Kerrang!'s 50 Greatest Albums of 2020

Code Orange vocalist, drummer, and bandleader Jami Morgan says his band’s fourth album is all about duality. “It’s about societal introspection and looking at where we’re at as a youth culture,” he tells Apple Music. “But it’s also about looking at yourself as a person—and what you present to the world in this digital age versus what’s inside.” On *Underneath*, the unclassifiable Pittsburgh band—equal parts hardcore crew and groove metal enthusiasts, punk rabble-rousers and industrial technicians—imbue their hyper-modern musical style with cold-eyed sociological observations and deep existential malaise. “There’s a journey down this rabbit hole of anxiety and fear and all these regrets and pain,” Morgan explains. “You’re looking at the world and looking at the bitterness and negative stuff you have and trying to work through it and see where it’s leading us in this very noisy world where it’s very hard to stand out but everyone’s constantly talking.” Below, Morgan and guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers guide us through their new underworld. **(Deeperthanbefore)** Jami Morgan: “This intro is a trailer, in some ways—or the scene before the opening titles. It’s introducing a little bit of our narrative voice and setting up a feeling of dread. And it starts off with the theme from the end of our last record, which we continued on some of the EPs that came in between. It’s the theme song, in a lot of ways, for the last era of our career that phased out and this new voice phased in.” **Swallowing the Rabbit Whole** JM: “This is about taking that first step into the realization that you\'re going to have to go on an internal journey—going down the rabbit hole of success and hurt and envy and self-worth. And you can continue to live in shame, or decide to confront this monster that\'s been depicted in our last three albums, and that\'s on the cover of this album as well.” Reba Meyers: “It took us a really long time to put this song together. It was like we were trying to figure out what kind of album we wanted to write. But once we were able to put that song together, it was the centerpiece to everything. It made everything else fall into place. It was almost a testing ground for a lot of the glitchier guitars and layering and overdubs and bringing in the pianos and synths and everything that would really take the main stage on a lot of the verses and everything of the song. It gave us a place to work off of for the other songs.” **In Fear** JM: “In some ways it’s about this culture we have of throwing each other to the wolves, where the jury of public opinion is almost the most important thing. We have to live in fear now of what we do and say and how we behave. And that’s good in some ways. But in some ways you can be stripped of what makes you an individual. So this isn’t anti-callout-culture, because some of that is important. It’s about how important social currency is, and how it’s our most important currency in a lot of ways.” **You and You Alone** JM: “‘You and You Alone’ is the first real touch of bitterness and anger on the record. We find ourselves at odds with all this hate and resentment we have towards those around us. It\'s looking at this bitterness and saying, ‘Is it totally justified, or in my mind? Or even if it is justified, is this something that I need to hang on to?’ But on the other end, I’m saying this to myself: If I have to carry this burden, what’s my part in it?” RM: “Creating this was like bringing back the old-school chaos of the style of writing we did in our riffs. But we then took it to another dimension almost with bringing in all these digital clippings and glitches. The verses started out as a simple chaotic guitar riff, but we gave it to our keyboard player, Shade, and he looped them and added all these accents and spit it back out. Then we went back and relearned the riff that way. So it was a very cool, very modern back-and-forth process.” **Who I Am** JM: “This is an observation on obsession through the lens of stalkers, and how that was looked at in the past, versus how people present themselves through social media. It\'s this unrequited idealization. In the past—and still, obviously—it’s driven people mad and they\'ve done horrible things. But now it’s something that\'s just totally normal: constantly looking at people; stalking them. And using that new media to make excuses for our shortcomings.” **Cold.Metal.Place** JM: “‘Cold.Metal.Place’ is like the environment of the record. It\'s where I\'m envisioning the birthplace of our main character—or our main antagonist, if you\'re thinking of it that way. It\'s like this merciless, barren, glass world—a machine world. This world we\'re depicting inside the record layout and on the cover. It\'s this environmental embodiment of our own self-destructive thoughts and ideas. We’re abused by this echoing noise of criticism that is sometimes necessary and sometimes just pushes you deeper into your own head. And you go into the cold metal place.” RM: “We, as a unit, have all felt like we’re in that landscape and we’re able to relate in that way—which made it so much easier to connect on writing these songs. It\'s almost like being able to see it visualized has helped me, especially, be able to get through that trial of pointed fingers at all of us. And it\'s a very special thing to feel and have gone through that as a unit through our whole journey of all these albums and coming to this one.” **Sulfur Surrounding** JM: “This is about how we manipulate each other without even meaning to. And sometimes, people mean to. Are you corroding your group by making everyone so connected and having to go on? That’s something I’ve struggled with. Is this the wrong thing for these people who are my friends? I want to do the right thing, but these feelings take over. And I feel everyone can relate to that in a way.” **The Easy Way** JM: “This song is like the bridge between the two halves of the album. We had a song called ‘Only One Way’ that we put out a year or two ago, and this is the sequel. And there\'s a part at the end of ‘Only One Way,’ melodically, that actually is the chorus of this song. Reba sings ‘Only One Way’—it\'s awesome—and then at the end, I creep in with this vocal melody, and that\'s the chorus of this song.” RM: “I think all of us knew when we were writing ‘Only One Way’ that it was going to come back around, just because of how strong the melody was at the end. It didn’t feel like it got its full time in the spotlight. And we always like having things connect and weave together so it doesn\'t just feel like a bunch of songs slapped together on an album. We always try to make it more of a journey—not just through this album, but through our whole trajectory as a band. And I think a lot of people who like our band like us because of that. We\'re all very obsessive about music that has more of an overall vision to it. And obviously, you can see Jami has planned all of this out.” **Erasure Scan** JM: “‘Erasure Scan’ is probably the darkest song on the album. Lyrically, it\'s about the school shooting epidemic, and maybe the events and brain trauma that turn people to committing these horrible atrocities. It gets into some light, probably bullshit, very poorly researched psychology, but I was just looking into the Triune Brain theory—about how the three brains can become rigidly locked. That\'s been seen in a lot of school shooters under psychological evaluation. They become very fixated on the external goal and mission that they\'re unable to divert from. We also talk about this parasite that we get deeper into later on ‘Back Inside the Glass,’ but it’s this aquatic worm that exists in grasshoppers, fucks with their brain and controls them and influences their behavior. So I was relating that to these shootings and talking about the government swaying public opinion with pointless gun and freedom debates, but nothing is really done to help reduce it.” **Last Ones Left** JM: “Other than ‘You and You Alone,’ I would say ‘Last Ones Left’ is pretty much the most bitter-ass fucking song on the album. It\'s about pride and it\'s about social climbing. It\'s pretty much saying we\'re the last ones left on the surface of real bands that have worked and climbed that fucking ladder through hard work and not through bootlicking.” RM: “We\'ve always needed to have that song on every record that empowers us. And for me, and I know the other guys, when we play that song, it definitely has that feeling to it—even at shows when we feel like it\'s us against the world, and no one there even cares or wants to see us—we can use that as an empowering song, and we\'re almost screaming it and singing it to ourselves at times.” **Autumn and Carbine** JM: “On the surface, the song is about the quick lives and deaths of these flavor-of-the-year new artists that are being propped up by corporations. They\'re told to be bombastic and loud, and their demise is very similar. It\'s quick and it\'s loud and then it\'s gone.” **Back Inside the Glass** JM: “Sonically, this song is very sci-fi hardcore in a lot of ways. Our main character, the monster on the front cover that we call The Cutter, is trapped inside this glass shell of how the world sees him—and how maybe even you envision yourself, for better or worse. And it’s that monster trying to get out. It’s your own mania getting the best of you. So you want to kill this thing inside you, but it’s going to come out like that monster. So you want it to go back inside the glass.” **A Sliver** JM: “Thematically, ‘A Sliver’ is the culmination of years of overexposure and noise that almost leads us to become deaf to the cries of everyone around us. Because we all watch these tragedies like they\'re a TV show. But it seems in the past, everything matters only for a sliver of time, and then it’s on to the next thing. We’re lost in the rat race, and it’s all been engineered by corporations for this exact purpose. So we all keep posting; we keep promising. But it\'s really for nothing. We\'re not heard at all. You\'re just a dollar or another voice in a sea of voices. Even that only matters for a second, and then people move on.” **Underneath** JM: ‘‘Underneath’ is really about being in that final, most important moment, facing this monster—whether that be proverbial or inner self. It’s the most positive song on the record, I think, because a lot of it is about redemption. It doesn’t really give you a clear ending as to what happened, but there’s a truth and you’re going to find out what it is. So we have to shed who we are and remove that machine inside. We either stand up to it or just disappear and become it.”

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

Over the last 20 years, a Pearl Jam studio album has come to signal more of something else—more tour dates, more bootlegs, more live films and live albums, more reason for them to come together onstage, that place that’s come to define them most this millennium. But *Gigaton*—the Seattle rock outfit’s first LP since 2013’s *Lightning Bolt*, and a clear response to our current political moment—feels different: Self-recorded and self-produced in tandem with longtime band associate Josh Evans, their 11th full-length merges the sheer power and unpredictability of their live experience with an experimental streak they haven’t embraced so fully since the late ’90s. For every midtempo guitar workout (“Quick Escape” is especially heavy), there’s a sliver of Talking Heads-like post-punk (“Dance of the Clairvoyants,” in which bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard swap instruments). Where there’s a weathered acoustic ballad (“Comes Then Goes” finds Eddie Vedder at his Who-iest), there’s also a psychedelic lullaby (“Buckle Up,” whose lyrics and kazoo-like backup vocals come via Gossard). It’s an album whose anthemic moments (see: the six-minute epic “Seven O’Clock,” whose cloud-parting coda bears echoes of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”) are matched—if not enriched—by its subtleties, namely a welcome attention to texture and arrangement. And with every band member represented in various phases of the songwriting process, it’s arguably their most collaborative studio effort to date, as clear a document of the chemistry they’ve developed over three decades as anything they’ve recorded live. “In the end, when we listened to it, it\'s like we really achieved something,” Gossard tells Apple Music. “It’s really us.”

