Kerrang!'s 50 Best Albums of 2023

No band could ever prepare for what the Foo Fighters went through after the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, but in a way, it’s hard to imagine a band that could handle it better. From the beginning, their music captured a sense of perseverance that felt superheroic without losing the workaday quality that made them so approachable and appealing. These were guys you could imagine clocking into the studio with lunchpails and thermoses in hand—a post-grunge AC/DC who grew into rock-pantheon standard-bearers, treating their art not as rarified personal expression but the potential for a universal good time. The mere existence of *But Here We Are*, arriving with relatively little fanfare a mere 15 months after Hawkins’ death, tells you what you need to know: Foo Fighters are a rock band, rock bands make records. That’s just what rock bands do. And while this steadiness has been key to Dave Grohl’s identity and longevity, there is a fire beneath it here that he surely would have preferred to find some other way. Grief presents here in every form—the shock of opening track “Rescued” (“Is this happening now?!”), the melancholy of “Show Me How” (on which Grohl duets with his daughter Violet), the anger of 10-minute centerpiece “The Teacher,” and the fragile acceptance of the almost slowcore finale “Rest.” “Under You” processes all the stages in defiantly jubilant style. And after more than 20 years as one of the most polished arena-rock bands in the world, they play with a rawness that borders on ugly. Just listen to the discord of “The Teacher” or the frayed vocals of the title track or the sweet-and-sour chorus of “Nothing at All,” which sound more like Hüsker Dü or Fugazi than “Learn to Fly.” The temptation is to suggest that trauma forced them back to basics. The reality is that they sound like a band with a lot of life behind them trying to pave the road ahead.

The third album from the masked, anonymous Brits of Sleep Token is also the third in a conceptual trilogy that began with their 2019 debut, *Sundowning*. Introduced with the stirring and dramatic leadoff single “Chokehold,” *Take Me Back to Eden* is another genre-defying exploration of music’s outer limits, incorporating elements of techno and tech-metal alongside R&B, post-rock, and pop—often in the same song. “Vore” spins out in Meshuggah djent-isms before swelling with the kind of strings that recall a battle scene from *Game of Thrones*. “Ascensionism” is an inventive and often bizarre mix of piano ballad, gospel, and ultra-modern metal. Closer “Euclid” sounds like a Lana Del Rey tune performed by an R&B singer and a chorus of aliens. Along the way, there are love songs (“The Apparition”), suicide ballads (“Are You Really Okay?”), and songs about loss (the title track). As always, mastermind Vessel’s vocals soar over the proceedings, offering lyrical mysteries in service to the nocturnal muse he calls Sleep. It’s as bewildering as it is impressive.

With their first album since 2016, Avenged Sevenfold takes an unexpected turn into existentialism. Written over a span of four years that included the pandemic, *Life Is But a Dream…* was inspired by the philosophy and writings of French author and Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus. The hypnotic lead single “Nobody” sets a reflective and pensive tone with orchestral strings as singer M. Shadows delivers snaky, overlapping vocal lines. Follow-up “We Love You” is an abrupt change of pace, with dissonant guitar bursts and a frenetic, Mr. Bungle-like arrangement that smashes dizzying old-school thrash into a slide guitar interlude. The entire album is all over the place—ragtime piano (title track), chamber music (part of “Game Over”), electro-pop (a few songs)—but for A7X, it’s a good place to be.

The day that Manchester band Hot Milk began work on their debut album, singer/guitarist Han Mee walked into the studio and immediately started crying. “I had a breakdown,” Mee tells Apple Music. “It was the pressure of it, like ‘I want it to be good and I don’t know if I can do it.’” Rather than be cowed, though, Mee and fellow singer/guitarist Jim Shaw channeled their fears and doubts into the music. “It became an actual diary entry, it became us and what we were going through at that time,” continues Mee. “That’s what music should be. Sometimes you just write to make yourself better.” Following three EPs and a string of exhilarating singles released since 2019, *A Call to the Void* takes in fierce metal riffing, explosive drops, and pummeling grooves alongside urgent beats, swaying synth-pop, and ’80s melodicism. It’s the sound of a forward-thinking rock band. Somewhere in the middle of the maelstrom are Mee and Shaw trying to make sense of early adulthood. “We’ve grown up a lot in four years with the experiences we’ve had, life moving around us, having to deal with loss for the first time,” says Shaw. “It’s the overwhelmingness of those questions,” adds Mee. “It’s where *A Call to the Void* came from as a notion, where, when you go through all those things, life in the trenches, it’s like there’s this overarching black hole. That’s what we wanted to encapsulate: the light and dark side of life, the reality of it all.” It’s all in there on Hot Milk’s debut album. Mee and Shaw guide us through it, track by track. **“WELCOME TO THE…”** Jim Shaw: “We always had the idea that we wanted to start the album with both our voices. It’s always been me and Han, that’s how it started, with our two voices. We wanted to introduce the album from both of us with this almost-hymn and a euphoric feel, like the church doors have opened and the choir is singing.” Han Mee: “Lyrically, it is an intention and a mission statement of what you’re about to hear. I think the fans will appreciate the grandiose sound of it. We’re about to enter the pearly white gates or maybe the spiky black gates of Hell. Who knows which one it is?” **“HORROR SHOW”** HM: “We’d been listening to a lot of The Prodigy, Pendulum vibes, and we love drum ’n’ bass, so that was sonically where we wanted this song to sit. It’s built to have this structure where you want it to get to that release. When it goes crazy, it works with the meaning of the song itself, which is me not being afraid to be the weirdo. I remember getting called a ‘horror show’ growing up and it’s leaning into that. This way of life that we’ve followed, this rock music identity, it gets in your DNA and it gets in your bloodstream and becomes your whole life. So, it’s like, ‘I might be a bit of a nightmare, might be a horror show, but fuck you.’” **“BLOODSTREAM”** HM: “It’s still a rock song, but it’s like a house or EDM track as well. We love putting everything together and we love that kind of music, it working as two genres married together. It was a fun song to write.” JS: “Me and Hannah \[Han\] have always loved house music. We’ve always gone to Creamfields, we’ve gone to The Warehouse Project \[Manchester’s annual season of club nights\]. The whole spectrum of electronic music is very much in our veins. We’ve always had in our head this scene of this dark and dirty club, like a \[Berlin nightclub\] Berghain kind of vibe.” **“PARTY ON MY DEATHBED”** HM: “This is quite nihilistic. A lot of people are like, ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ but it does because the point is that it’s supposed to be everything or nothing. It’s supposed to be darkness in a light place. It’s that whole feeling of, ‘I’m just going to keep doing this until the day I die.’ I’ve always said, ‘I’m going to try heroin on my deathbed. I’m going to get my son to inject it between my toes.’ It’s the funny thing I say to my friends, so it came from that.” JS: “It’s a ‘fuck it!’ song. It’s seizing life as it comes at you and trying to get the most out of it and saying, ‘I’ll be partying on my deathbed, I’ll be singing my way out all the way through.’” **“ALICE COOPER’S POOL HOUSE”** HM: “This was an idea I had while I was on mushrooms in America. I was watching a lot of music documentaries at the time, and a lot of them mentioned the same thing: how they always used to go back to Alice Cooper’s pool house for afters. I thought it’d be quite funny if I wrote a song about him telling you something at afters—you know how you get all deep and stuff at afters?—and it just blew your mind. It ended up getting to Alice Cooper himself and he ended up doing a skit on the end of it, which was insane. I always say it’s the mushroom trip that never ended.” **“ZONED OUT”** JS: “We’ve played this for maybe three years and it’s changed drastically every single time. When we wrote it, it was about how consumed we are with technology and social media. I can’t stand social media and it was the frustration of being like, ‘Unless it’s online, it didn’t even happen.’ It’s asking people basically to get their heads out of the phone and see the world.” **“OVER YOUR DEAD BODY”** HM: “There was a feeling I wanted to write about but I wasn’t sure how to convey it. Also, I think saying, ‘Over your dead body’ can be quite strong if you’re being serious. I’d been listening to and reading a lot of John Cooper Clarke poems. I love the way that he is so tongue-in-cheek and cheeky with it all. I was like, ‘That’s where the song has to be. Let’s go really cheeky in the lyrics and the verses and let’s just have a bassline and vocal and see where this song’s going to take us.’ It’s about the way that we talk about people that have done us wrong. At the time, I was pretty angry about the way that someone had done something, so it was kind of about them.” **“MIGRAINE”** JS: “This is probably my favorite track and it’s got no right to be because it’s basically a Frankenstein of three other songs plus another. We were in LA and \[blink-182’s\] Mark Hoppus hit us up and was like, ‘Do you want to try writing a song together?’ We were like, ‘Fuck, yeah.’ It started in his basement and we took it back and sewed it into stuff that we already had. From a sonic perspective, I really wanted something that started synth-driven and then moved into something super aggressive.” **“BREATHING UNDERWATER”** HM: “I feel like this song is the greatest encapsulation of my pain that I’ve ever managed to create. Even now, when I listen to it, it makes me upset because I’m still feeling like that. This song is probably the most important song we’ve ever written just for my own sanity and my own brain and the way that I managed to create the lyrical content and it flew out. It needed to be written. It’s never been hard for me to share, to talk about my emotions. I’m blessed and gifted, but at the same time, it’s not a very great thing for everybody all the time. It’s not hard for me to talk about my feelings, so I feel like it was like, ‘Of course Hannah’s written this.’” **“AMPHETAMINE” (feat. Julian Comeau & Loveless)** HM: “This is another social commentary song about the fact that you’re kept awake all night because of the stuff that happens in the world, and it’s just a bit of a mad place that we live in. This is a tongue-in-cheek thing about the amphetamine that’s built into the news, this notion that we’re controlled by fear.” JS: “Originally, this was the end of the album. We collected these 10 songs and the way that ended, we wanted to bookend the album the way we started it, so we got Julian Comeau \[TikTok star and one half of emo-pop duo Loveless\] involved and wanted this big vocal ending where all of us were singing different things and then all came together at the end with that big ending, the same way it starts.” **“FORGET ME NOT”** JS: “This is about the passing of my granddad through dementia. That was something I was dealing with right then and there and I wasn’t sure—I’m the complete opposite to Hannah, I’m not very good at expressing my emotions and telling people how I feel.” HM: “I had an idea of how he was feeling, so I would write lines and show them to him, and he would say yes or no. If he said yes, I’d go, ‘Why don’t you write the next one?’ just to prise it out of him.” JS: “We wanted to do something that didn’t really have any guitars or live drums, something that was different. I’m super happy how this song came out. It’s everything that I thought it would be and more.”

