*. **“Nevermore”** Blythe: “This song is very much about my hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Lyrically, it’s sort of scripted in the Southern gothic/horror-tinged tones that Edgar Allan Poe employed so well—and he’s from Richmond. The song is about the history of the city from pre-revolutionary days to now. It’s not seen through the eyes of Poe, exactly, but his metaphors—like in his poem ‘The Raven’—are definitely employed. There’s a lot of atrocity and inhumanity and dark history that happened in Richmond, and it’s all in the song.” **“Vanishing”** Morton: “No two songs on this album do exactly the same thing, and ‘Vanishing’ to me feels like a very heavy metal song in the classic sense. It\'s full of acrobatic riffs—that’s \[LOG guitarist\] Willie Adler at his riff-writing finest—and yet it manages to hold that signature Lamb of God groove that \[drummer\] Art \[Cruz\] is keeping us rooted in here. It’s very dark and minor-key, very heavy and foreboding, but it’s still a workout on the fretboard.” **“To the Grave”** Morton: “On an album full of very collaborative songs, this is one of the most collaborative songs. It went through so many changes along the way. It was originally written to be much faster, and we slowed it way down. Once the vocal was added, parts of the music were rewritten again. Even when we were in the studio, we were still debating about different parts of it. I know this is a really personal song for Randy. His lyrics always have a personal element, but this one in particular has a lot of meaning to him.” **“Ditch”** Morton: “I live outside of Richmond, Virginia, and on the edge of my property are Civil War earthworks from where Confederate soldiers dug trenches to defend the city. I was crossing over those one day, and it occurred to me that a lot of the dudes who dug those trenches died in them. They dug their own graves. I began to wonder if any of them considered that while they were doing it. From there, I started to think about these parallels between then and now as a nation that’s so divided. All this contentious ideological posturing we’re doing just feels really ill-fated.” **“Omens”** Blythe: “A buddy of mine named Ryan Holiday wrote a book called *The Obstacle Is the Way*, where he writes about how to apply Stoic philosophy to modern-day life. One of the things he points out is that all of the problems we’re facing today are exactly the same problems that occurred in the ancient Roman empire at the height of Stoic philosophy. We have corrupt politicians, social upheaval, economic upheaval. There was even a plague that lasted for most of Marcus Aurelius’ reign. These problems happen again and again throughout history, but we feel like this is the first time any of it has happened. But none of this is unprecedented. And people survived and got through it.” **“Gomorrah”** Morton: “This one starts out kind of atmospheric and moody and then just builds in tension and intensity. It ebbs and flows in places, but I feel like the anxiety in the song grows all the way through. That was totally unplanned from a writing perspective, but I think Josh Wilbur, our producer, keyed into it and really helped us hone it. These are all Randy’s lyrics, and I don’t like the idea of trying to interpret his lyrics, but to me, it seems like a kind of self-reflection in the dystopian landscape that we all felt like we were in for a period of time.” **“Ill Designs”** Morton: “This is a song about consequences. It’s about watching an individual or a group of individuals manipulating situations for their own gain—and then having that turn on them in the end. It was, in a sense, about wrestling with how to feel about that. You find compassion for people as human beings, but you can’t really argue with the universe. All you can do is just see what comes back around. You could attribute this to one specific person or group of people, but it’s really about the universal theme of karma and consequence.” **“Grayscale”** Morton: “This is a really cool song that came very, very late in the writing process. Willie had the music for this on the side, and I don’t think he had initially intended on presenting it as a Lamb of God song. But somehow it came across the table, and everyone really liked it. It’s tuned all the way down to drop B. It’s the only song on the album that’s in B, and it’s only the second time we’ve ever done that on a record. It’s very hardcore-influenced, and it’s another song based on a personal experience of Randy’s.” **“Denial Mechanism”** Morton: “This is very punk rock. Like ‘Grayscale,’ it came pretty late in the process. We had seven or eight songs that were on their way to being album-ready, and we started to consider what elements we were missing. So Willie came in with a hardcore thing on ‘Grayscale,’ and I came in with a more traditional punk rock song in ‘Denial Mechanism.’ But it’s actually the first one we recorded when we got to the studio. I’m pretty sure Art’s drums are a first take, too.” **“September Song”** Morton: “Traditionally, we stretch out a little bit on the last song. On our past albums, this spot has been occupied by songs like ‘Reclamation’ or ‘Vigil’ or ‘Remorse Is for the Dead.’ To me, the intro of ‘September Song’ has a very June of 44 /Slint/Fugazi kind of post-punk vibe to it. I instantly loved how it was sounding as it was coming together. Even as it was taking form, I felt like it was going to be a strong contender for the album closer, which is definitely a coveted spot. You know, we always want people to listen to our albums start to finish. If you don’t make it to the end, you haven’t had the complete experience.”