Colson Baker, the rapper turned pop-punk provocateur known as Machine Gun Kelly, has a somewhat cynical view of fame. At a certain point, he has said in interviews, fans stop rooting *for* you and start rooting against you. Here, on *Tickets to My Downfall*, his fifth LP, he attempts to capture—and potentially reclaim—his crash-and-burn moment. To give the people what he thinks they want. Although the subject matter doesn’t stray too far from Baker’s past releases, musically it’s a sharp left turn. *Downfall* is his project that trades rapping for early-2000s-era pop punk, and was executive produced by blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. It’s littered with middle-finger-in-the-air moments—proud proclamations of recklessness, like going off his meds and \"back on all those drugs I quit\"—but they’re delivered with a certain youthful insouciance. “If I’m a painter, I’d be a depressionist,” he sings on “title track,” a frenetic F-U to his ticket buyers. It feels, at times, like he’s framing the album to be a pile-up of self-pity and angst, but that\'s an undersell; *Downfall* is also emotionally generous, fiercely hyperactive, and ultimately very relatable, full of moments of tenderness and surprising vulnerability. More often than not, Baker is digging around in his pain. “lonely” finds him missing his father, who passed away a few months before the album’s release. “kiss kiss” and “forget me too” are about struggling to break bad habits, be them toxic relationships, booze, or drugs. On the project’s lead single “bloody valentine,” he almost misses a flight because he’s so caught up in love, a tone that calls to mind the boyish romance that underlined many of blink-182’s hits. “There’s a renaissance of guitar-driven music happening in the mainstream,” he tells Apple Music. “This song has been kicking down the door.” The other influence who can be felt throughout these songs is Kurt Cobain, Baker’s childhood idol and rock’s most devoted outsider. Even though *Downfall* is hardly alienating or inaccessible—there’s a song with Halsey, after all—it doesn’t shy away from insecurity or the uglier sides of life. The closing track, “play this when i’m gone,” is a goodbye letter to his daughter, just in case. “I\'m 29, my anxiety\'s eating me alive/I\'m fighting with myself and my sobriety every night/And last time I couldn\'t barely open my eyes/I apologize.”

\"I think it might be a relief to listeners to be like, ‘Oh good, this song isn\'t sad,’\" Jeremy Bolm tells Apple Music about Touché Amoré\'s fifth record *Lament*. \"Or not even sad, like, \'Oh, this is a song that I don\'t have to be afraid to listen to or be concerned to listen to because it might make me feel a certain way.\'\" After tackling the death of his mother on 2016\'s *Stage Four*, Bolm felt it would be best for his mental health to simply write about what\'s been going on in his life since that moment. He expresses his vulnerabilities both good and bad throughout, ranging from an appreciation for his partner (\"Come Heroine\") to the panic of shouldering other people\'s grief (\"I\'ll Be Your Host\") and feeling abandoned by those closest to him (\"A Broadcast\"). The Los Angeles quintet linked up with producer Ross Robinson to push forward their boundaries, as the album implements pedal steel guitar (\"A Broadcast\"), pop structures (\"Reminders\"), and post-punk (\"Feign\") into the band\'s relentless blend of emo and hardcore. \"I\'m so proud of it, and I know that\'s not unique, but in my heart of hearts, I feel like this is our best record,\" Bolm says. Below, he takes us track by track through *Lament*. **Come Heroine** “This one immediately felt like an opening track. I think it also does a pretty good job of setting you up for some of the context of the record, just in terms of how it\'s, in a way, part appreciation. It’s about my partner\'s incredible ability to be supportive and there. And just how, even when things seem to be as bad as they could be or as crazy as could be after the loss of my mom and all that sort of stuff, just that sort of reassuring presence from someone who also hasn\'t exactly had the happiest life. I think that kind of a person deserves a million songs written about them.” **Lament** “I just sort of had to take a step back, and I looked at the track titles, and I was like, \'Honestly, I feel like even just the word *lament* sort of ties up a lot of what we\'re going for here.\' So it became the title track, and for me, this song is just about how, for lack of a better term, something that\'s triggering can just throw your day off completely. The big part toward the end of the song—\'So I lament, then I forget/So I lament, till I reset\'— I think that just feels like the cycle that a lot of us go through.” **Feign** “This song is completely about impostor syndrome. I think when anyone is struggling with their art form in general, the first thing they do is find themselves to be a fraud. I\'ve always done my best to not take all the accolades that people have been kind enough to give me since I started making music with this band. And I\'ve come to realize that the times where I\'m sort of feeling the most free, the most carefree about what I\'m writing, some of those lines that get written end up being the ones that I think people connect to the most, and I can\'t help it. I always feel like it was accidental.” **Reminders** “Arguably the poppiest song in our band\'s catalog. The song was pretty inspired by the early-2000s Bright Eyes records, between *LIFTED* and *I\'m Wide Awake, It\'s Morning*, where he has a few songs that have a really good juxtaposition between a verse that\'s hyper-political and then the next verse that\'s deeply personal. I always looked at that ability that Conor Oberst had in a very envious light. So this was me sort of trying my hand at that, and it was written the day that Trump was exonerated from being impeached. We can\'t rely on the system to make our days better, we have to rely on what\'s around us. To keep our heads up, to keep ourselves going.” **Limelight** “We’re all made to believe that a loving relationship is one where it\'s consistent PDA or you\'re consistently romantic, or you have a passionate kiss every single day, and things like that. Which, I think, once you\'re with someone long enough, I don\'t think that\'s true. I think passion for me is the ability to just be around each other and love each other\'s company. And then also having heavy, heavy experiences together. Like the people in her family that have passed since our relationship, people in my family that have passed since our relationship. We\'ve now had three, four pets die. And every one of those was a very devastating situation, but brought us even closer together. So a lot of that was sort of on my mind when writing this song. And sort of not letting any outsiders have any sort of idea of what my kind of love is.” **Exit Row** “We put this song as the first song on Side B because I feel like it\'s a good energy boost situation. I feel like, at this point, every one of our records has this kind of song on it. I love the half-time drop in it; I feel like it makes me want to fucking kick a bunch of boxes over.” **Savoring** “After the shutdown happened, we were getting the mixes of the songs, and the opening lyrics just cracked me up: ‘Savoring the days that we spent inside as if tomorrow will be different, whatever we decide.’ But the part that makes you realize that it wasn\'t written for this is when I say it\'s nurturing, because this shit is not nurturing. I think any musician or any person who travels will tell you that when you\'re on the road, you\'re thinking about being home; when you\'re home, you wish you were on the road.” **A Broadcast** “\[Guitarist\] Nick \[Steinhardt\] had started learning how to play the pedal steel. Less than a year before we did this record, he wrote that song on it. Every one of our records has what I call the ‘weirdo track.’ I was a little nervous with it, because it started coming together and I started freaking out, like, ‘What am I going to do on this thing?’ So when I was out in the desert writing the song, I was freaking out about that. I read probably like 50 Leonard Cohen poems, listened to a few of the songs, and one of the things that I think Leonard is so amazing at is his ability to write the four-line stanzas. I wrote probably 12 different stanzas, if you want to call them that. And then I just sort of cherry-picked the ones that I think connected the best with how I was feeling. So this is me just sort of paying homage to the people that have inspired me and influenced me in so many different ways.” **I\'ll Be Your Host** “This is my panic of the countless messages and conversations that I\'ve endured about people losing people in their life, and how that\'s had a dramatic effect on my personal life. It\'s really, really difficult to navigate other people\'s tragedies on a consistent basis. I\'ll be approached, and someone will let me know the person in their life that recently died, or whatever. And the thing is I understand completely why people are doing this. I would do the exact same thing. I completely get it. But I can\'t deny what it\'s done to me. It\'s a really hard thing to take on, and I do feel guilty that I don\'t respond to fans about it.” **Deflector** “Being such a fan of Glassjaw and the records that Ross did, I found myself hearing a lot of those elements in the ideas that he had for this song. The last chorus where the kick drum is just consistent, that was an idea from him. The chorus, for me, deals with situational anxiety, conversations that I\'m uncomfortable having, and also the impostor syndrome as well, sort of all tied together with not being comfortable with a lot of situations. So that was me trying to try my best to be a John K. Samson, with painting an image of two trapeze artists doing their act and missing the connection and falling to the ground. And what that means for the trapeze artist, and what that means for myself in a more literary sense.” **A Forecast** “I lost some family because of Facebook. It\'s the social platform that allows your family to comfortably, openly speak about things that you really wish they hadn\'t. So for me, the first big section of this opening song, it\'s really heavy, and it\'s really uncomfortable. And it\'s not an easy first couple lines here. I\'m in this extreme, insane jazz phase where I\'m obsessed with discovering new records constantly with it. And I never had the patience before. I\'ve always respected jazz to an extreme level, but it\'s just never connected to me.”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