After releasing records called *Red Album*, *Blue Record*, *Yellow & Green*, *Purple*, and *Gold & Grey*, Baroness has run out of colors. “The chromatic-themed sector of our existence was only ever going to have those iterations,” guitarist, vocalist, and founding member John Baizley tells Apple Music. “It was only ever going to be the color wheel, the rainbow. When we finished *Gold & Grey*, which was our stand-in for orange, we understood it was the end of the cycle.” Thus, *Stone* begins a new era for the band and their self-described style of “sneaky prog,” which combines elements of sludge metal, prog rock, and western-themed acoustic music. It’s also the first Baroness full-length in the band’s 20-year history that features the same lineup as the one before it. In this case: Baizley, guitarist/vocalist Gina Gleason, bassist Nick Jost, and drummer Sebastian Thomson. “I can’t even begin to overstate how critical that lineup stability was for us writing this record,” Baizley says. “What we’ve never been able to do before is take the chemistry of the band members and allow it to guide the songwriting as much as we have with *Stone*. There’s always been a new member coming in who has to learn what we are. But now I feel like we finally have a foundation.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Embers”** “After we recorded all the ‘loud’ songs, meaning anything with bass and drums, we realized the acoustic element which is on all our records was missing. So Gina and I rented a trailer in central Pennsylvania and spent a week working. We came out with ‘Bloom,’ the last track on the record, which has a closing-credits feel, and I wanted something with an opening-credits feel as well. So we took an outtake from the ‘Bloom’ session, a short piece that didn’t have any mistakes in it, and I added some low notes on my piano that I think give it a kind of menacing feel. It’s a nice bait and switch for the opening of ‘Last Word.’” **“Last Word”** “This song is by far our most collaborative recorded effort in our entire history. Everyone’s written a part for it. It also has a fucking shredder solo, which is something I’ve always had a very hard line against in this band. But that got harder and harder to do when Gina joined, because she has tremendous capability as a soloist. I really put her through the wringer on our last record, so this time she needed to be free. Importantly, it also has an improvised jam at the end of the song, which we began doing onstage years ago and felt, with this record, that we had earned the right to present to our audience.” **“Beneath the Rose”** “The opening riff was something I continually tried to make a song out of for *Gold & Grey*, but it just wasn’t working. In the early days of the pandemic, I pulled it out again and put it to a drum loop that Seb had recorded. I really wanted to do something that had a Nirvana-type riff, something with some pronounced chugging in it, a little bit of metal swagger, a little bit sort of rock. But whenever I say these things, I just turn it into a song that sounds exactly like us. It was fun to write, but one of the hardest to figure out what I was going to do with vocally. What I ended up with includes a relatively different vocal style for us, almost like an English poetic cadence. I think it kicked off the development of a new aesthetic that continues into the following track.” **“Choir”** “The idea with this, initially, was to take the tempo and the key from ‘Beneath the Rose’ and then start with the guitar sonata that ends that song. But we had no other plan beyond that. What we ended up with is like an extension of ‘Beneath the Rose,’ but fully improvised. We had no discussion about what we were going for or what we were going to do. Every single thing that happens in this song is accidental. I think we recorded three versions, but the first one was by far the best because of the musical conversation that’s happening.” **“The Dirge”** “This is the final and shortest piece of the musical trilogy that starts with ‘Beneath the Rose.’ Gina and I were really into this Amps for Christ song called ‘Edward,’ which has this very strange, disoriented, lo-fi feel to it. It’s really loose, but it’s like a beautiful little folk song. We wanted to capture something that had that feel. I was sitting in my room one night, watching a TV show, and there was a scene where two girls are singing a song at an open-mic night. It’s not a good song, not a good show, but I liked the chord progression. So I took those chords and wrote this in a minute and a half. I think it’s a weird, unique bow at the end of our trilogy.” **“Anodyne”** “This is the only song we\'ve ever written that has a four-on-the-floor kick pattern and a backbeat snare. It’s a tried-and-true classic in rock ’n’ roll, but we\'ve never done it. And then Gina and I are singing simultaneously into one mic, so we’re baking our harmonies into one another, making them inseparable. The lyrics are based on a recurring nightmare I’ve had for many years now. In the dream, I’m in a canoe on a lake in the middle of the night. I’m following another canoe that outdistances me, and then I start sinking. Sometimes I have entire dreams where I’m just drowning for what seems like eight hours. I felt like writing a song about it so that the dream doesn’t feel that horrible to me.” **“Shine”** “I was crossing over the Brooklyn Bridge on my way to see Seb or Nick, and the song ‘#3’ by Aphex Twin came on, and I had such an overwhelming moment. It’s a very beautiful song, and it’s simple—like four notes that just repeat. So I took those notes and made them into ‘Shine.’ Gina and I really like playing western-style guitars, like Ennio Morricone tones, so the end of this song is like us trying to find our own way through *Once Upon a Time in the West*. Every record of ours has to have a glockenspiel on it, so this is the song with the glock.” **“Magnolia”** “The main riff has what I call the human element in it, by which I mean the best technical riffing that we do as guitar players always has this implicant strum. Plus, every record I do has to have one Neurosis moment, and it’s always from ‘Stones From the Sky,’ which is by far my favorite Neurosis song. So we did that at the end of the song, where we layered all these crazy guitars. It’s called ‘Magnolia’ because the day I began writing it in 2020, the magnolia tree in front of my house was blooming. When we finished guitar overdubs a year later, it was blooming again. And when I finished vocals the year after that, it was blooming yet again.” **“Under the Wheel”** “This is a song that Nick wrote. And when Nick writes a song, I know that we’re going to have to work to decipher it, because the level of sophistication that he thinks at is insane. He’s a classically trained bass player, but his goal is never to sound like he\'s being showy. So he’ll write these simple-sounding things that are, in reality, almost impossible to follow until you’ve listened to it a hundred times or had him show it to you a hundred times. But that challenge was really cool. Then we did this thing where the song gets louder every few measures and the pressure we’re playing at increases. That was really fun to do.” **“Bloom”** “‘Bloom’ was recorded during one of the most difficult weeks of my life during this writing session. It was, in some ways, tied to what was going on then, which is that we had our whole record musically recorded but I was really struggling to find myself as a vocalist. That’s when Gina and I rented that trailer, ostensibly to start working on vocals, but I was just struggling. After a day or two of that, we picked up our acoustic guitars and wrote this song based off a piece that Gina had. Then we recorded it outside by the campfire, facing each other, into a single mic. You can hear dogs barking, the fire crackling, all kinds of birds chirping. And then we added all these crazy overdubs using mostly things that are not instruments. I think the song is kind of a strange triumph for us.”