On their third full-length, the Sydney quartet Stand Atlantic keep redefining the boundaries of pop-punk, using their guitar-bass-drums-vocals setup as a launching point for maximalist misfit anthems. Tracks like the speedy poison-pen letter to anxiety “van gogh” and the self-loathing “don’t talk \[to me\]” operate in classic pop-punk mode, using the “three chords and the truth” ideal to tackle heavy problems with bravado and wit. Elsewhere, *f.e.a.r.* gets lyrically meta and musically grandiose: “dumb,” a collaboration with Atlanta genre bender Tom The Mail Man, takes on the frustrations of being musically pigeonholed with funk bass and f-bombs, while the larger-than-life “cabin fever” throws in trap drums, strings, and even a cameo from vocalist Bonnie Fraser’s mum as it rages against the major-label machine.

Nearly 30 years into their career as one of the most globally recognized hard rock bands‚ not to mention pioneers of nu metal, proving severe guitar syncopation and high-octane rap-rock are no flash-in-the-pan genre trends—Korn returns with their 14th studio album. Not quite as dark as 2019’s *The Nothing*, written in the aftermath of the death of frontman Jonathan Davis’ wife, *Requiem* is a complex meditation on grief. Not softer, exactly, but nine tracks of real profundity: shoegaze-y detours (“Let the Dark Do the Rest”), death-metal sludge (“Hopeless and Beaten”), metallic scraping (“Lost in the Grandeur”), and the thick radio-rock melodicism of “Start the Healing” (featuring a surprisingly positive message: “I can take it all away, the feelings/Break apart the pain and start the healing”). This is not just the veteran release of a consistent band but one that chooses to evolve with each new record.

In May 2021, amidst a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US stemming from the pandemic, the Los Angeles Public Library posted a video of four young girls from Los Angeles playing a song called “Racist, Sexist Boy” for AAPI Heritage Month—two minutes of wonderfully sludgy outrage inspired by an interaction that drummer Mila de la Garza had with a classmate just before lockdown began. The song quickly went viral, creating an audience for The Linda Lindas before they’d ever had a chance to launch a proper tour. “In a way, I felt like we kind of had something to prove, to show for ourselves that we\'re actual musicians,” Mila tells Apple Music. “We\'ve been around for three years, and it\'s not just that we had one viral moment then we were going to go away.” While most teenagers spent the pandemic fumbling through remote school and social isolation, The Linda Lindas seized the opportunity to record their debut album. (They released a self-titled EP in 2020.) Written and rehearsed almost entirely through Zoom while all of its members—Mila and her sister Lucia, their cousin Eloise Wong, and Bela Salazar—were also feeling their way through the chaos of high school and middle school from home, *Growing Up* is a set of blistering, deeply felt pop-punk that meets the moment head on, whether they’re grappling with solitude (“Why”), self-care (“Remember”), spirals of thought (“Talking to Myself”), or disgruntled house cats (“Nino”). Here, the band takes us inside every song on the album. **“Oh!”** Mila de la Garza: “‘Oh!’ was actually written all together on our front porch.” Lucia de la Garza: “We had amps inside and we had cords running out the screen door to Bela and Eloise on opposite sides of the porch. The neighbors didn\'t like it, but it\'s okay.” Eloise Wong: “There was a situation at school where I tried to help someone who was being bullied, but then it kind of just blew up in my face. I wasn\'t really sure what to do and I was kind of angry at stuff. That\'s how the lyrics came about.” **“Growing Up”** Lucia: “It was hard being at home and feeling at this age that I had to figure out who I was. I felt like I was supposed to know what I want to do with my life. We were all apart from each other, and I didn\'t want to grow up in a way, and I realized you can\'t make growing up