Though much of the band’s material has traditionally been written by guitarist, vocalist, and founding member Matt Heafy, Floridian metal squad Trivium took a different path on their ninth album. The bulk of the lyrics and a fair chunk of the music on *What the Dead Men Say* were written by bassist Paolo Gregoletto, who nicked the title from a story by Philip K. Dick, the sci-fi giant whose work has been adapted into films like *Blade Runner*, *Total Recall*, and *Minority Report*. And that wasn’t the only thing on Gregoletto’s reading list that influenced the record. “There’s not a definitive narrative, but if you listen to some of the songs, you maybe pick up on things that relate to one another,” the bassist tells Apple Music. “I was reading books like \[David Wallace-Wells’\] *The Uninhabitable Earth* and Naomi Klein’s *The Shock Doctrine*, where it’s this concept of people using disasters—whether man-made or things like we’re experiencing \[with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic\]—to gain an edge or profit while other people are left to pick up the pieces.” Below, Gregoletto tells the tale behind each track. **IX** “Originally, this was attached to the next song, ‘What the Dead Men Say,’ as the intro. When you\'re listening to it, it\'s meant to be a continuation—the two go together. The music is foreshadowing what’s to come. It’s a lot of the same melodies and chord progressions you hear in the next track, but played a lot slower and with a different feel. It’s our ninth album, so that’s where the Roman numeral comes from.” **What the Dead Men Say** “I got the title from the Philip K. Dick short story. I felt like the words I was coming up with were about this sci-fi, trippy type of in-between state and the way we deal with death and grieving in the digital age. I’ve always loved Philip K. Dick books and stories because a lot of them are still really relevant and ahead of their time. So I found this short story and I liked the title a lot—it was really intriguing. I think some of the best titles and lyrics are stuff you can’t totally explain.” **Catastrophist** “This is one of the first things I wrote for this record. I was just piling up riffs for this song and it seemed to get longer and more complex. It had this epic feel to it, so I knew the lyrics were going to have to fit that. I was reading *The Uninhabitable Earth* and *The Shock Doctrine* and just thinking about these crises that happen in the world and how some people can benefit from them but a lot of people have to suffer and pick up the pieces or are left to their own devices. And what you do in the world kind of determines what people who aren’t even born yet are going to have to deal with.” **Amongst the Shadows & the Stones** “This was a song that \[guitarist\] Corey \[Beaulieu\] brought in. He already had the title and he had recorded the screams on the ‘amongst the shadows and the stones’ part, which is pretty much where it is now. It’s a great hook, so I took that and started writing lyrics. I ended up thinking about how we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the war on terror, and what the real consequences have been—not only for us, but for the people on the other end. So it’s about the aftermath, when the dust has settled and there’s just rubble and nothing.” **Bleed Into Me** “A lot of times I write on guitar, but I started writing this song on bass, so bass is a pretty prominent feature of this song. I used one of our lower tunings, which can really benefit more groove-oriented stuff like this. The lyrics came from when I was riding the L in Chicago and saw this dude shooting heroin in the front of the car. So I started thinking about how people are able to ignore things or pretend that things around you aren’t happening. But I made eye contact with this person and for a moment I got to see their world. You can’t look away, and you have to reckon with what that means for you, for them, and for everyone around you.” **The Defiant** “Matt brought in the demo for this one, and right away I felt like it had an almost \[Trivium’s 2005 album\] *Ascendancy*-type vibe to it. When I wrote the lyrics, I had just watched that R. Kelly documentary, and I was thinking about how bad people don’t always just happen in a vacuum. There’s people behind them that are assisting and facilitating things. And these kinds of people can live how they want openly, because shamelessness is a defining feature of our culture now. And just because you’re a bad person, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get what’s coming to you.” **Sickness Unto You** “This is another song that Matt brought in. It just felt like we needed something to let loose and be heavy and fast. That’s the stuff that we excel at. There’s an almost Rush-type vibe in the middle that comes from \[drummer\] Alex \[Bent\]’s part, and I can’t praise him enough for his playing on this record. Matt wrote the lyrics, which are definitely more somber-type lyrics about loss, and I came up with the title of the song. I don’t even know where I got it from—it just felt interesting.” **Scattering the Ashes** “Corey brought in this one, along with some lyrics and the title. His grandfather died last year, and the lyrics describe the process of scattering his ashes out into the ocean. So I took that and turned it into a story of a father and son, or these people that have a falling-out over something but they’re never able to reconcile it. Then losing someone and having that loss compounded with the fact that you weren’t able to get over this or say you were sorry about something. Musically, it makes me think of that Finnish band Sentenced, who make this very melodic but really dark music. This song isn’t as dark as Sentenced, but it’s our version of that.” **Bending the Arc to Fear** “This was the last song I brought into the record, and I just wanted to riff out. I also love having outros that go in a totally different direction than you were expecting. For the lyrics, I was thinking about that saying ‘The long arc of history bends toward justice.’ If it can be bent to justice, it can be bent to all these other negative things. Then I started thinking about the Ring cameras that everyone has on their houses now, and the culture that has built up around them. It breeds paranoia, really. You’re living your life through these little glimpses outside your door and it can just whip up all this fear.” **The Ones We Leave Behind** “This was a song that Corey brought in, along with the title, and it started out way different than what you hear on the record. It started slower, with more clean guitar parts. When we were jamming it, I just had the very cliché metal idea of ‘What if we play it faster?’ So we started playing it faster and faster, and the riffs kind of changed a little bit to what you hear now. With the lyric, I started thinking about how people are left behind by the culture we have where it’s a winner-takes-all kind of mentality—which is a very American way of thinking. But if the winner takes all, what are the other people left with?”

“I’m 71 and I don’t fuckin’ understand how I got there,” Ozzy Osbourne tells Apple Music. “I can remember times when I\'ve fuckin’ woken up, puke down me. I’ve fuckin’ woken up with a bed full of blood, when I’ve fallen down and banged my head.” It’s not like Ozzy Osbourne hasn’t tackled the subject of death before. Fifty years and one week prior to the release of this album, on the very first song on Black Sabbath’s debut LP, he asked Satan: “Is it the end?” Here, though, on his 12th solo album, and first in a decade, he’s thinking about it a little more seriously. On “Holy for Tonight,” he ponders: “What will I think of when I speak my final words? … What will I think of when I take my final breath?” On the title track, a soaring ballad featuring Elton John, live strings, and a choir, he admits, “Don’t know why I’m still alive/Yes, the truth is I don’t wanna die an ordinary man.” Let’s get one thing straight: There is zero chance of Ozzy Osbourne dying an ordinary man. Nor Elton, for that matter—or anybody else involved in making this record. At the helm is Andrew Watt, a guitarist who got to know Osbourne while working on Post Malone’s track “Take What You Want” (which you’ll also find at the end of this record). Watt enlisted some famous friends to help, and the first call was to Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. “I was like, ‘Ozzy wants us to make an album,’ and he was like, ‘When? When are we doing it? Let\'s do it. Let\'s do it. Let\'s do it,’” Watt says. “I was like, ‘Wow, okay. He really wants to do it, and we need a bass player.’ So I called Duff \[McKagan\] up, from Guns N\' Roses…and Duff was like, ‘When? When? When? When?’ Same thing, same enthusiasm.” The result is an epic release that stares time and mortality squarely in the face, but still has time for toilet humor, aliens, cannibals, and that time in 1972 when Osbourne did so much cocaine he accidentally called the police on himself. (“I thought it was an air conditioning button,” said Osbourne of the story behind the punky “It’s a Raid.” “It was a fucking Bel Air patrol.”) Considering Osbourne has publicly battled health issues for decades, and in 2019 was diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s disease, the mere existence of *Ordinary Man* is quite extraordinary. Watt, Smith, and McKagan have nailed the balance of heavy-as-hell riffs (notably opener “Straight to Hell”) and heartstring-tugging rock ballads (“Under the Graveyard” and the title track in particular), while “Today Is the End” hits like a snarling Metallica/Alice in Chains hybrid—both bands he inspired. Meanwhile, the massive drums and pitch-shifted voice intro on “Goodbye” are a clear nod to “Iron Man.” After singing, “Sitting here in purgatory, not afraid to burn in hell/All my friends are waiting for me, I can hear them crying out for help,” the Prince of Darkness ends the song with a crucial question: “Do they sell tea in heaven?”