blink-182’s ninth album—and first in 12 years with guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge in the lineup—is far from a self-satisfied victory lap. Even after all these years, the band’s irrepressible cheekiness animates their insouciant riffs, whirlwind drums, and yelped vocals. They may be elder statesmen of punk rock at this point, but they’re still kicking against anyone who might get in their way. The reunion of DeLonge with bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker (who produced *ONE MORE TIME...*) grew out of the members dropping their past differences in the wake of Hoppus’ cancer diagnosis. “I feel like there’s a real sense of brotherhood with us,” DeLonge told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe during a full-band interview. “Like any brothers, you have your little spats over the years, and you grow apart. You come back together. You’ve always got a foundation, you’re connected. You’re still inseparable energetically.” That connection is apparent throughout *ONE MORE TIME...*, which Barker calls “very collaborative.” It calls back to blink’s past at its outset, opening with the speedy “ANTHEM PART 3”—the third part of a trilogy that dates back to the band’s *Enema of the State* era, although this time out, things are more optimistic than the angst-filled first two installments: “If I fall, on some nails/If I win or set sail/I won’t fail, I won’t fail,” DeLonge wails as the song comes crashing to an end. *ONE MORE TIME...* has other moments of introspection: The title track is a very blink-182 take on a power ballad, with DeLonge and Hoppus musing about life being too short to not get over past differences. The anthemic “WHEN WE WERE YOUNG” turns the old phrase about youth being wasted on the young into fuel for one last trip to the mosh pit and closing track “CHILDHOOD” pivots on the always pertinent question, “What’s going on with me?” Not that *ONE MORE TIME...* is exclusively built on self-affirmations and serious business. “DANCE WITH ME” opens with a gag about self-pleasure before jumping off into a peppy chronicle of lust, while the bouncy “EDGING” channels love-’em-leave-’em brashness into a giddy power-pop jam. The brief interlude “TURN THIS OFF!” manages to channel gags about bad sex and old scolds into 23 seconds of blissful riffing. *ONE MORE TIME...* represents a new era of blink-182, although the most important aspect of the music Barker, DeLonge, and Hoppus make remains the same: “Every single time that we’ve just put our heads down and done our own thing,” said Hoppus, “and write music that the three of us love, that’s important to us—it has served us well.”

If the combination of extravagant music and world-weary lyrics on Fall Out Boy’s eighth album sounds appropriate to the current queasy moment, there\'s a good reason for that. *So Much (For) Stardust* was conceived in the spirit of 2008\'s *Folie à Deux*, one of the most ornate and possibly divisive entries in the band\'s catalog. “There was a feeling that I kind of wanted to get,” Patrick Stump tells Apple Music. “I don\'t want it to sound anything like that record, but I wanted to get back to this feeling that we had when we were making it, which was ‘I don\'t know how much longer this\'ll last.’” *So Much (For) Stardust*, appropriately, captures Fall Out Boy going for broke, whether on the speedy opener “Love From the Other Side” (of the apocalypse) or the meditation “Heaven, Iowa,” which has a blow-off-the-roof chorus that gives its verses added emotional weight. Bassist and songwriter Pete Wentz\'s lyrics are drolly on point, with quotable one-liners like “Every lover\'s got a little dagger in their hand” (on “Love From the Other Side”) and “One day every candle\'s gotta run out of wax/One day no one will remember me when they look back” (on “Flu Game”) scattered throughout. At times, though, they have a tenderness to them that belies the nearly two decades he\'s spent in the spotlight, as well as his elder-statesman status. “I\'m my dad\'s age when I thought he had it all figured out, and my parents are starting to look like my grandparents, and my kids are the age that I was,” Wentz says. “And this, I guess, is how the world goes on.” These thoughts reminded Wentz of a speech Ethan Hawke gives in the 1994 slacker comedy *Reality Bites*, which is sampled at the record\'s midpoint, “The Pink Seashell.” “His dad gave him a pink seashell and went, ‘There, this has all the answers in the universe.’ And he goes, ‘I guess there are no answers,’” says Wentz. “There\'s the idea that nothing matters—and that was a weird message for me. I was like, ‘I don\'t think we can bake that into the whole record.’” Instead he channeled the 1989 baseball fantasia *Field of Dreams*, in which Kevin Costner\'s character is guided by the mantra “if you build it, they will come.” “He went out and built the field in the grass because he was doing a crazy thing,” said Wentz. “We all should be doing stuff like that.”

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

It’s no coincidence that Code Orange’s fifth album is called *The Above*; as the follow-up to 2020’s *Underneath*, there’s a direct juxtaposition. “Where I feel *Underneath* and *The Above* coincide is like there’s almost this door between them,” vocalist and conceptual mastermind Jami Morgan tells Apple Music. “It’s the door of moment and choice. To me, it’s the thin, reflective line between things and feelings that feel very far apart but are often very close, like the inverse, the question and the answer, darkness and light. A lot of *The Above*’s themes are different ideas of light—the light of self versus the light of acceptance and want.” Musically, Morgan and his bandmates—guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers, keyboardist/programmer Eric “Shade” Balderose, bassist Joe Goldman, guitarist Dominic Landolina, and drummer Max Portnoy—gave priority to traditional rock instruments over electronics in this incarnation of their genre-defying style. “We wanted things to be a little bit more open and human but still have this digital backbone, whereas on *Underneath*, the digital element is to the front,” Morgan explains. “I feel like we also tightened up the songwriting and maybe painted within the lines a little bit more but challenged ourselves to be as avant-garde as possible within those lines.” Below, he comments on each song. **“Never Far Apart”** “I feel like this song really sets up the juxtaposition of the two opposing moods of the album. It’s like the verses are this dark, internal monologue of somebody that’s trapped in their own prison. It’s like this justification of failure and an exposing of your true nature, especially as the song explodes at the end. The chorus is, to me, almost the opposite. They’re in this almost cartoonish, faraway, unreachable, dreamlike voice, but it’s idyllically beautiful. It’s like a Disney musical or something. We felt like it was a good way to open because it exposes the different paintbrushes of the album all within one song.” **“Theatre of Cruelty”** “This continues to set up those two fields that are the through line of the record. It’s like the harder parts of the song introduce a looser but buggy and parasitic riff style that we utilize throughout the whole record. Then there’s these more ethereal parts that are kind of heavenly and smooth but still have this digital, glitchy backbone. The song is about drive. It’s about obsession. It’s about trying to present as one thing while the theater of the mind is always playing something a lot more sinister and a lot more cruel.” **“Take Shape” (feat. Billy Corgan)** “It was awesome working with Billy on this. He was obviously a big inspiration to us in general, and he almost plays a little bit of a narrator role in the song. ‘Take Shape’ is really about feeling like you’re being pushed through a stage play of your life that you really can’t control, like some *Truman Show* shit, like you’re just a puppet on strings being controlled by your own subconscious or your goals or whatever.” **“The Mask of Sanity Slips”** “Lyrically, this is a grungy, heavy take on somebody dealing with internal resentment, loneliness, feeling like a square peg in a round hole—something, I think, we feel as a group a lot, something I definitely feel a lot, trying to hide behind either confidence or feebleness. I even created this mask of my own face that I was calling the Mask of Sanity. Sonically, our plan was quiet/loud grunge dynamics, but with some death-metal double kick, which I’ve never heard on a grunge song, and some electronics. There’s even a bouncy mosh drop that we thought would subvert genre rules a little bit and make it more our style.” **“Mirror”** “Dynamically, this is one of the softest songs we’ve ever done, but I think it’s really powerful. Reba’s amazingly powerful on it. It’s disparate, it’s kind of lush, it’s pretty, but it also has a little bit of a dark underbelly. It was definitely influenced by trip-hop, Björk, even Tori Amos, but it has our modern production and some Code Orange darkness in there. I also think it’s cool because me and Reba both wrote the song. It’s really reflective—pun intended—of what the song is. It’s like the same words but two points of view.” **“A Drone Opting Out of the Hive”** “I wanted this song to feel like a fucking David Fincher interrogation room scene. The album has these two battling aesthetics, and one of them is like that: noir, fucking serial killer, buggy crime. To me, that’s our heaviness, our hardness, and our darkness. Then there’s this brighter, almost poppier thing that has a little bit of this digital element to it, like an impressionist painting where something’s just a little bit off. But this is where the album gets darker and veers into the underbelly. The beat is made of teeth chattering and whispers and all kinds of weird shit. It was really fun to make.” **“I Fly”** “This is one of the first songs on the album that me and Reba go bar-for-bar on, going back and forth to tell the story together, which I think is really cool. We wanted it to feel dark and heavy but have a big, soaring chorus. We were thinking almost like Alice In Chains meets industrial. There’s this robotic voice that says, ‘This is real’ over and over again, and it’s a reminder that we’re in the real world and not a dream. I wrote the lyrics based on this book of old epitaphs, things that people wrote about their own deaths for their relatives to read at their funerals. There’s a real twisted humor to a lot of them.” **“Splinter the Soul”** “Musically, this is a little bit Nine Inch Nails, a little bit Pantera, with an Alice \[In Chains\] chorus. We thought that would be a cool hybrid, sonically. It’s about the struggle of always trying to get to the next lily pad, about how it might feel better to just splinter the soul to take back control, like death by suicide as opposed to getting killed. I think we all have that human impulse in us to take it away from ourselves so no one can take it away from us.” **“The Game”** “It’s definitely one of our most psychotic, heavier songs to date. I visualize the pinch harmonics as the buzzing needles of a lie detector test when they go up and down. To me, the lyrics are from the point of view of a character I call the Manipulator, the one prying at you to take the path of most resistance instead of least. It’s frustration bubbling up to a head. You hear all these sounds from earlier in the record, like ripped duct tape, laughter, knife scrapes. The end definitely gets the most *Underneath*-ish in the sense that it’s super controlled chaos.” **“Grooming My Replacement”** “People were like, ‘You sure you want to use the word “grooming”?’ But it’s not like that. Words can’t mean more than one fucking thing? I’m like, ‘I’m not changing that shit.’ The song is about feeling like you’re being used to train your successor. It’s definitely where we started to discover this album’s version of heavy and how it would distinguish from previous albums—looser, groovier, corrosive, kind of snarling, thick, not as outwardly calculated as *Underneath*, but precise, like the perfect fucking crime.” **“Snapshot”** “Stylistically, this almost feels like a heavier indie song or something. It’s definitely totally different than anything we’ve done. The metaphor of the first line is from the movie *One Hour Photo*, starring Robin Williams. He’s this lonely photo printer in a Walmart. I just like the metaphor of the snapshot—a brief moment in time that can last forever. It’s like shit that never goes away. The lyrics have the theme of the movie, as well as fantasizing about capturing your captor, turning your own predator into prey.” **“Circle Through”** “This is definitely one of the most poppy songs we’ve ever done. It’s where, in my opinion, the light starts to shine through, almost like the crack under the door. We start to get to the other side, get to where it is we’re going. It’s about your negative thoughts and your never-haves, and manifesting bad things, and just asking yourself to walk that circle through. Is this really what you want? Is this what you want to create? Is that the life that you want, or are you presenting yourself to it in this circle of desire and negative self-talk or talk about others?” **“But a Dream...”** “This is kind of like the final passageway. It’s a bit existential. It’s about choice, about free will, about things that have been talked about to death a million times. I visualize it as these two doors with two blinding lights—the door of being accepted, and the door of going wherever yourself leads you to go. That might be you by yourself forever. Can you live with that? Can you face that, or do you have to keep chasing desire and chasing adoration? That’s something I struggle with a lot.” **“The Above”** “This is definitely one of my favorite songs. It’s one of the most personal songs, for me, that I’ve ever written. When Shade first came up with this melody, and we started utilizing it in different ways, it really clicked for me as the melody that represents what the album is. The song itself is like the other side of the hill. It’s like the end of one journey and, hopefully, the beginning of another. It’s coming full circle with yourself. It’s about being able to live with who you are, and not just your accomplishments, your wins or losses, your friends, the car you drive, the money you have, or whatever. Can you live with who you really are as a person, how you’ve treated other people? To me, it’s one of the coolest, most emotional songs we’ve ever done.”