happen. You can\'t stop it from happening either. I was really, really nostalgic and sentimental about all the times that we had, because I didn\'t realize how much the band meant to me until it wasn\'t really in full swing anymore. I think I was realizing that music is special to me, too. All the parts of my life that were suddenly gone.” **“Talking to Myself”** Mila: “It\'s basically about needing someone else to talk to. Because being by yourself can be a blessing, and it\'s like you need that sometimes, but you also, you can\'t be by yourself forever. The song is about having someone else to take you out of a spiral, having someone else to bring you back up when you push yourself down so much.” **“Fine”** Eloise: “I think that a lot of oppression in society is just so normalized. In the words that we say and the things that happen, I feel like we\'re just taught to see it and just not blink an eye. It happens all the time, but no one does anything about it, because, you know, it\'s fine. But sometimes it gets to a point where it\'s not fine, where it\'s hard to take. Because some of these things that are just normal shouldn\'t be normal, and they push other people down, and it\'s not okay. I was kind of fed up about that and wrote that song.” **“Nino”** Bela Salazar: “On our EP, I wrote a song called ‘Monica,’ and that was about my other cat. I would play ‘Monica’ and my cat Nino would get really pissed. I don\'t know how he understood, but he would just start yelling. So I was like, ‘Okay, I have to write you a song now, because it\'s not fair.’” Mila: “I feel like I was most nervous for Nino\'s reaction to ‘Nino.’ Like, what if Nino doesn\'t like it?” Bela: “He was purring when he heard it, so that\'s a good sign.” **“Why”** Mila: “It\'s just pandemic stuff, missing people. I feel like during the pandemic we all kind of figured out more of who we are.” Lucia: “Isolation brings up a lot of emotions that you didn\'t know were there. I feel like being by yourself for that long kind of takes a toll on your mental health. Eloise\'s lyrics are very poetic on that one, I just have to say.” **“Cuantas Veces”** Bela: “I grew up listening to a lot of bossa nova, and I wanted to mix some of the stuff that I listened to into what we\'re doing. I chose to do a song in Spanish because I\'m not very good at sharing my emotions and this felt like a way that I could do it, but also have it still be a little bit more intimate and personal. I wasn\'t completely ready.” **“Remember”** Lucia: “There was a lot of feeling like every day is the same during the pandemic. There was a lot of feeling like I could have been doing so much more with my day. I didn\'t learn anything in school; I didn\'t pay attention; I was just lounging around watching Netflix all day. I was trying to find a way to forgive myself for not doing anything during my pandemic, and I think this song is just about forgiving yourself for that. Kind of remembering that it\'s okay to make mistakes and it\'s okay to regret and it\'s okay to not be okay sometimes.” **“Magic”** Lucia: “Teenagers complain—that\'s just how it is. I\'m around them every day. It’s a thing. But I always remember that I\'m super fortunate—to have discovered music and discovered a passion for it at my age. And obviously the world needs to be better and the world needs to change. Magic is always treated as like a curse and a gift—it depends on who is wielding it. But what if it’s this fantastical thing that might could save us all? What if *we* are the magic?” **“Racist, Sexist Boy”** Mila: “Before, it was more of an angry song, directed at one person. But now it\'s more a prideful song about bringing people together. Telling people that they\'re not alone, because other people go through that stuff too.” Eloise: “You write that song and it\'s made for blowback—you expect all the racist, sexist boys out there to be like, ‘What? Racism doesn\'t exist. Sexism doesn\'t exist.’ But instead we got all these positive comments. It was so cool just to see. There is good in this world, you know?”