Welcome to Calvary Falls, where the world of one quiet, snowy American town is about to be turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious man…to catastrophic results. Creeper has never been a band to accept limitations on their ambitious designs; 2017’s debut album, *Eternity, In Your Arms*, took broad brushstrokes of Peter Pan, weaved in the fantastical story of a paranormal investigator’s disappearance, and set it, as one would fully expect, in Southampton. On *Sex, Death & the Infinite Void*, their second full-length concept album, such scale and vision isn’t simply confined to their storytelling. “Creating this record was about ignoring the things that had trapped us in the past,” frontman Will Gould tells Apple Music. “I wanted to ignore what had come before, and prove wrong everyone that said no band could advance their sound so dramatically without alienating your fanbase.” And so this love-triangle tale of lust, envy, and wrath plays out to a soundtrack of British glam rock, Americana country, 1950s doo-wop, and their stock-in-trade: emo punk hooks. A first visit to any strange place requires a good tour guide to uncover its true depths, however, so who better to show you the sights of Calvary Falls than Gould himself? **Hallelujah!** “Our opening is spoken by Patricia Morrison, from The Sisters of Mercy and The Damned, who we met at the Kerrang! magazine awards show in London last year \[2019\]. A little while later I had this spoken-word idea to open the record, and asked Patricia. We sat inside this studio in London and did all of the dialogue between us. I described how I wanted a sort of Madame Leota character from Disney’s The Haunted Mansion \[ride\], and she knew exactly what I meant. This opens our whole story, and sets up the marriage of Annabelle, who Patricia voices throughout the album’s interludes, and the villain of our piece, Buddy.” **Be My End** “It took a long time to decide what the first song proper on the album should be. It isn’t a drastic departure in sound for us, which I felt important on an album that otherwise is a big change for us, while it also lays out the apocalyptic nature of the prophecy brought forward by our main character, Roe, who arrives in Calvary Falls with the message that the world as people know it will end in seven days. The whole piece is summarized by the opening lyric: ‘Will you be my Armageddon?’ It has a very Creeper chorus—over the top and vaudevillian—while the bridge contains a theremin, which we recreated the sound of on an emulator as none of us could play the actual thing.” **Born Cold** “This was the very first song we wrote for the record—it’s the nucleus of the whole piece. I already had the narrative for this album before even writing this song, which introduces the character of Roe, a man who can’t feel and has fallen to Earth. A lot of this record in fact was based on Marilyn Manson’s interpretation of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, on Manson’s *Mechanical Animals* album. I was obsessed with that record when I was younger.” **Cyanide** “This song was the result of a very difficult time. My songwriting partner, Ian \[Miles, guitar\], was very sick for a time. He was receiving treatment in Brighton when we were supposed to be writing together in Los Angeles, so we found ourselves trying to write via FaceTime. Nothing was working. I went for breakfast one day off the Sunset Strip, and T. Rex came on over the speakers. ‘This is what we should be doing!’ I started saying. ‘People think Creeper are a pop-punk band with eyeliner, but we’re a glam rock band!’ My manager was eating his food in silence opposite me and—I’ll never forget it—he calmly put his cutlery down, looked at me, and said, ‘Well, just go and do it, then.’ We went back to the studio and the whole song came together in about 30 minutes. It’s my real life seeping into this album; I was writing this song about Annabelle and Roe’s attraction to each other, but also about myself and what I was going through personally. It’s half reality, half fantasy, and that’s when Creeper is at its best.” **Annabelle** “I was obsessed with Suede when I was younger, and the opening beat here pays homage to their song ‘Trash.’ It was something intentionally English on a very American record. It’s a Britpop song, yet when it comes into the first lyrics, it might as well be a Green Day song. This introduces Annabelle further, while Roe is learning that sinning is part of being human: ‘God can’t save us, so let’s live like sinners.’ That went back to when we played the Warped Tour one year and had a run-in with the Westboro Baptist Church, who were picketing the event.” **Paradise** “This is written from the point of view of our villain, Buddy Calvary. Roy Orbison was a really big influence on the country elements of this record, and when we were working on ‘Paradise’ we were watching the video to his song ‘I Drove All Night.’ The visual picture of the world we’re creating is something I always have in my mind when writing music, and this song was actually born from us muting that video and saying, ‘Let’s write a song to go with this.’ I always want lyrics to give you just enough for the listener to work with in imagining the place and characters, and then the music does the rest.” **Poisoned Heart** “Ian and myself wrote a number of songs in this alternative country vein, and this one stuck due to the chorus, which I love. It’s a song that will really divide people, I’m sure. There are similarities in our narrative to the first time you meet Roe and the first time you meet Buddy, and both have a poison heart in their own sense—Roe because he can’t feel anything, and Buddy because he’s had everything given to him; he may have loved Annabelle at one point, but his controlling nature has ruined their relationship. If this was a musical—and I really wish it was!—I would have both characters sing it, one verse each.” **Thorns of Love** “A long time ago, I was writing a musical called *Cosmic Love*, about a woman who fell to Earth and fell in love with a man from the 1980s. Some of the lyrics in the second verse are actually from the musical I wrote all those years ago—‘Lennon was shot in December time/Curtis was hung by washing line/1980s lovers died in twos.’ This is a doo-wop song in the vein of ‘Drive-In Saturday’ from the David Bowie record *Aladdin Sane*. Even though I wrote this song myself, it’s the contributions of other people that really make it: Ian with that Avenged Sevenfold-style solo, Patricia’s middle section that sounds like *The Rocky Horror Picture Show*, and Hannah’s \[Greenwood, keyboards and vocals\] ridiculous intro.” **Four Years Ago** “This is a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra-style duet; a very delicate, feminine vocal meets the baritone male. I spent a long time trying to write a song for me and Hannah to sing, and it presents the disintegration of Annabelle and Buddy’s relationship. It’s opening up to the listener about how messed up this relationship is, after only giving little hints previously.” **Napalm Girls** “‘Napalm Girls’ is the coolest name for a song that anyone has ever come up with—and I didn’t even mean to call it that originally. This is where the road to the end of our story begins, and describes Roe and Annabelle getting together for the first time before running away to the top of a mountain for Roe to go back to whence he came. The lyric ‘She is a war in me/Her kiss is violence’ could sum up the last two years of my life, when you’re obsessed with someone and you’re first falling in love. I also hid a reference to my girlfriend’s favorite My Chemical Romance song in this.” **Black Moon** “Welcome to our album’s ‘death’ song, where Roe meets his demise at Buddy’s hands. At this point, Roe has become completely obsessed with Annabelle, and he’s a sinner now. He’s not the man from the start of the album who was ‘Born Cold’—he’s now transformed and has now become just as sinful as anyone. He is martyring himself and dying for the sins of this town—and closing our messed-up story. The title honors a long-standing tradition in our band of having the word ‘Black’ in the title of a song on each of our releases.” **All My Friends** “‘All My Friends’ is a departure from our narrative, and wasn’t meant to be on the album at all. I had originally written another ballad for this point, called ‘Shattered,’ which was really dramatic and about our character’s death. But I had also written this song late one night, while drunk, after Ian had fallen very sick, and it just so happened that some other people also heard it and encouraged me to develop it. It captures the darkest moment in my life. There’s a lot of realism in this record—the main romance; reflecting my own feelings of being an alien and an outsider in the music scene—but this song is the most real Creeper has ever been.”

On their eighth studio album, *Wake Up, Sunshine*, All Time Low has perfected their hook-heavy pop-punk formula—and they’ve done so without falling into the seductive trappings of nostalgia. “There’s a big distinction,” frontman Alex Gaskarth told Apple Music. “We weren’t trying to sound like we sounded 12 years ago. But some of that energy shines through. It’s a really cool amalgamation of everything that’s come before it.” Just don’t for a second think they’ve run out of tricks. The band’s new album runs the gamut of their career, centering on optimistic songs as luminous and unclouded as the title suggests. There’s the self-referential fan service of “Some Kind of Disaster,” the Y2K-era blink-182-channeling “Sleeping In,” and the pulsating palm-muted power chords of “Safe.” Then there are moments of unexpected innovation: the rhythmic structure of “Trouble Is,” the country influence of “Favorite Place,” and All Time Low’s first foray into hip-hop on “Monsters.” “I hope that when people listen to the album, it’s a reminder of why they fell in love with the band in the first place,” guitarist Jack Bakarat says. “The focus all along has been to get back to the basics—capturing that magic again.” Below, Gaskarth breaks down each song on *Wake Up, Sunshine*, track by track. “There’s a lot of hope on the album,” he says. “There\'s a lot of looking forward to a brighter future. And I think that shines through.” **Some Kind of Disaster** “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the record. When we finished it, we all paused for a second and said, ‘Hey, that seems like it would be an amazing way to open a show.’ That conversation evolved into, ‘Well, if we\'d open a show with it, why not open a record with it?’ It feels like it\'s this declaration of our return and an anthemic call-to-arms song. I\'d say that it\'s autobiographical about the band in the chorus: ‘It\'s all my fault that I\'m still the one you want/So what are you after?/Some kind of disaster.’ I ask the fans if they\'re ready to do this all over again and take this ride again.” **Sleeping In** “When you\'re with the person you like, you just never want to go to sleep, because it\'s just too good of a time. You’re still up at 7 am and the next good idea is to put on Britney Spears and have a dance party. I’ve certainly done that many times. I think we’ve all been there. And I love a good pop reference.” **Getaway Green** “I wanted there to be a lot of color throughout this record. I wanted this to feel very vivid and bright. ‘Getaway Green’ is really about a sense of escapism, but also a SoCal Romeo and Juliet situation, where it\'s not meant to be but they want it to be, and eventually it\'s going to be.” **Melancholy Kaleidoscope** “It was a weird day in the studio. Nothing really seemed to be clicking and I was in a weather-induced funk. I was feeling some crazy seasonal depression. I wasn\'t in the mood to write uplifting music. And Zakk Cervini, our producer, came in with this idea for a fast, uptempo, Warped Tour-esque song. It\'s just not where my head was, so I made it a challenge for myself to make it work. In doing so, I started to take steps towards getting my head in a better place. ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope’ was maybe the second \[song\] we wrote. It shaped the tone of the album, once I got over that hurdle.” **Trouble Is** “This was a fun one from beginning to end, because we challenged ourselves to do something with a weird, rhythmic cadence. It\'s these intervals of six and then seven, which is not an easy time signature to write a pop melody around. It actually ended up working really, really well. And then the song settles into 6/8 for the chorus, which just always feels big. It became this fun little math project. It\'s not like we\'re a sophisticated, techy math rock band, anyway. We\'re playing pop rock here at the end of the day.” **Wake Up, Sunshine** “It is the overall idea that in a world that feels like it\'s falling apart, and in a situation where it\'s very easy to self-doubt and become your own worst enemy, hanging on to the idea that someone out there is all about you is something that can really help pull you through. Knowing that all it really takes is just a connection with one other person out there can sometimes be the thing that gets you moving in the right direction again. And I think that sentiment echoes throughout the entire album.” **Monsters (feat. blackbear)** “We\'ve never really gone there before as a band, we\'ve never really featured a rapper on anything. And so it’s like, 15 years into a career, there\'s still some new things to try, and that happened to be the right one in the moment. It was really cool and special.” **Pretty Venom (Interlude)** “\[This is a\] 3 am-er. We write our dark songs late at night. The song\'s very reflective. I think it hearkens back to some of the woes throughout our career where we felt resentful towards people who didn\'t have the band\'s best interest in mind, and I got to speak to some of those things—just about how someone else\'s poison can poison you and it changes you as a person, and suddenly their toxicity is making you toxic.” **Favorite Place (feat. The Band CAMINO)** “When we wrote ‘Favorite Place,’ we all recognized that we were pulling some of \[The Band CAMINO’s\] influence. And so it only felt right to reach out to them and see if they wanted to be a part of it. Because it felt like, in some way, they had contributed to the writing of the song. They ended up enjoying the song and wanted to be a part of it. It was really fun. I love when you see some camaraderie between labelmates.” **Safe** “We all jokingly said that the songs we wrote in Nashville have a bit of a Nashville \[sound\] playing throughout them in some way, like ‘Safe,’ ‘Favorite Place,’ and ‘Getaway Green.’ They could all easily translate to what I think would be pretty rad country songs. So eventually we\'re going to have to make a Y\'all Time Low record.” **January Gloom (Seasons, Pt. 1)** “This was written during the session in Nashville in January \[2019\]. It was cold, rainy, miserable. It was just a difficult time. I felt myself really weighed down by it all. I felt a little bit aimless and I didn\'t have a ton of direction. Similar to ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope,’ my lack of inspiration served as inspiration. And so, in this song, I\'m talking about sitting alone with the voice in my head, saying, ‘Give me something.’” **Clumsy** “‘Clumsy’ feels like a really staple All Time Low song that speaks to the legacy of the band. You could put it on almost any All Time Low record at any time in All Time\'s history and it would make sense, even though it sounds like the 2020 version of All Time Low. The lyrics of this song are all about loneliness and why you end up lonely.” **Glitter & Crimson** “To me, this song is about two characters who are deeply in love, whose love is not allowed to be that by \[a certain\] society. They\'re gay, and they don\'t feel like they\'re accepted in their own skin for who they are, or for who they want to love. It’s a cry out to seize that power back and saying, ‘No. You don\'t get to dictate how we live our lives.’ Obviously, I can\'t speak to that, being a straight guy, but I know a lot of people who live that experience every day. And it was something that felt very meaningful that I wanted to address for them because they can’t \[in this way\]. They aren\'t songwriters.” **Summer Daze (Seasons, Pt. 2)** “‘Summer Daze’ is a song about that celebratory feeling of elation that you get from, like, a summer camp romance. It’s that honeymoon phase where you know it\'s probably going to come to an end because it has to, but at the time, it was just everything.” **Basement Noise** “That’s how it all wraps up—an ode and a tribute to our humble beginnings, having this big dream of hopefully getting out on the road someday and making a go of it. If you\'d told us back then that we would be doing this 15 years later, record number eight, I don\'t think we would have ever believed you.”