It might seem odd for a band from the UK to call themselves Empire State Bastard, but according to vocalist Simon Neil, it’s all about energy. “New York City inspired the very essence of this band, and I think the energy of New York suits us—we’re kind of eccentric, nonstop, 24-hour, a little bit of everything.” Musically, Empire State Bastard was born in the back of Biffy Clyro’s tour bus. Both Neil and guitarist Mike Vennart play in the Scottish alt-metal band (Neil also handles vocals) and would spend the drives between cities playing each other some of their heaviest and most avant-garde favorites. Mr. Bungle and Cardiacs took turns with Converge and the Melvins, forming a unified sensibility. “We’ve known each other for over two decades now, so I remember really trying to force Cardiacs and Mr. Bungle on Simon back in those days,” Vennart tells Apple Music. “Then it became, ‘This is the freakiest thing I’ve got—show me yours.’” The ultimate irony is that Empire State Bastard managed to coax Mr. Bungle’s drummer—and former Slayer legend—Dave Lombardo into their band. (“It’s almost too much for me to handle,” Vennart says.) Along with bassist Naomi Macleod (Bitch Falcon), they combine modern sociopolitical themes with ’90s AmRep heaviness and unusual time signatures. “We both look for similar things in music,” Neil says. “We like things to be pushed to the very edge and the very limit.” Below, the duo discuss each track. **“Harvest”** Neil: “It’s about identity, especially during the lockdown. It\'s tough these days to know exactly what you think because everything\'s pushed towards you. Everything\'s telling you what to think, how to look, what to feel about things. You have very little time to consider things yourself. This song is about trying to take that time to process things rather than just following your nose down the internet or down social media and think that\'s the way you need to live your life.” **“Blusher”** Vennart: “It\'s one of the only moments on the record where I\'m threatening to give myself carpal tunnel. There\'s some serious alternate picking, and you have to really dig in to get it tight, but it feels really good. The pain feels so good, man.” Neil: “Lyrically, it’s about not being afraid to feel a bit embarrassed about shit. Not feeling afraid to say, ‘Oh, I really got that wrong.’ Just being aware that mistakes are all right. Unfortunately, mistakes live online forever, but that’s a dangerous thing to view ourselves with because we spend our whole lives walking in a minefield.” **“Moi?”** Vennart: “This is definitely one of a couple of Melvins-esque moments on this record. If it wasn\'t for Simon\'s input, we could probably get done for plagiarism on this one.” Neil: “I feel like this song could only really exist in this band. I know Mike\'s saying that it sounds a bit like the Melvins, but to me it feels like there\'s an awakening in the melodies and the way it pushes and pulls. Lyrically, it’s the classic ‘Me, my fault?’ There’s a lot of people that don’t take accountability these days, and it seems like you get rewarded for denying reality.” **“Tired, Aye?”** Neil: “This is one of the first songs that Mike presented for the record. Over the years, I’ve always wanted to do a duet with just my vocal and a drum set. When you’ve got Dave Lombardo on your album, that’s when you do it. And the composition of the song was so complex that it felt like I had enough dimensions to justify it having no guitars. So that was a little bit of a headbutt because Mike’s guitar work on the original version is absolutely superb. And people will hear that at some point.” **“Sons and Daughters”** Vennart: “There\'s moments in this where we get to use the guitar as a sort of sound bath, so it’s just me and Naomi droning on a couple of chords. It\'s the first point in the record where you really get to meditate for a moment. But again, some of the choppy riffs are pure Osbourne-ian. And then Simon just took it to a completely different place.” Neil: “For me, this song just felt like a monolith rolling through the desert. It made me think of the front cover of *Dopesmoker* by Sleep. It’s about how cheap our governments see human life, how quickly we go to war for things, how quickly things get out of proportion. There’re no victors in any wars. The romance we see in all these war movies is just not reality.” **“Stutter”** Vennart: “Throughout all of this stuff, the idea subconsciously was to try and bend metal into shapes that I had not heard before. The meter of the opening riff is quite odd, so it\'s geometrically a bit wonky and lopsided. And then at the end, the song does something that I don\'t think I\'ve heard before, where you\'ve got the guitar and bass just sort of droning together for like eight bars while Dave Lombardo is playing within an inch of his life as fast as he can. It’s like tantric metal or something.” **“Palms of Hands”** Neil: “Lyrically, it was written during the time when we were all isolated. I just kept picturing the thought of going to a sex party after the pandemic, when everyone’s lost their mind. No one knows how to conduct themselves, so it’s basically a comedy of errors.” Vennart: “There’re definitely points in this song that are some of the most trad thrash moments of the whole record, where just for a few bars here and there, you really feel like you’re actually in Slayer. It’s like levitating.” **“Dusty”** Neil: “This, to me, is probably one of the most avant-garde songs on the record. It sounds like something a band like Daughters would do. It took me a while to figure out what to do vocally on this song because it’s got a weird time signature, 11/8, which Mike didn’t tell us. It’s called ‘Dusty’ because I’ve watched a few things about the Dust Bowl over the last few years, and it really struck me that it’s a similar thing to what people are going through in Europe at the moment, where people are having to move because the climate is making it uninhabitable.” **“Sold!”** Neil: “I think we all had this weird connection with spending money during the pandemic because it was one of the only things we were in control of. Some people were still working and had money, some people weren’t working and didn’t have any money, but commerce was the one thing that we were all drawn towards. I found myself spending money on things that aren’t important, thinking, ‘Life will be better once I buy this thing.’ But these are just stories we tell ourselves.” Vennart: “It’s hard to keep everyone on track because it’s got a couple of weird time-signature tricks. It\'s got a bit of a surf-rock moment, and it\'s got some stabs that are really hard to play live. But I love it. It’s one of the more hatstand, crazy-ass, gonzo moments on the record.” **“The Looming”** Neil: “As soon as I heard this, I knew it was going to close the record. Even before I\'d done any vocals, there was a power, there was a progressiveness, there was an ecstasy to this song that is hard to achieve in an oppressively heavy piece of music. I think the breakthrough in this song was the keyboards—those little bits of nonsensical, celestial-type sounds are keeping the listener bubbling up on top of the song, almost like you’re a swan or a duck sat on the surface, and underneath everything’s going crazy. Lyrically, it’s about the end of the world.”