Pale Waves’ third album is the sound of a band unafraid—and more importantly, unapologetic—about who they are. *Who Am I?*, released in 2021, saw lead vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie open up a more personal side to her songwriting, but its follow-up *Unwanted* delves even deeper, exploring betrayal, jealousy, depression, rage, addiction, loss—and on the heartbreaking “The Hard Way,” the suicide of a schoolmate. “It’s from me maturing and becoming more comfortable within my own skin that I can be more confident and open,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “I feel like with the first album, and even slightly with the second album, I was still so timid. As I grow up, I become more sure of myself and that\'s displayed through how much I\'m able to put out there for everyone to see and hear.” Sonically, too, *Unwanted* is a far tougher proposition than its predecessors. Tracks such as the middle-finger-up pop-punk of the title track and the classic-rock crunch of “Jealousy” hold back some of the Manchester quartet’s more ethereal synth-pop trademarks to deliver a heavier kick. “That was 100% a conscious decision,” Baron-Gracie says. “When the pandemic happened, we were so upset that we couldn\'t play live, and that definitely influenced the direction we went in with this record, because we knew that when we stepped back onstage, we wanted to have the best time. We wanted to have that more heavy sound sonically; we didn\'t want to play these slow, sad songs.” That’s not to say *Unwanted* is short on poignant moments (you can practically taste the grief that powers the epic ballad “Without You,” for instance), yet the roar that breaks through the pain is one of defiance. Read on as Baron-Gracie walks us through her band’s album. **“Lies”** “We’re easing fans into the transition—we’re placing them in the swimming pool, and we were putting them in the shallow end. Even though there’s something quite dark about the subject matter, it puts people in a good mood because it’s got this drive running through it. It’s so fun to watch people dance to it when we play live.” **“Unwanted”** “‘Unwanted’ really summarizes the overall record, too—the dark, traumatic themes that run throughout. Feelings of neglect, anger, vanity, jealousy, sadness, depression…a lot of worlds that I think Pale Waves haven\'t tapped into before. It was really important that we made this record because I feel as a woman in today\'s society, when we project these feelings, we get labeled crazy. If a man\'s angry, they’re seen as more confident because they know their point, they know what they want. Whereas when a woman\'s angry, she\'s a crazy bitch. I wanted to show other women that it’s OK to feel these things.” **“The Hard Way”** “It\'s such a traumatic story about an amazing young girl at my school who had so much potential, but she was being bullied and took her own life because of it. She couldn\'t take any more of the abuse. I feel partly responsible that I didn\'t step up when I was a child and I saw that happening. It’s something that’s really affected me throughout my life. I hope that me telling her story in some form will influence other people and show them that everyone\'s fragile and to be careful with your words and be careful with your actions, because you never know when you\'re pushing someone too far.” **“Jealousy”** “I wrote ‘Jealousy’ with Whakaio Taahi from Tonight Alive. I’d written a few songs with him and a lot of them were very soft and mellow and they just weren\'t sitting right with me. I didn\'t feel like this was the next Pale Waves record. And then one day I came in and he played the ‘Jealousy’ riff and I was like, ‘Oh my god, you genius. That is amazing. That is exactly the direction that I want to go in! Forget all these soppy songs that we\'re writing. Let\'s write about jealousy and make it this sexy, aggressive song!’” **“Alone”** “’I don\'t think I\'ve ever been as brutal as I am on this track. It’s about when you say no to someone and they just don\'t leave you alone. So many times—in clubs, in bars, in goddamn Tesco—where someone comes up to you and they\'re like, ‘Can I buy you a drink? Can I get your number?’ And you say, ‘Sorry, I\'m not interested.’ And they still get all handsy and physical with you. Do you not get the message? Don\'t touch me. It\'s as simple as that. Leave me alone. I\'m absolutely fine by myself without you. It’s the ultimate rejection song. I just channeled all those nights where I\'ve said no but they\'ve continued to harass me.” **“Clean”** “Even though there\'s a lot of negative emotions on the record, I really wanted a moment or two where there was some kind of positivity or some kind of hopeful agenda. I wanted to write a cheesy love song. Like a song that they would play in a movie when the couple was falling in love and decide to run away together. I wanted to capture those moments that you feel when you\'re falling in love. There\'s nothing quite like that thrill of the very start of a relationship where those feelings are growing.” **“Without You”** “I knew that I wanted a huge ballad on the record. I feel like this record, because it\'s so loud and it\'s so in-your-face, that this ballad had to be on the same level as tracks like ‘You\'re So Vain.’ It couldn\'t just be a ballad where I\'m on my guitar or on the piano again. It had to be dynamic and flow through the emotions. ‘Without You’ is about me losing someone so close to my heart that I struggle to comprehend how I can live life without them. It\'s the sad realization of you have to find a way to get through it and cope with it and realize that they aren\'t coming back.” **“Only Problem”** “‘Only Problem’ is about me having this constant thing in my life that I was always battling with and was always pulling me down. It was always something that I relied on in my states of feeling fragile and it brought me back up, but then it would always drop me back down. I had to learn and come to terms of removing that from my life for good. Alcohol would give me that fake confidence that you need when you feel insecure. There can be such reliance on that, and people in this industry normalize it, and it shouldn\'t be normalized. It can be abused, and I wanted to learn to live a life without it. So I removed it completely, and now I\'m much happier.” **“You’re So Vain”** “There\'s a lot of pop-punk on the record, which I love, but then you get to ‘You\'re So Vain’ and it\'s almost more classic rock and roll in a way. I wanted to push it more in this direction. We came up with the riff first and I was like, ‘Yes! That’s it!’ And then I was like, ‘OK, we need a subject matter that is going to work with this. It needs to be badass. It needs to be confident. It needs to be unapologetic…’ I feel like there\'s a lot of egotistical people in the music industry, people that I may have looked up to that I\'ve met and I\'ve figured out that they’re an awful person. I channeled my anger towards people\'s egos with this song. I wanted to take them down a step.” **“Reasons to Live”** “This has the dark and it has the light. The chorus is the light and verses are the dark. It\'s about when I was really struggling with my mental health. I felt like it was deteriorating and I felt really fragile, and then I found love that enabled me to see the light. Love pulled me back and showed me a new perspective on things. It helped me get healthier and helped me to really fall in love with things. Even to really fall in love with music again.” **“Numb”** “I go through periods in life where I hit this wall of depression and it can last days. I don\'t want to move out of bed, I don\'t care about anything, I don\'t care about anyone. I know that a lot of people feel this way and go through the same thing, and I feel it\'s important when you get to that point to know that other people go through it too, and to be able to relate to something. So I wanted to write a song about the way I feel when I get like that. I wanted it to be really stripped back, just me, an electric guitar, and some harmonies. I didn\'t want any other distractions, I just wanted everyone to focus on what I was saying.” **“Act My Age”** “It is about growing older. It’s a battle between being like, ‘Shit, I need to grow up,’ but then also, ‘Oh, shit, I miss when I was a child and I didn\'t have to worry about anything.’ It’s that realization that everyone gets older and everyone needs to get their shit together. I was turning a page in my life where I was wanting to remove a lot of toxic things out of my life and I was reflecting on childhood and that innocence that we have and wanting to channel some of that into where I am right now.” **“So Sick (Of Missing You)”** “I wrote this because I was tired of writing about myself or other people that I knew in my life. I was watching *Sex Education* at the time, and I wrote this about the period where Maeve and Otis aren’t talking and they\'re missing one another and they’re both like, ‘How could you be so mean to me and just cut me off like that?’ I related to that so much, and I love their relationship. I think it\'s so interesting and *Sex Education* is such a good show. After listening through various track listings for the record, it felt like this could be the only closing act. No other track felt right. I didn\'t want to do the typical Pale Waves thing and finish on the classic ballad, because we\'ve already done that twice.”

A fiery, confident kick-back against convention, Pale Waves’ third record Unwanted sees the group building on the promise of last year’s UK Top 3 album Who Am I?, and staking their claim as British rock’s most dynamic young group. “It’s bold and unapologetic, and that’s what the Pale Waves community is about,” says frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie herself. “We don’t need to fit a perfect mould, we don’t need to apologise for being ourselves, and we won’t change for anyone. That acceptance is what connects us.” Led by riotous lead single “Lies”, Unwanted is a record that reaches out to the passionate community of misfits and LGBTQI+ fans around the band, tapping into darker emotions than ever before while also striking a fresh tone of defiance.