This is the AC/DC album that no one thought would happen. After a tumultuous period that saw the death of guitarist and co-founder Malcolm Young, the departures of bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd, and the (thought-to-be) career-ending hearing loss of vocalist Brian Johnson, it was widely assumed that 2014’s *Rock or Bust* would be AC/DC’s swan song. “You can’t call an album *Rock or Bust* and then go bust,” lead guitarist Angus Young says. With Johnson, Rudd, and Williams back in the fold, *POWER UP* is a massive triumph. True to AC/DC’s nearly half-century of domination, the album sees the Australian masters in top form, as evidenced by the groove-powered opener “Realize,” the frenetic “Demon Fire,” and anthemic lead single “Shot in the Dark.” Elsewhere, Johnson cowboys up on the western-themed “Wild Reputation” and delivers a classic AC/DC double entendre on the suitably lascivious “Money Shot.” Dedicated to Malcolm, the record features songs that he and his brother Angus worked on together back in 2007 and 2008. “These ideas came from just before we did *Black Ice*, when me and Malcolm had been in the studio for a long time just writing songs,” Angus reveals. “We had so much material.” With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping much of the world on lockdown and just about eliminating live music, AC/DC decided to release *POWER UP* to tide fans over until the band can safely hit the stage again. “I think we waited until the world hit a limit of misery with this thing,” Johnson says, “and just said, ‘Right, time to cheer it up.’”

“I want to get to that point where I can just write one lyric and people understand what I’m about,” IDLES singer Joe Talbot tells Apple Music. “Maybe it’s ‘Fuck you, I’m a lover.’” Those words, from the song ‘The Lover,’ certainly form an effective tagline for the band’s third album. The Bristol band explored trauma and vulnerability on second album *Joy as an Act of Resistance.*, and here they’re finding ways to heal, galvanize, and move forward—partly informed by mindfulness and being in the present. “I thought about the idea that you only ever have now,” Talbot says. “\[*Ultra Mono*\] is about getting to the crux of who you are and accepting who you are in that moment—which is really about a unification of self.” Those thoughts inspired a solidarity and concision in the way Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire, and drummer Jon Beavis wrote music. Each song began with a small riff or idea, and everything that was added had to be in the service of that nugget. “That’s where the idea of an orchestra comes in—that you try and sound, from as little as possible, as big as you can,” Talbot says. “Everyone hitting the thing at the same time to sound huge. It might also be as simple as one person playing and everyone else shutting the fuck up. Don’t create noise where it’s not needed.” The music’s visceral force and social awareness will keep the “punk” tag pinned to IDLES, but *Ultra Mono* forges a much broader sound. The self-confidence of hip-hop, the communal spirit of jungle, and the kindness of jazz-pop maestro Jamie Cullum all feed into these 12 songs. Let Talbot explain how in this track-by-track guide. **War** “It was the quickest thing we ever wrote. We got in a room together, I explained the concept, and we just wrote it. We played it—it wasn’t even a writing thing. And that is about as ultra mono as it gets. It had to be the first track because it is the explosion of not overthinking anything and *being*. The big bang of the album is the inner turmoil of trying to get rid of the noise and just be present—so it was perfect. The title’s ‘War’ because it sounded so violent, ballistic. I was really disenfranchised with the internet, like, ‘Why am I listening to assholes? You’ve got to be kind to yourself.’ ‘War’ was like, ‘Yeah, do it, actually learn to love yourself.’ That was the start of a big chapter in my life. It was like the war of self that I had to win.” **Grounds** “We wanted to write a song that was like AC/DC meets Dizzee Rascal, but a bit darker. It’s the march song, the start of the journey: ‘We won the first battle, let’s fucking do this. What do you need to stop apologizing for?’ That’s a conversation you need to have when all these horrible people come to the forefront. I was being criticized for speaking of civil rights–whether that be trans rights or gay rights or Black rights, the war on the working classes. I believe in socialism. Go fuck yourselves. I want to sleep at night knowing that my platform is the voice of reason and an egalitarian want for something beautiful—not the murder of Black people, homophobia at the workplace, racist front lines. We were recording in Paris and Warren Ellis \[of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman\] popped in. He sat with us just chatting about life. I was like, ‘It would be insane if I didn’t ask you to be on this record, man.’ I just wanted him to do a ‘Hey!’ like on a grime record.” **Mr. Motivator** “\[TV fitness guru\] Mr Motivator, that’s my spirit animal. We wrote that song and it felt like a train. I wanted to put a beautiful and joyous face to something rampantly, violently powerful-sounding. ‘Mr. Motivator’ is 90% lethal machine, 10% beautiful, smiley man that brings you joy. The lyrics are all cliches because I think *The Guardian* or someone leaned towards the idea that my sloganeering was something to be scoffed at. So I thought I’d do a whole song of it. We’re trying to rally people together, and if you go around using flowery language or muddying the waters with your insecurities, you’re not going to get your point across. So, I wanted to write nursery rhymes for open-minded people.” **Anxiety** “This was the first song where the lyrics came as we were writing the music. It sounded anxiety-inducing because it was so bombastic and back-and-forth. Then we had the idea of speeding the song up as you go along and becoming more cacophonous. That just seemed like a beautiful thing, because when you start meditating, the first thing that happens is you try to meditate–which isn’t what you’re supposed to do. The noise starts coming in. One of the things they teach you in therapy is that if you feel anxious or scared or sad or angry, don’t just internally try to fight that. Accept that you become anxious and allow yourself the anxiety. Feel angry and accept that, and then think about why, and what triggered it. And obviously 40-cigarettes-a-day Dev \[Adam Devonshire\] can’t really sing that well anymore, so we had to get David Yow of Jesus Lizard in. He’s got an amazing voice. It’s a much better version of what Dev used to be like.” **Kill Them With Kindness** “That’s Jamie Cullum \[on the piano\]. We met him at the Mercury Prize and he said, ‘If you need any piano on your album, just let us know.’ I was like, ‘We don’t, but we definitely do now.’ I like that idea of pushing people’s idea of what cool is. Jamie Cullum is fucking cooler than any of those apathetic nihilists. He believes in something and he works hard at it—and I like that. When I was working in a kitchen, we listened to Radio 2 all the time, and I loved his show. And he’s a beautiful human being. It’s a perfect example of what we’re about: inclusivity and showing what you love. I didn’t write the lyrics until after meeting him. It was just that idea that he seemed kindhearted. Kindness is a massive thing: It’s what empathy derives from, and kindness and empathy is what’ll kill fascism. It should be the spirit of punk and soul music and grime and every other music.” **Model Village** “The part that we wrote around was something that I used to play onstage whenever Bowen was offstage and I stole his guitar. So it had this playfulness, and I wanted to write a kind of take-the-piss song. I’m not antagonistic at all, but I do find things funny, like people who get so angry. I wanted this song to be taking yourself out of your own town and looking at it like it’s a model village. Just to be like, ‘Look how small and insignificant this place is. Don’t be so aggressive and defensive about something you don’t really understand.’ It’s a call for empathy—but to the assholes in a non-apologetic way.” **Ne Touche Pas Moi** “I was getting really down on tours because I felt a bit like an animal in a cage. Dudes are aggressive, and it’s boring when you see it in a crowd. Someone’s being a prick in the crowd and people aren’t comfortable—it’s not a nice feeling. So I wanted to create that idea of a safe arena with an anthem. It’s a violent, cutting anthem. It’s like, ‘I am full of love, but that doesn’t mean you can elbow me in the face or touch my breasts.’ We can play it in sets to give people the confidence that there is a platform here to be safe. I said to Bowen, ‘I really wish there was a woman singing the chorus, because it’s not just about my voice, it’s more often women that get groped.’ A couple of days later, we were in Paris recording Jehnny Beth’s TV show and I told her about this song. It was a nice relief to have someone French backing up my shit French.” **Carcinogenic** “Jungle was a movement based around unity—very different kinds of people getting together under the love of music. It was one of the most forward-thinking, beautiful things to happen to our country, \[and it\] was shut down by police and people who couldn’t make money from it. I wanted to write a song that was part garage rock, part jungle, because both movements have their part to play in building IDLES and also building amazing communities of people and great musicians. Then I thought about jungle and grime and garage and how something positive gets turned into something negative with the media. Basically, any Black music that creates a positive network of people and communities, building something out of love, is dangerous because it’s people thinking outside the box and not relying on the government for reassurance and entertainment and distraction. So then it got me thinking about ‘carcinogenic’ and how everything gives you cancer, when really the most cancerous thing about our society isn’t anything like that, it’s the class war that we’re going through and depriving people of a decent education, decent welfare, decent housing. That’s fucking cancer.” **Reigns** “This was written around the bass, obviously. Again, another movement—techno—and that idea of togetherness and the love in the room is always apparent. Techno is motorik, it’s mesmeric, it is just a singularity—minimal techno, especially. It’s just the beat or the bassline and that carries you through, that’s all you need. Obviously, we’re a chorus band, so we thought we’d throw in something huge to cut through it. But we didn’t want to overcomplicate it. That sinister pound just reminds me of my continual disdain for the Royal Family and everything they represent in our country, from the fascism that it comes from to the smiley-face racism that it perpetuates nowadays.” **The Lover** “I wanted to write a soul song with that wall-of-noise, Phil Spector vibe—but also an IDLES song. What could be more IDLES than writing a song about being a lover but making it really sweary? When I love someone, I swear a lot around them because I trust them, and I want them to feel comfortable and trust me. So I just wrote the most honest love song. It’s like a defiant smile in the face of assholes who can’t just accept that your love is real. It’s like, ‘I’m not lying. I am full of love and you’re a prick.’ That’s it. That song was the answer to the call of ‘Grounds.’ That huge, stabby, all-together orchestra.” **A Hymn** “Bowen and I were trying to write a song together. I had a part and he had a part. Then my part just got kicked out and we wrote the song around the guitar line. We wanted to write a song that was like a hymn, because a hymn is a Christian, or gospel, vision of togetherness and rejoicing at once for something they love. I wanted to write the lyrics around the idea that a hymn nowadays is just about suburban want, material fear. So it’s like a really subdued, sad hymn about materialism, suburban pedestrianism. And it came out really well.” **Danke** “It was going to be an instrumental, a song that made you feel elated and ready for war—and not muddy it with words. A song that embodies the whole album, that just builds and pounds but all the parts change. Each bit changes, but it feels like one part of one thing. And I always finish on a thank you because it’s important to be grateful for what people have given us—so I wanted to call the song ‘Danke.’ Then, on the day of recording it, Daniel Johnston died. So I put in his lyrics \[from ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’\] because they’re some of the most beautiful ever written. It fits the song, fits the album. He could have only written that one lyric and it’d be enough to understand him. I added \[my\] lyrics \[‘I’ll be your hammer, I’ll be your nail/I’ll be the house that allows you to fail’\] at the end because I felt like it was an offering to leave with—like, ‘I’ve got you.’ It’s what I would have said to him, or any friend that needed love.”