With his first proper solo album since the dissolution of his former band, ex-HIM leader Ville Valo is testing his personal vision under the moniker VV. On *Neon Noir*, the Finnish vocalist and songwriter explores new facets of gothic rock by turning up his ’80s influences in tandem with moody David Lynch-isms and ’60s folk rock in an effort to, as he puts it, find the sweet spot between Depeche Mode and Black Sabbath. “After playing with HIM for a quarter century, it felt very daunting to call it a day,” he tells Apple Music. “It was such a huge part of my life. I really didn’t have any expectations about what would happen afterwards because I didn’t know if the inspiration would be there, or if I would just feel like I’d lost a limb. So, it took me a while to get inspired again.” After HIM split up in 2017 as one of the most commercially successful Finnish bands of all time, it took Valo over two years to pick up a guitar again. “I ended up producing and engineering and writing and doing everything by myself,” he explains. “I was stupid enough to think that that’s what a solo album’s supposed to be like. Some of it has to do with COVID because there was no chance to put a band together. But I’ve also always had a strange fascination with artists like Prince, who do everything by themselves. Because if you work completely in a solitary fashion, the vision is very undiluted. It doesn’t necessarily mean the result is better, but I think it’s more unique and special because you can hear who the artist really is.” Below, he details each track on *Neon Noir*. **“Echolocate Your Love”** “It was written during the darkest times of the pandemic. I’ve always been fascinated by bats and how they navigate using echolocation. I started thinking that maybe people should use the same at times—close your eyes and you can actually see and understand things better in the dark. And also, the classic line of ‘love is blind.’ In this case, you could interpret the darkness as being the pandemic. Let it wash you over because you’re going to be stronger afterwards.” **“Run Away From the Sun”** “That’s the first song I wrote for the album and the first song I wrote after HIM disbanded. So, it was a big deal for my self-confidence to be able to show myself that I can still pull it off and actually get a song that makes me tickle in just the right spots at the right time. I think the song is very ’80s—the whole album is pretty ’80s—but it’s quite anthemic. I was in a very bad place mentally and spiritually when I wrote it, and I couldn’t see a way out. So, I asked the one I love to join me in the darkness as opposed to trying to drag me out. It’s a love song.” **“Neon Noir”** “When I wrote this, I was still trying to find the right spot for me, which is somewhere in between Depeche Mode and Black Sabbath. The song has a very classic-rock feel to it with the guitars, but then the midsection has this shoegaze-y Cocteau Twins/Jesus and Mary Chain feel to it. I think I found a way to combine all that stuff within a single song and send as many mixed messages as I could for the listener. For me, the song represents the dance of life—all the good and bad that we go through in order to develop and grow as individuals.” **“Loveletting”** “It’s weird that this was the first single because it’s quite a departure. It does have similarities to my previous band, and you can recognize who’s singing, but it has a lot of folky influence to it. The verses of the song are very ’60s. I love Cat Stevens and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and all of that melancholy folk music of the time, and I was trying to bring some of that into the music, which is very new to me. It has a lot of ’80s dance-goth feel to it, too. That is very un-HIM.” **“The Foreverlost”** “That’s the second single, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s definitely the most gothic-rock song on the album. I was able to bring a lot of the musical perversions into the song that I wasn’t able to fulfill with HIM. The guys in HIM were more hard rockers, God bless them, but this time I didn’t have them holding me back. So, it’s very Sisters of Mercy, and it’s quite tongue in cheek as well because there’s a lyric about the ‘nyctophile’s Shangri-la,’ and that’s obviously Helsinki because it’s dark all the time here.” **“Baby Lacrimarium”** “‘Lacrimarium’ is a weird Latin word that I heard about from a friend. It’s what’s called a tear vessel, where back in the day people would weep and save their tears in a tiny jar. I just thought the idea was quite extraordinary. Lyrically speaking, I love combining good old ’50s or ’60s American, ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’ pop music with semi-poetic goth themes. Musically speaking, it’s the poppiest track on the album. It’s got a lot of jangly, clean guitars with the super-chorus \[effect\], like The Cure.” **“Salute the Sanguine”** “This is a fast rock track with a bit of The Cult in the guitars. The chorus is, ‘Go salute the sanguine, red in tooth and claw. It has to feel.’ It’s about the animalistic, instinctual aspect that is so important in life. To me, it’s not about ones and zeroes or social media. It’s about letting yourself go and letting the animal out—howling at the moon a bit. It’s probably the most HIM-like track on the album. It’s like a freight train, and it’s probably going to work great live.” **“In Trenodia”** “I was trying to think of a melancholy utopia. ‘Threnody’ means a sad song, usually a solitary song sung by one person, so I turned the idea of that into a world-building exercise. Trenodia is the land of the sad song, a place where I would feel at ease and at home. It’s a beautiful place where the sun is always setting, and the birds sing the most melancholy tunes. It has a bit of *Siamese Dream*-era Smashing Pumpkins guitars coming together with a sort of Type O Negative gothic pop. It’s one of the odder bits ’n’ bobs on the album.” **“Heartful of Ghosts”** “That’s my favorite of the album because it’s something very different. It has this weird lava lamp sort of feeling. It’s very ’60s and—rest in peace—Angelo Badalamenti, talking about *Twin Peaks* and all that stuff. I think the theme from *Twin Peaks* was such a big influence on all the musicians my age. You want to be able to create something that’s beautiful but ominous at the same time. ‘Heartful of Ghosts’ has this brooding sense of something terrible about to happen, and super-weird lyrics about tarot cards and a planchette, the thing you use with a Ouija board.” **“Saturnine Saturnalia”** “That’s the most Black Sabbath thing on the album. I’m a huge Black Sabbath geek. I grew up with that stuff, and they were one of the main idols for HIM. We were such fanatic fans when it came to Sabbath, and I think we still are. So, you have to have a couple of really big, monstrous, fuzzy guitar riffs on a rock album. I also grew up with Type O Negative and that sort of stuff in the early ’90s that incorporated a sense of the romantic and melancholy pop with the very Sabbath-y riffs, so that’s what I was aiming for here.” **“Zener Solitaire”** “Zener cards are the telepathy cards—the ones with the crosses, the circles, the waves. One person holds them to themselves, and the other person is trying to guess them. I thought the saddest thing in the world would be to play solitaire with Zener cards because that’s something you can’t really do by yourself. This is an instrumental track, kind of a Phil Spector production meeting up with Goblin, who did the music for the original *Suspiria*. It’s meant as an intro for the next song, ‘Vertigo Eyes.’” **“Vertigo Eyes”** “I didn’t purposefully set out to do an eight-plus-minute song, but that’s what happened. I was thinking of the dream sequences from David Lynch’s *Lost Highway*, those subliminal messages he keeps giving the viewers with the editing. There’re so many weird things. You know that semi-surreal feeling when you have a really high fever? You’re not sure what’s true and what’s not true. You’re not well, and you’re in this in-between state. That’s what I wanted to create with this song. Musically, it’s like psychedelic U2 coming together with Sisters of Mercy and then *Welcome to Sky Valley*-era Kyuss at the end.”

With his first proper solo album since the dissolution of his former band, ex-HIM leader Ville Valo is testing his personal vision under the moniker VV. On Neon Noir, the Finnish vocalist and songwriter explores new facets of gothic rock by turning up his '80s influences in tandem with moody David Lynch-isms and '60s folk rock in an effort to, as he puts it, find the sweet spot between Depeche Mode and Black Sabbath. "After playing with HIM for a quarter century, it felt very daunting to call it a day," he tells Apple Music. "It was such a huge part of my life. really didn't have any expectations about what would happen afterwards because I didn't know if the inspiration would be there, or if I would just feel like I'd lost a limb. So, it took me a while to get inspired again." After HIM split up in 2017 as one of the most commercially successful Finnish bands of all time, it took Valo over two years to pick up a guitar again. "I ended up producing and engineering and writing and doing everything by myself," he explains. "I was stupid enough to think that that's what a solo album's supposed to be like. Some of it has to do with COVID because there was no chance to put a band together. But I've also always had a strange fascination with artists like Prince, who do everything by themselves. Because if you work completely in a solitary fashion, the vision is very undiluted.