Neck Deep is no stranger to a concept. While the Welsh band’s sound has snowballed over the years, furnishing their pop-punk template with eclectic influences, their subject matter has evolved, too. The band’s last album, 2017’s *The Peace and the Panic*, was a preliminary foray into overarching themes, examining the calm and chaotic duality of life, partly inspired by the death of frontman Ben Barlow’s father. *All Distortions Are Intentional*, their fourth LP, broadens and deepens that scope, immersing the listener in the world of Sonderland, where we meet Jett—a character Ben admits is drawn from his own experiences, but could just as easily be relatable for anyone who’s ever felt depressed, disillusioned, and unsure of where they fit in. Jett meets and falls for Alice, with the album telling the story of their developing relationship set against the backdrop of Jett’s mental health struggles. This is no clear-cut romantic tale, as Barlow explains in this track-by-track guide, but a nuanced picture of modern life, where changing the world means different things to different people, and happiness never wholly vanquishes sadness, and vice versa… **Sonderland** “There is a consistent theme throughout the record, which is Jett’s flirtation with death and the thought of wanting to jump off a cliff and end it all. Jett is conscious that he feels no connection to the world he’s in, or the people who are in it. This opening song serves to set the listener up with an insight into Jett’s mental state, but also into how the world he’s in is impacting negatively upon that.” **Fall** “Unsurprisingly given Jett’s negative worldview, he decides to go out and get wasted because he feels he has nothing else to do. There he meets Alice, and they have this crazy night together, which is very much inspired by a lot of my own teenage nights out and meeting somebody you feel you have this otherworldly bond with based on one evening, only for it to soon wear off. Jett is aware he’s made a meaningful connection that he wants to hold on to, even if he’s not met Alice in the most ideal circumstances.” **Lowlife** “This really is Jett’s song, where you get a glimpse of his personality that’s not his depressed side, pondering the world. Instead he’s happy with himself. This song was where the idea for the whole concept came from, and very much how I was feeling when I wrote it, on tour with blink-182 and having the time of my life. This is Jett saying: ‘I’m a lowlife but I’ve got it all figured out, it’s everyone else that doesn’t get it.’ ‘Lowlife’ isn’t by any means saying it’s healthy to live that way, but it’s glorifying Jett’s ‘fuck you’ attitude.” **Telling Stories** “I feel like this has the most ‘classic’ Neck Deep sound and wouldn’t have been out of place on \[the band’s second album, 2015’s\] *Life’s Not Out to Get You*. We didn’t ever really intend to write pop-punk songs this time around, but we wrote a banger of a pop-punk song so rolled with it. Jett and Alice have been spending some time together and opened up to one another. They find common ground and solace in the fact they’re both unhappy. It also introduces two minor characters, Jack and Emily, representing the Instagram-perfect lifestyle, showing the contrast and disconnect between people.” **When You Know** “This is Jett realizing he’s in love with Alice. They’ve had this whirlwind romance, which began in the haze of a nightclub, and have spent some meaningful time together. It’s a straight-up love song, highlighting that feeling when you first realize that you’re totally enamored with someone, which can be life-changing. It’s the juxtaposition between Jett musing his place in the world and figuring out that he might have found that place with Alice. It’s a happy song for once.” **Quarry** “It was an intention to have ‘When You Know’ and ‘Quarry’ next to one another, to highlight the fluctuations in Jett’s mental state. Anyone who’s been in the throes of depression or anything similar will understand how quickly your emotions can change. One minute Jett has gone from thinking ‘Oh my god, I think I’m in love’ to straight back to rock bottom. He’s thinking about his past and the people that he’s lost. There’s a quarry he drives past every day, and he’s debating if doing something drastic might be the answer.” **Sick Joke** “It’s probably one of my favorite tracks on the record. It’s Jett questioning if things are real, and whether all the terrible things that have happened to him throughout the course of his life is just some sick joke. His thoughts and lucidity are warped. It’s an existential crisis where Jett thinks that because life is so sad and so grim that it can’t be real—and if it isn’t, and this is some kind of fever dream, then maybe that’s for the best.” **What Took You So Long** “This is another development in Jett and Alice’s love for each other. I wanted reminders throughout the record that these two states of mind, being incredibly depressed and having glimpses of positivity, can run parallel to one another. The lyrical content of ‘What Took You So Long’ concerns Jett realizing this is the first shred of hope that he’s had in his life for a very long time. The big line in the song is ‘I was not me until I discovered you.’” **Empty House** “Listeners should note that there’s been a fair passage of time between these songs, with this story going over a period of a year or more. At this point in the story, like in a movie, I wanted to have some turmoil, with Jett and Alice experiencing a bump in the road. It’s Jett feeling utterly defeated, sitting alone in his empty house, wondering if things are ever going to get better now he’s potentially lost the one good thing he had going for him.” **Little Dove** “It’s the resolution between Jett and Alice. Anyone who’s been in a relationship of a good amount of time knows what it’s like to have that first fallout with someone, which is usually rectified by some honest conversation. They’re getting back on track, confiding in each other, and admitting they’re both messed up and that the modern world they’re in is disrupting their relationship.” **I Revolve (Around You)** “This uses outer space as a metaphor for a relationship. I find the idea of space to be romantic, particularly the bit in *WALL-E* when the two robots are dancing in space. It feels like this big affirmation of Jett and Alice’s relationship, with him having this epiphany that his life is Alice now. Rather than focusing on the bad things in the world, Jett realizes he can revolve around Alice. Just as the planets and solar system keeps on going, so does love, which means it’s able to conquer the trivial.” **Pushing Daisies** “It was important to us how we ended the album. I didn’t want to end it with this big, lovely, tied-up-in-a-bow ending. Yes, there’s a clear conclusion here, when Jett realizes he doesn’t have to stand out from the crowd to have value, but if one person cares about you and gives you perspective, that’s important. When you get to the end of your life, you’re not going to look back on what you didn’t do, but on what you did do. You don’t have to change the world, but you can change *your* world.”

Making her stage debut in April 2019 and selling out her first headline show at London’s prestigious Southbank Centre less than a year later, A.A. Williams has hit the ground running. Similarly, the acclaim for her performances and her music has been unanimous from the start. After one self-titled EP and the 10” vinyl collaboration Exit in Darkness with Japanese post-rockers MONO, the London-based singer-songwriter has signed to Bella Union and made a stunning debut album, Forever Blue. A rapturous blend of post-rock and post-classical, Forever Blue smoulders with uncoiling melodies and haunted atmospheres, shifting from serenity to explosive drama, often within the same song. Williams is a fantastic musician as well as songwriter, playing the guitar, cello and piano, and her voice has the controlled delivery of a seasoned chanteuse whilst still channelling the rawest of emotions. Forever Blue is named after a song that didn’t make the album’s final cut, “but it still encapsulated these songs,” Williams explains. “It sounded timeless and in the right place.” The album’s threads encapsulate the anxieties and addiction of love and loss with haunting detail, for example ‘Glimmer’(“I wasn’t meant to see the sun washed out and pale / I wait undone / I wasn’t meant to be the one hollow and hurt and meant for none”), though Williams admits the theme was shaped more by her subconscious than any grand plan. “The lyrics come at the end, they fall into place, rhythmically, and link together,” she explains. “And then it’s my job to decipher what I’ve written! I want the words to get my point across but still let the listener map on their own experiences. I find it really therapeutic.” Therapy is intrinsic to Williams’ approach: to not just express and unpick her feelings of longing and loss but to work through them. “Verbalising something, you feel a weight has been lifted,” she says. The transition can be mirrored in the dynamic shift from ‘quiet’ to ‘loud’, as on ‘Glimmer’ and arguably at its most euphoric on ‘Melt’. “There’s something very satisfying and elating about songs that have that drop in them, to stomp on the guitar pedal on and let it all out.” It’s testament to Williams’ skills, and those of husband and bassist Thomas Williams, that Forever Blue’s commanding sound was largely captured at the couple’s two-bedroom flat in North London. Drums by Geoff Holroyde were added at engineer Adrian Hall’s studio in South London, with guest vocals from Johannes Persson (Cult Of Luna), who adds his deep-trawling growl to ‘Fearless’ (“he sounds like Tectonic plates moving” Williams feels), Fredrik Kihlberg (Cult Of Luna) on ‘Glimmer’ and Tom Fleming (ex-Wild Beasts) on ‘Dirt’. Williams can scarcely believe she’s in such exalted company, or that her band has toured with Cult Of Luna, Russian Circles, Explosions In The Sky, Nordic Giants and Sisters Of Mercy, whilst performing with MONO at their 10th anniversary show. It’s not because she doesn’t trust her own worth but that Williams only became a singer-songwriter by chance. Having taken music lessons from the age of six and been immersed in classical music, Williams’ life was forever changed when she discovered Deftones in her mid-teens, “and after them, all things heavy,” she recalls. “It was music that made me feel included, that tapped into me.” Yet it was only years later, when she found a guitar in the street with a note attached, “please take me, just needs work,” that Williams started playing guitar, and only started writing songs as a way of learning how to play. “I wrote in different styles to find a sound I was comfortable with,” she says. “Likewise, with singing. I’d never before thought of singing with a microphone in front of other people. It’s been quite a journey.” That journey was thrown off course by the Coronavirus lockdown, but Williams’ response has been the ‘Songs From Isolation’ video project, solo renditions of songs suggested by her fans. At the time of writing, she has performed Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ (“to take on a song like that, you either have to be brave or dumb, and I thought, let’s be brave!”), Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ and Nick Cave’s ‘Into Your Arms’. As ‘Songs From Isolation’ keeps posting intimate messages from a place of solitude, Forever Blue will spread the news of A.A. Williams’ extraordinary talent far and wide - and once lockdown is over, she and her band will be taking the next steps on her journey by touring the record. She’s already come so far but this story is only just beginning.

“We weren\'t like, ‘Let\'s create a metal supergroup,’” Greg Puciato tells Apple Music about what is, whether he likes it or not, a very impressive metal supergroup. “It just happened. That’s part of what makes it so fucking cool.” He’s one of *three* vocalists in Killer Be Killed—another thing that makes it cool. Having three singers allows for collaboration usually reserved for genres like hip-hop or jazz. Rather than trading fiery verses or spindly brass solos, Puciato, Max Cavalera, and Troy Sanders take turns singing, screaming, and harmonizing over songs they almost entirely wrote together. Puciato and Cavalera also play guitar and Sanders is on bass, while Ben Koller, the only non-singing member, provides drums. And they had a ton of fun doing it—perhaps the coolest part of all. *Reluctant Hero* comes six years after their self-titled debut. They only toured their debut album once, for the 2015 Soundwave Festival in Australia, where they realized they were loving it so much that they couldn’t just leave it at one album. It had all started with a casual conversation between Puciato—who has fronted The Dillinger Escape Plan and The Black Queen, and released his solo debut just weeks prior to this album—and Cavalera, founding vocalist of Sepultura, who went on to sing in Soulfly among other groups. “We got in a room like little 13-year-olds,” Puciato says. “We didn\'t use a computer, we put our phones aside, we were just riffing and playing for like a week.” Then, Dillinger was touring with Mastodon, for whom Troy Sanders sings and plays bass. He’d heard about the project by then. “He asked who was playing bass and I was like, ‘I think Max and I were both going to play bass and we’re just going to hire a drummer or something.’ He was like, ‘No, I\'m playing bass.’ I said, ‘Oh, all right. Well, I guess you\'re going to sing too, then. So we\'ll have three singers and that\'ll be fucking cool.’” The final addition was Koller—who plays with Converge, All Pigs Must Die, and more—who officially joined the band at the end of the Soundwave shows. “It’s easily the most fun I\'ve ever had in a band,” Puciato says. “Which is why we choose to live together when we’re working on it. We could easily get separate hotel rooms, but we got an Airbnb every time. The recording took two months, so we lived in a house that entire time together: We’d wake up, eat breakfast, go to the studio, get food, go to the bar. It was like summer vacation sleepover when you’re a kid and you just want to stay at your friend\'s house. That\'s the only other time I\'ve acted that way.” The constant vocal baton-passing is a genuine thrill to hear. “Troy and Max have really distinct character voices,” he says. “I\'m more of a free roamer, so I feel like I can shape-shift a bit.” You can hear him switch between light melodies and cataclysmic shrieking throughout. Tracks like “Dream Gone Bad” and “Comfort From Nothing” show off the full range of each vocalist, to almost dizzying effect, as they take turns leading verses and choruses, singing and screaming, solos and riffs. Elsewhere, such as on “Left of Center,” they’ll harmonize, creating some of the most exciting moments on the record. Those harmonies were directly inspired by Puciato’s 2019 work with Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell, but more than that, they allowed each singer to experiment with stuff they couldn’t usually do as the only one holding a mic. “It was like, ‘What can I do to embellish this thing that Troy\'s doing, or this other thing?’ It’s fun to *not* be the primary vocal. It was really nice after having my whole career as the guy that has to come up with all of it.” Sometimes, they didn’t even need to sing at all. “I really got off on a lot of the guitar playing on this record,” he says. “I’m really stoked on the solo in ‘Inner Calm From Outer Storms.’ It’s this fucking Pink Floyd-y type of thing in the middle of nowhere. Just because you\'re a singer doesn\'t mean that you want to be in the front of the goddamn picture the whole time. None of us are like that. I think we all really got off on being in the support role as often as we could.” “From a Crowded Wound” was one of the only tracks that wasn’t written together. Puciato first penned it in 2010, and considered keeping it for his solo work. “That\'s my baby, it was me the whole way through—everyone\'s vocals, all the guitars, the drum pattern. But I couldn\'t write the vocals and I didn\'t want to force it.” He eventually realized it wasn’t his voice he needed. “To be able to actually write with someone else\'s voice was really fucking cool,” he says. “The parts that Max and Troy sang, I heard in their voices. It’s like being a director and you know what actor is playing the role and you can write with them in mind.” Like the best hip-hop collaborations, there was healthy competition and admiration in each recording session, which, again, can be heard throughout. “Max would do one line and then I’d be like, ‘Oh shit, I want to double that.’ So then I would jump in and double it, and then Troy would be like, ‘Okay, cool. Now that you did that, I\'m going to go back and change this thing that I just did.’ It was really organic and exciting and competitive, but productive. You’re fanning out on one another and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, dude. Fuck, that was sick. Thanks, Troy. Now I need to fucking go back and redo that pile of garbage I laid down five minutes ago that I thought was shit hot.’ We just had a really good time with it.”

What happens when current and former members of Fit For An Autopsy, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Misery Signals, Blacklisted, and Counterparts collide? A master class in modern metallic hardcore. *Splinters From an Ever-Changing Face* revels in screeching, slashing guitars (“Covet Not”), face-pounding pit slams (“Pariah”), and snarling, sample-laden grinds (“Hesitation Wounds”), while guest shots from Pete Morcey of 100 Demons (on “Absence”) and Tanner Merritt of O’Brother (on “Sands of Sleep”) bring vocal nuance to the pandemonium.

“This is the new abnormal!” Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe screams on “Reality Bath,” a particularly ferocious track on the band’s long-awaited follow-up to 2015’s *VII: Sturm und Drang*. It’s a fitting sentiment for the Virginia metal squad’s first record without co-founder and drummer Chris Adler, who split in 2019. Propelled by the dexterous drumming of new member Arturo Cruz (Prong/Winds of Plague), venomous cuts like “Memento Mori,” “Checkmate,” and “New Colossal Hate” showcase the band’s groove metal mastery. “Art has brought a more youthful energy, which is something our old selves need, because I’m pushing 50 and I can get set in my curmudgeonly ways,” Blythe tells Apple Music. “But at the same time, there’s nothing at all new about the writing process. The same guys who always wrote the music wrote the music this time. So in a sense there’s absolutely nothing different.” Lyrically, Blythe spits sociopolitical epithets all over *Lamb of God*, even bringing in Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta and Testament’s Chuck Billy to join him on “Poison Dream” and “Routes,” respectively. “I wrote this record thinking about the mess that is modern-day life,” Blythe explains. “The information overload and the shallow pursuit of wealth and material goods as status symbols have led to an entirely false idea that having these things is going to bring you some sort of inner peace or well-being or happiness—and it\'s a load of bullshit.” Below, he unpacks some of the album’s key tracks. **Memento Mori** “I wrote this song as a reminder for myself to not get stuck in this crazy morass of digital doom and gloom—all the biased news and social media stuff—and get out and really make the most of today. Because when I’m laying on my deathbed, if I have regrets, if I have things I wanted to do that I did not do, I don\'t want to sit there and be like, ‘God, I wish I hadn\'t spent so much time on Twitter. That sucks. I could have gone to Africa or the jungle. I could have written another book or something. But no, I spent eight hours a day on Twitter.’ Which I don’t do, by the way.” **Checkmate** “This is about our subpar political system. The two-party system is just a nightmare, particularly given the divisiveness of— not just right now, but for years now. And it’s not just whoever’s in the Oval Office, but in Congress that really chaps my ass. When Congress manages to agree on something like a relief package to help people who are suffering right now economically in this pandemic, you’ll see news stories about how the bipartisan agreement is some huge victory—that two political parties agreed on something for the good of the American people. That shouldn’t be a special occasion for celebration. But it is now, because everybody politicizes everything. So the lyrics talk about how people are so entrenched ideologically now on one side or the other, but life is not that black and white. There’s shades of gray.” **Poison Dream (feat. Jamey Jasta)** “I was looking up stuff about water pollution one day and I realized that every single place I’ve ever lived has had horrific water pollution. Everywhere we need water to survive, but people are poisoning it in the name of commerce. And these companies can do this because they\'re making so much money. It\'s not that the EPA is not finding them—some of these places just have enough money to pay the fines. So that’s where I’m coming from in the song. Not far from where Jamey lives, there’s a plant that dumps all this pollution in the water too. We were talking about that, and I’ve wanted him to be on a Lamb of God record for a long time—he’s a dear friend of the band, and I just love him as a person. I thought he’d be perfect for this song, and luckily he agreed to do it.” **Routes (feat. Chuck Billy)** “I went to Standing Rock, North Dakota, during the NODAPL movement, which of course was held on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. It started with just a few women and children trying to protect their water source, and then soon people from other Indigenous nations joined them. I went there to support them and bring supplies. I was out there for about a week, and it was a very profound experience because of the way these people were being treated by both the government and the private security corporations that were hired to protect the interests of this freaking oil company. If that had happened anywhere in a city or even a suburb that wasn’t the middle of nowhere, North Dakota, and it wasn’t Native American land, there would’ve been massive riots. Naturally, I wanted to write a song about my experience there, but because it was an Indigenous-led movement it felt super important for me to have an Indigenous voice on it. Chuck Billy is a member of the Pomo Indian tribe, and he’s a dear friend. We’d talked about the situation before, so I reached out to him and he said yeah. It worked out really great, and this one’s for the Natives.”