After parting ways with guitarist/clean vocalist and band co-founder Jason Cameron in 2021, Bury Tomorrow had some soul-searching to do. At first, they seriously considered dissolving the band. But ultimately, the British metalcore stars decided to carry on with two new members—keyboardist/clean vocalist Tom Prendergast and guitarist Ed Hartwell—in Cameron’s stead. To test the waters, they released two stand-alone singles in 2022: “Death (Ever Colder)” and “Life (Paradise Denied).” “They went down really, really well,” vocalist Dani Winter-Bates tells Apple Music. “You rarely get a chance to litmus test an album—essentially a sound and a feel—but we did, and we’ll probably do it again.” Bury Tomorrow’s appropriately titled seventh full-length, *The Seventh Sun*, picks up where those singles left off. “People have asked if there was more pressure on this album, but it almost feels like the pressure’s off somewhat,” Winter-Bates says. “We chose to continue in this band, and we chose to continue in a different way. That choice has given us a bit of freedom, and we’re super proud of how it turned out.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Seventh Sun”** “For human beings, the cycles are around the sun. For the band, this is our seventh time ’round, because each one of those suns is your album, essentially. And seven is quite a significant number, obviously, in lots of things. I usually fixate on the negative, like seven circles of hell or seven deadly sins. But for us, *The Seventh Sun* is about our journey, this next chapter and this next cycle. It’s a statement of intent: ‘We’re here, and we’re going as hard as we possibly can.’” **“Abandon Us”** “Lots of people connotate the title with our lineup change, but it’s not actually about that. This is about the fact that we, as humans, operate in a very negative and consumerist light. We take and we take and we take, and then we leave for dead. For me, the ethos of our band is about acting with kindness in all that we can do. The borders that we create, the issues that we create, the segregation that we create are all man-made. These aren’t concepts that exist in any other form, other than in mankind. For me, this song is about recognizing that and calling it out.” **“Begin Again”** “This is very much about renewal. On our last album, *Cannibal*, I wrote heavily about my own journey with mental health and my own experiences. It was very, very introspective—the most so of any record we\'d done. This song is recognizing that sometimes you have to go through that fire to be able to come out the other side. There’s a couple of really poignant lyrics in there about crawling when you can no longer walk. There’s always something you can do to step forward.” **“Forced Divide”** “In the studio, I contracted COVID, which is mental considering we were in an isolated studio in an old manor house. I had septic tonsillitis and COVID at the same time, which for a vocalist was not the best. And I still had ‘Forced Divide’ to record. The song is all about that rip and pull that we find when we have to cut off the dead weight that goes along sometimes with relationships. It’s a really hard thing to do, but sometimes you’ve got to trim the leaves for growth. And it’s a metalcore slammer. It’s as thrashy as you get from us.” **“Boltcutter”** “This is probably the most savage song on the record. It’s not like anything we’ve ever really written before. It’s nodding to the seventh-sun element of this togetherness, this being able to push through. It is as anti-hierarchical as you could probably get from me, a very anti-establishment song. It’s not necessarily that I’m fully anti-establishment; it’s just more so that, at this moment in time, in not just the UK but worldwide, there seems to be a need for a reset. So, again, there’s that renewal theme.” **“Wrath”** “This is a real heartstrings one, very emotional. Our guitarist Kris \[Dawson\], one of his friends lost their mum recently. He was going through the stages of grief that you go through, and Kris told me that he wanted a song about that. I lost my nan at the start of COVID, so I started pulling in that feeling. Some people think about what happens after death, and other people think about what happens right now. That all depends on whatever spirituality or faith people have—or don’t have. After you go through all the anxiety and anger, you come to that realization within grief that all you want to do is make that person proud.” **“Majesty”** “Before Tom joined the band, him and Kris had been writing together for years. They’ve grown up with each other, and they wrote this one in lockdown. I was listening to it on my own, and I loved it. So, when Tom joined, I was like, ‘I’ll be taking that song off your hands, thank you very much.’ Lyrically, it’s about this feeling of isolation and how we need to be together. They’re calling out to, I suppose, that love and togetherness that we had prior to the pandemic, and that hopefully we’ll gain once more.” **“Heretic” (feat. Loz Taylor)** “This is as pissed off as you probably get me as a vocalist. It’s a particularly violent song, and it has to do with living in chaos and understanding that we can use that to our advantage sometimes. For the middle bit, we got Loz Taylor; While She Sleeps are our boys and have been for years. And Loz has never done a guest vocal before. The whole of the song is call-and-response, and his vocals fit so perfectly with that feel. It’s a real contrast to my vocals.” **“Recovery?”** “Lyrically, this is a bit of a throwback to *Cannibal*. When I wrote that album, it was very much how I felt in that moment, talking about anxiety, depression, and OCD. ‘Recovery?’ is how I feel now. I have to accept the fact that, even though I’ve had a long-standing journey with my own mental health, I’m never going to recover. I’m never going to get rid of my anxiety or chronic depression. It’s just part of my life. I have this new understanding that it’s a long-term condition. And that’s nothing to be ashamed about.” **“Care”** “This was the first song that Kris and Tom sent, and they’d written it prior to Tom joining the band. It’s an expression about how the world is incredibly unkind, especially to those people that are drowning. We care more about how shiny our boat is than we do about chucking a life raft to someone else. And for good measure, we might as well chuck a load of rubbish on top of them. But this world is nothing without kindness. It’s pivotal to our survival.” **“The Carcass King” (feat. Cody Frost)** “Cody Frost is an unbelievable human being, just a force to be reckoned with. An artist in the truest sense, I think. The producer we were working with, Dan \[Weller\], is Cody’s producer as well. When he showed me her stuff, it was just like this unbelievable level of vocals. ‘The Carcass King’ is very heavy and very emotive, which is a blend we’ve always wanted but have been really scared of it sounding conceited. The song is very much about self-defamation, but I wanted it to be theatrical and poetic. And I think Cody really ramped that up. It’s something special.”

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

The Gaslight Anthem’s 2023 LP *History Books* serves as their first since 2014, and the band brings such ferocity to their return, it sounds as if they’re trying to wipe away a near-decade’s worth of cobwebs in a single riff, cymbal crash, and lyric. Somber but not sad, *History Books* recalls the urgency and triumph of the band’s sophomore effort and breakthrough, 2008’s *The \'59 Sound*. Singer Brian Fallon sounds reinvigorated and as tenacious as ever, yet also a bit wiser since the last time he and his band checked in. Opener “Spider Bites” shines with soaring guitar solos and a galloping drum groove. Fallon’s voice is awash in distortion, less desperate but no less passionate than he sounded as a young man 15 years prior to *History Books*. The Jersey-bred band still pays homage to their chief influence Bruce Springsteen on *History Books* (they even recorded a version of the title track with him), but the inspirations are more varied, less indebted to a particular time, place, and Boss. “Autumn” is a blues rock bar sing-along, and “Michigan, 1975” shows a restraint and tension reminiscent of alt-rock anthems that populated radio playlists when The Gaslight Anthem’s band members were still boys. Sort of like Faulkner once said, the past is never dead. It ain’t even the past.

Physical copies at Convulserecords.com

For Beartooth’s fifth album, lead vocalist and mastermind Caleb Shomo wanted to go in the opposite direction of 2021’s *Below*. Where that album is dark and depressing, *The Surface* is full of positivity. Where *Below*’s front cover is black and ominous, *The Surface*’s cover is bright pink and hopeful. The dramatic shift comes from Shomo’s decision to quit drinking and move from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles. The result is possibly the metalcore band’s poppiest album to date. “This album is a story of change,” Shomo tells Apple Music. “This album is a story of growth. At the end of the day, it’s about doing what it takes to be happy. That can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to me being happy is chasing what I love with every ounce of my being. This record is me manifesting that and speaking it into existence.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Surface”** “It’s me trying to describe the manic high I had when I first quit drinking alcohol. It truly felt like I had unlocked something that was going to change my entire life. I felt invincible in that moment.” **“Riptide”** “This is the first song I wrote for this album. I wrote it a week after I quit drinking and realized that I wanted to do something different with this record. ‘Riptide’ is really the mission statement of this whole album, and hopefully every album to come.” **“Doubt Me”** “It’s about when people doubt what you’re doing, doubt your vision, and don’t see the bigger picture that you see. Sometimes you have to just trust that you know what’s best for you, and that you need to do whatever it takes to be true to yourself and get done what you need to get done.” **“The Better Me”** “This is simply about making that change in your life that you know you need to make. I think everyone has those moments when you look in the mirror and know there’s something that could make us happier or healthier, whatever that may be. This song is about chasing that.” **“Might Love Myself”** “It’s about the first time I felt self-love. That’s something that was very unusual and confusing, but absolutely amazing. So I tried to just put it into words and turn it into a song.” **“Sunshine!”** “This is about me realizing that my seasonal depression is getting out of hand and I really need to make a change. I ended up moving to Los Angeles about seven or eight months after I wrote that song, and never looked back.” **“What’s Killing You”** “This is about dealing with loss. Throughout the process of this record, I went through a very significant loss in my life. It’s something that we all deal with in this world, so this song was just me trying to put those emotions into words.” **“Look the Other Way”** “It’s a song about speaking out into existence that you need help with something. There were a lot of things in my life that I was dealing with and hiding. They were killing me, and not good in the slightest. This song is about the moment that I told somebody that I want to change those things in my life for the first time.” **“What Are You Waiting For”** “It’s about doing whatever you gotta do to be the best version of yourself and not making excuses and just going for it. Sometimes the only way to make big changes in your life is to take a leap of faith and go for it.” **“My New Reality”** “This is another song about manifesting what you want out of life. For me, it’s understanding that I still have a whole life ahead of me that I can do anything I want to with—and I need to take advantage of that.” **“I Was Alive”** “This was inspired by the last conversation I had with my late grandfather. He talked about how he lived a life that he was happy with, and he was ready to go. He was one of the most amazing and inspiring people in my life, and this song is—as many of these songs are—me manifesting the best version of myself that I can possibly be for the rest of my life.”

“Does anyone even know you?/Does anyone even care?” That’s just one of the many existential questions put forth by The Armed on *Perfect Saviors*. This time around, the multifaceted, multitasking, multicultural, willfully mysterious collective peer through the cracked lens of everyone’s smartphone to examine the cultural chaos, social media narcissism, virtue signaling, and performative blah-blah-blah of our current moment. You know: the Modern Malaise. On songs like “Sport of Measure” and “Sport of Form,” they’re not talking about Monday Night Football or the UFC or even (necessarily) the endless public humiliations of celebrity athletes. No, it’s a much nastier blood sport The Armed are interested in: The daily *Lord of the Flies* competition for likes, followers, and views. They even issued a press release about it: “*Perfect Saviors* is the soundtrack to a single movie with 7.5 billion roles.” According to vocalist and spokesperson Tony Wolski (who may or may not have formerly been known as Adam Vallely), the single “Everything’s Glitter” was inspired by David Bowie’s first US press tour. It looks at what Wolski—who directed the video for the track and co-produced *Perfect Saviors*—calls “the razor’s edge between icon and clown.” The song itself sounds like The Strokes being calmly fed into a Vitamix. So does “Clone,” which appears two songs earlier. Between them is “Modern Vanity,” which sounds like a seasick, drug-induced fantasy headache written by stone-cold teetotalers. Meanwhile, “Liar 2” is a dance track about being hopelessly depressed. Probably. The point here—and on “Modern Vanity,” and elsewhere on *Perfect Saviors*—seems to be the juxtaposition, the pairing of opposites. It’s what The Armed have thrived upon since their inception in 2009 but elevated to an art form on their celebrated 2021 album, *Ultrapop*. In fact, most of *Perfect Saviors* is a seesawing mashup of indie rock, post-hardcore, and strobe-effect electronics, but (usually) without the abrupt stylistic U-turns many of their sonically schizophrenic peers go in for. Toward the end of the record, we get some melancholy sax (“In Heaven”) and a Radiohead-style mood piece complete with free-jazz skronk, sad piano, sadder strings, and a slow fade into oblivion. That one’s called “Public Grieving.” As on the band’s previous outings, *Perfect Saviors* has cameos. But this time, the guest list is more crowded than usual. Featuring appearances from indie darling Julien Baker, avant-garde saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, and Chavez/ex-Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney alongside dudes from Jane’s Addiction, Queens of the Stone Age, and Red Hot Chili Peppers—plus too many more to list here—the album is crammed with people from other bands. At the same time, The Armed will put Iggy Pop in one of their videos (“Sport of Form”) without getting him to perform on the song itself. It’s the equivalent of taking a selfie with a rock star whose music you’re not actually familiar with. Which is probably the point.

The deskbound among us might first interpret the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album as a reference to the font, but a few minutes with the music and you’ll realize that what Josh Homme refers to is a sense of decadence so total it ends with the city on fire. They remain, as ever, the hardest hard-rock band for listeners who don’t necessarily subscribe to the culture or traditions of hard rock, channeling Bowie (“Emotion Sickness”), cabaret (“Made to Parade”), and the collars-up slickness of British synth-pop (“Time & Place”) alongside the motorcycle-ready stuff you might you might expect—which they still do with more style than most (“Obscenery”). And like ZZ Top, they can rip and wink at the same time. But *In Times New Roman...* plumbs deeper personal territory than prior records. Homme has weathered the deaths of friends, the dissolution of his marriage, and other painful developments since the release of 2017’s Villains, and the album touches on all that—but he also wants to be clear about assumptions listeners could make from his lyrics. “I would never say anything about the mother of my kids or anything like that,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also, by the same token, you must write about your life, and I think I\'m soundtracking my life. These songs and the words that go with them are an emotional snapshot where you stop the film, you pull out one frame. One song it\'s like, \'I\'m lost.\' And another one, \'I\'m angry.\' They need to be these distilled versions of that, because one drop of true reality is enough flavor. I think the hatred and adoration of strangers is like the flip side of a coin. But when you\'re not doing it for the money, that currency is worthless. I can\'t get involved in what the people say. In a way, it\'s none of my fucking business.” For Homme, the breakthrough of *In Times New Roman...* came *because* he was unflinchingly honest with himself while he was writing through some of his darkest moments. “At the end of the day, the record is completely about acceptance,” Homme says. “That\'s the key. My friends have passed. Relationships have ended. Difficult situations have arisen. I\'ve had my own physical and health things go on and things like that, but I\'m okay now. I\'m 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of what\'s going on, you know what I mean? But in the last seven years, I\'ve been through a lot of situations where it doesn\'t matter if you like it or not, it\'s happening to you. And so I\'ve been forced to say, yeah, I don\'t like this, I need to figure out where I\'m at fault here or I\'m responsible here or accountable here. And also, I need to also accept it for what it is. This is the reality. Even if I don\'t like it, it would be a shame to hold on too tight to something that\'s slipping through your hands and not just accept it for what it is.”

Veteran LA noise-rock trio HEALTH’s 2023 LP *RAT WARS* builds on their noise-centric industrial exercises, accentuating their hardcore tendencies with dance grooves, haunted synths, and wall-of-sound guitar lines. Taking influences from Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and contemporaries like A Place to Bury Strangers, HEALTH builds deeply twisted odes to sweaty nights on the club floor and long mornings trying to fend off the sun. Like its predecessor, 2019’s *VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR*, *RAT WARS* blends pain and catharsis, emptiness and ecstasy. On “UNLOVED,” the trio of Benjamin Miller, Jake Duzsik, and John Famiglietti cook up a track built around military-grade snare drums, gnarling synths, and hi-hats that slosh like boots in deep rain puddles. Duzsik takes the vocal lead, conjuring up a deeply dark tale as he croons in an almost-snarl, “And it was not my fault you were unloved when you were a child/I wasn\'t there.”

Meet Me @ The Altar, the pop-punk trio of lead vocalist Edith Victoria, drummer Ada Juarez, and guitarist Téa Campbell, met on the internet—from different corners of the United States, all three knew they wanted to start a band, and they wanted to do it with other women of color, a rarity in their chosen musical genre. Not only did they serve to move the once progress-proof scene forward, but they also reminded listeners why they fell in love with it in the first place: earworm hooks, shout-along melodies, and caffeinated riffs. Their EPs, all self-released (with the exception of 2021’s *Model Citizen* on Fueled by Ramen), confirmed their talent. But it\'s their debut LP, *Past // Present // Future*, that amplifies their songwriting, from the industry-plant kiss-off “Say It (To My Face)” to the Disney Channel 2000s-pop-rock-inspired closer “King of Everything.” With the guidance of producer John Fields (Demi Lovato, Jonas Brothers, P!nk), the album is 11 tracks of full-speed mall-punk adrenaline, palm-muted power chords, and self-esteem-boosting lyrics.

On his second solo album, Slipknot and Stone Sour lead singer Corey Taylor takes on toxic relationships, mental health issues, “sappy, stupid hippie songs,” and more. Singles “Post Traumatic Blues,” “Talk Sick,” and “Beyond” lock in an upbeat alt-rock tone, while the latter—along with “Starmate” and “Someday I’ll Change Your Mind”—were written for his wife, dancer and Cherry Bombs co-founder Alicia Taylor. “*CMF2*, as a whole, is a glimpse of where my solo music is going,” Taylor tells Apple Music. “It’s more focused; sharper, better songwriting, better performances, just *better*. It’s a journey covering dozens of emotions and issues, and you never know where it will take you each time.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Box”** “The curtain draws back, the band begins slowly rolling along on its climb to the top of the mountain, and \[then\] the inevitable slide towards the gravity of life. This song sets the tone for what’s to come without giving away the secrets inside.” **“Post Traumatic Blues”** “Dedicated to those struggling with PTSD and their families. This song is a fiery message building a bridge between the ones who suffer and the loved ones trying desperately to understand what’s happening to them.” **“Talk Sick”** “A taste of the medicine that comes with toxic relationships and the melancholy aftermath that comes when you get even. Everyone loses.” **“Breath of Fresh Smoke”** “I wrote this in 2005 as I started to get my life back together. Classic case of a person with a huge soul being bigger than the town they grew up in.” **“Beyond”** “I got tired of every love song being sappy, so I wrote one that has the same feel and urgency as when I’ve been away from my wife too long. Why can’t a love song kick ass?” **“We Are the Rest”** “A rowdy anthem that lets the upper 1 percent know they’re on borrowed time. We represent the wave that will wash them all out to sea.” **“Midnight”** “A song about getting in your car in the depths of a quiet depression and driving through a city without seeing it at all.” **“Starmate”** “One rocking love song works, why not two? This is a banger that will definitely fit in perfectly with our live set.” **“Sorry Me”** “A song about trying to figure out for yourself the mistakes that may have gotten you to the present place you reside. The silence speaks for itself.” **“Punchline”** “A satire about trying to get rid of the people in your life who fill you with guilt for being who you are, even when who you are is amazing.” **“Someday I’ll Change Your Mind”** “One more song for my wife. I wrote this for her on her birthday and had all our friends help me sing the *whoa*s to her. This song is very special. And the piano on the track is my actual piano that I have at home that my wife spent a year finding for me.” **“All I Want Is Hate”** “There are a lot of sappy, stupid hippie songs in the world that have no pragmatic solutions, just syrupy emotions. This song is an answer to those songs—one in particular.” **“Dead Flies”** “A vision of the future for a leech of a person who you’ve cut out of your life—a person who used to mean a lot. Now, because of the choices they’ve made in life, the only beings that will be left hanging around them will be dead flies.”

℗ 2023 BABYMETAL RECORDS / Amuse Inc. under exclusive licence to Cooking Vinyl America Inc. / 5B Records

“When we started making this record and throughout a lot of it, I was feeling like life was trying to devour me.” That’s what Pierce the Veil vocalist/guitarist Vic Fuentes says about the San Diego post-hardcore band’s fifth album. “It was testing me, really seeing what I was made of. I had that feeling of being sort of trapped or stuck, or like something was eating me.” It’s a feeling that Fuentes and his bandmates—bassist Jaime Preciado and guitarist Tony Perry—know a lot of people can relate to after suffering through the pandemic. “I think this record was the thing that got us through all that personally—and also as a band,” he tells Apple Music. “The process was what brought us back into the light. A lot of it is about fighting your way back to feeling better again. Not just moving there calmly, but actually clawing your way, digging your way, scratching your way back to feeling like a human again.” All of which goes a long way toward explaining the album’s title. “The Jaws of Life is a machine that’s meant to save people’s lives, to pry them out of things,” he offers. Below, Fuentes comments on each song. **“Death of an Executioner”** “The visual of this song, to me, is a car that’s following you—like the video for ‘Karma Police’ by Radiohead. It’s got its headlights on your back, and it’s just kind of slowly creeping on you. To me, it represents social media and people expecting perfection out of you and always waiting for you to make a mistake so they can run you down and destroy you. I like the title ‘Death of an Executioner’ because it describes killing the person who’s trying to kill you.” **“Pass the Nirvana”** “Every time we’ve played this song live, I’ve dedicated it to all the youth in the crowd who didn’t get a graduation or a prom. It’s describing how the youth of America went through so much in such a small amount of time. I just feel like they’re going to be traumatized forever because of COVID and insurrection and all these school shootings. It’s just too much. ‘Pass the Nirvana’ is about trying to find a good feeling after all of that.” **“Even When I’m Not With You”** “This started with a text that my manager sent me. She wrote, ‘Even when I’m not with you, I’m still with you.’ I was going through a rough time, and she was consoling me with these beautiful words. It hit me so hard that I wrote it down, and it all just naturally fell together into a song about devotion and staying connected through love, even over long distances. I dedicated it to my wife, and it’s a reminder that we’re always connected no matter where I am in the world.” **“Emergency Contact”** “When you’re young and you go to the doctor, you always put down your mom or dad or guardian as your emergency contact. And then there’s this funny moment when you get older, and your emergency contact becomes your wife or your partner. God forbid something happens to me; my wife will be the one to help me. I got to record this one when I was staying up in Seattle at this amazing 100-year-old house owned by Mike \[Herrera\] from MxPx.” **“Flawless Execution”** “This one’s kind of hard to describe. I feel like it’s about people blurring the lines between love and sex and vice versa. It’s almost about when you’re OK with being used because you want to be close to the person so badly. You want love so badly that you’re actually OK with being used or abused, kind of like the Bill Withers song ‘Use Me.’ So, it’s about those extremes that we go to just to be validated. If you’re always desiring someone’s approval, it can go to some toxic places.” **“The Jaws of Life”** “It’s about trying to get released from life’s grip and finding your way. There’s a line in it where I say I’m having the time of my life rotting in the sun, inside the jaws of life. It’s trying to be OK with where you are and starting to feel happy again—I’m making my way, and I know that I can see some light. There’s a lot of ’90s influence in this song musically, which I’m super stoked on. The verse feels like Tripping Daisy or Superdrag—I was thinking about their song ‘Sucked Out’ a lot when I was writing this one.” **“Damn the Man, Save the Empire”** “I’ve been trying to use this title for years, but it’s never felt right until now. It’s a quote from one of my favorite movies, *Empire Records*. Lyrically, it’s about how no one can really know who you are until they’ve really spent some time with you. I feel that way sometimes when people follow our band on social media and think they have me pegged, but you’re seeing what I want you to see, not who I fully am. So, it’s just reminding people about that superficial experience.” **“Resilience”** “With this song, I had this vision of that classic scene in the movies when the hand pops out of the dirt after they’ve been buried alive, and the person starts pulling their body up to the surface. It’s like when you’re digging your way out of this hole, and your eyes finally see the sun and they adjust. Also, one of my most proud moments on this record is that we got to use a quote from *Dazed and Confused* to start the song. We actually had to have the actors approve that. It was such a win for the album.” **“Irrational Fears”** “This is an interlude that sets up the next song. It was inspired by that first scene in the movie *Garden State*, with Zach Braff, where he’s on a plane that’s going down and everyone is freaking out around him, but he’s perfectly calm. We wanted to set the scene with this British flight attendant being all chipper but saying really dark things. Jaime made the music, and then my friend who’s a voice actor recorded the voiceover in London. It was a fun challenge, and I’m really proud of how it came out.” **“Shared Trauma”** “The title kind of speaks for itself. I’ve always felt that shared trauma and going through a traumatic experience with somebody can be one of the strongest bonds in human existence. Knowing that you’ve both been through something together will always connect you in such a powerful way. I think that’s beautiful—it’s the good that can come out of the bad. Musically, it was very much a collaborative band effort that came out of this loopy analog beat that Jaime sent me. It was really fun to write.” **“So Far So Fake”** “This song was written in 2017, so we’ve had it for a long time. It was one of the only ones that made it from some of the first writing sessions we did before the pandemic. It’s about if you’ve ever been betrayed by somebody you felt was a friend, and the wound never really mended—where even an apology doesn’t feel like it’s enough. It feels like it can never really be resolved. So, it’s a bit angry, a bit sour, a bit difficult to think about. But I always want to write about things that are affecting my life.” **“12 Fractures” (feat. chloe moriondo)** “The song was called ‘12 Fractures’ before it became the 12th song on the album. We didn’t plan it like that. I’m glad it worked out that way, but it also makes things confusing. I’m actually looking at our vinyl right now to make sure it doesn’t just say ‘Fractures.’ But this one came from a deeply personal story about a friend of mine who went through a divorce. I watched two of my favorite people in the world just fall apart. When friends break apart like that, it’s like losing a family member. It’s super difficult, even as a bystander. It was cool to get Chloe on the song to bring the story to life. I’m a big fan of hers, and I think she did an amazing job.”