Releases 2/7/2020 The Fallen Crimson – the first new studio album from Envy in five years – is a record that almost never happened. Japan’s most iconic and influential post-hardcore band suffered seemingly insurmountable personal and creative struggles that challenged the very existence of the band like nothing they had experienced in their nearly three decades together. After reuniting with briefly estranged singer Tetsuya Fukagawa – and shaking up their lineup for the first time in 25 years –­ Envy return refreshed with their most dynamic and progressive work, The Fallen Crimson. Opening with the melodic thrash that made Envy so renowned in the first place, The Fallen Crimson finds the band perfecting their past, exploring their present, and pondering their future. It is the deepest, and most poignant album of Envy’s legendary career. It bears the stories and scars of a band whose relationships with each other are as dynamic and progressive as their music.

\"This record\'s been such a strange, strange ordeal. I mean, every record we\'ve always done, it has some kind of tragic story with it,\" vocalist/guitarist Domenic Palermo tells Apple Music about his Philadelphia-based band Nothing\'s fourth album. \"And this one I wasn\'t expecting to kind of have that, but lo and behold, here we are: The globe is on fire right now.\" Inspired by a 2019 *New York Times* photo of a black hole, *The Great Dismal* is a 10-track odyssey set for the end of the world. \"You can\'t ignore what\'s going on anywhere,\" says Palermo. \"The world has this like apocalyptic vibe. There\'s not a lot of uplifting things to keep your eyes on at this point.\" It\'s a dominant theme throughout the record, whether in the Alex G-featuring \"April Ha Ha,\" which marvels at trying to escape the inescapable, or in \"Ask the Rust,\" a reminder that the past is never far behind. It\'s echoed in the album\'s sonics, which toggle between Nothing\'s eerie slowcore tendencies and a constant onslaught of shoegazey squall: Where the opening track\'s grim beauty is aided by cellist/violinist Shelley Weiss and harpist Mary Lattimore, Cloakroom\'s Doyle Martin adds atmospheric guitar layers to songs like the fuzzed-out \"Famine Asylum\" and sprawling \"In Blueberry Memories.\" Here, Palermo meditates on our existence while guiding us through each track of *The Great Dismal*. **A Fabricated Life** “I had that song written and I didn\'t really know exactly how I was going to approach it, whether I wanted to make it a heavier song or keep it more acoustic-sounding. I finally just leaned in on it—like the way it is now, kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting of guitar tones, like really abstract, wanting to create this wall of sound. Just this mixture of guitars and string sounds, and then adding Mary Lattimore\'s harp, and putting a weird treatment of delays and reverbs on it. And then adding Shelley Weiss is just unbelievable. It turned into more of a cinematic thing. Everyone fought with me about putting it as track one, but for me it was really important to set the pace of the record, because the whole record feels cinematic anyway.” **Say Less** “It\'s funny because \'Fabricated\' is about being born into a body that you had no control over and then dealing with those circumstances and everything that comes with that. It constitutes exactly what you\'re going to do in your life. It\'s everything. To go in with something like that to basically rolling into a song where it\'s like, ‘I don\'t really have anything to say about any of this, I don\'t really care to think about it anymore’—it\'s kind of a quick on/off switch between the two. The music kind of reflects that same thing.” **April Ha Ha** “I’m a big fan of Alex G. We had plans to have him come in the studio and do some guitar work with me and maybe even write a song together. He\'s so self-conscious. He\'s just like me about vocals. He hates the way he sounds just the same as I do. So he was like, \'Oh, man. I don\'t want to do a vocal thing.\' I was like, \'Look, man. You have to. I\'m not giving you a choice. I have this part for you and I think it\'s great; you have to hear you singing these words.\' And he did it and we were all really happy with it. I love it because it\'s just like it really just creeps up on you, and if you don\'t really understand what\'s there or don\'t know, it\'s a pleasant surprise.” **Catch a Fade** “It’s about dealing with the need to create and the need to do what you need to do to survive. This song is really special for me because it was the one song that was a demo that Doyle had, and that was our first attempt at writing together. To me, it really shows. He sent me this really lo-fi demo of this track, and it was real direct, a really beautiful vocal melody, and just a clean song all the way through. Me and Kyle \[Kimball, drummer\] flew to Indiana to kind of massage some of the stuff we had and then work on a couple of things that he had, and we were able to at least get the one track done. We just reworked it from the ground up.” **Famine Asylum** “This is our call to Nothing fans that we\'re writing the best version of Nothing songs yet still. The song is about what people are starting to see now, and just that humanity has really stacked the odds against itself. It\'s kind of getting easier to see now where the blame for everything that\'s happening is, and that there could be a peacefulness in extinction in some cases. And then, it\'s a fine line of sounding like a psychopath and just being realistic. But there\'s a lot of *Dr. Strangelove* tied up into that song, which really speaks to exactly what I\'m saying, just in a less poetic way.” **Bernie Sanders** “I wanted to show what this band is capable of doing—kind of let loose a little bit. Just not be so hung up on what I think I need to do and what I think people want me to do, which is kind of a cruel thing musicians go through that\'s not really ever spoken about. It\'s just there\'s this bar to clear and then there\'s these critics and there\'s a lot of the things that just weigh on your decisions on what you want to do. It\'s sad because I feel like we lose a lot of important things because of that. The OG \'Bernie Sanders\' demo was real strange. When I got the secondary demo down, people were just like, \'This is absolutely going to be the highlight of this record.\' I stuck with it, and when we were recording with Will \[Yip, producer\], I finally became a believer in it. It\'s just nice to take yourself out on that limb and not injure yourself fatally.” **In Blueberry Memories** “I\'ve never done anything as detailed as this and as precise. This thing just became like a symbiote, you know what I mean? Like, it attached itself to me. And, like I said, in the process of achieving this courage to get past the self-doubt. \[2018\'s\] *Dance on the Blacktop* did great, but it felt like a linear move to me in a lot of senses. I feel like we just got comfortable making what we thought was a Nothing record. And with that, there\'s just a lot of things that I was fighting against. Everything I\'m doing on this has just been so calculated so that at the end of the day, if this blew up in my face and it was just a complete disaster, then I could say to myself, \'Well, you did everything that you could, and you made the record that you wanted to make.\' For me, that would be like any way that this comes across is going to be a success to me, and myself, just knowing that I did what I wanted to do, being a person that wasn\'t really supposed to be in this position that I\'m in right now, making this music and stuff. Every day is a win for me because I don\'t feel like I was meant to be here at all.” **Blue Mecca** “This song really sets the tone. If you didn\'t feel like the record had a cinematic feel to it, I think that this one really nailed it. The song\'s about my dad and kind of going through this point in time when he was trying to rehabilitate himself and he chose the route of going through Christianity and it really not being the best way for him to deal with what he was dealing with inside, which was years of PTSD, two tours of Vietnam, drug addiction, bad DNA—a lot of things that religion wasn\'t just going to help. There needed to be some other help, and it wasn\'t there. It kind of created its own storm.” **Just a Story** “This song is literally just about the day that John Lennon was killed, essentially. For some reason, when we were in the studio, we were just sitting there and there was all these Beatles posters all over the wall, because Studio 4 \[outside of Philadelphia\] has done work with John Lennon and The Beatles before. Just being in those same walls for five weeks with all this, the ghost of all these people moving through the studio. It was just this reoccurring thing with John Lennon.” **Ask the Rust** “The song itself is about the readjustment factor of coming home from that time I spent \[in prison\] and to this day just still having dreams about being there. You kind of think that you\'re past something but your past isn\'t always done with you. I think that rings true in these dreams that I have, where I wake up and I did something wrong and I\'m back in prison again. I\'m saying goodbye to people, and there\'s this crushing feeling inside my stomach. Like I fucked everything up. And then, I\'m back again. To me, that\'s why this record is so important in general. That\'s what this whole thing entails. It wasn\'t about me 10 years ago writing *Guilty of Everything* and just seeing all these things that were such a potent factor in my life and how we\'ve addressed them and we\'re good to go. No, it doesn\'t work like that. And I see that now. It\'s how you use them to move forward that is the key. It\'s not about getting past them. It\'s about learning to live with them.”

*Tap* More *to read our track-by-track guide with Trevor Dunn.* It’s almost impossible to quantify the volume of music that’s come from Trevor Dunn, Mike Patton, and Trey Spruance since they founded Mr. Bungle in 1985 as high school metalheads in Eureka, California. It laid the foundation for the bands, collaborations, performances, and compositions across every imaginable corner of music that came after. And though they were known as experimental, avant-garde Frankensteins in their approach to metal, punk, ska, surf, jazz fusion, pop, and much, much more, it all comes back to *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny*, their insane thrash metal demo that for years has mostly been available as a shoddy YouTube stream. “For whatever reason, that demo was always close to our hearts,” bassist Trevor Dunn tells Apple Music. “It represents a really specific period of our life. We took the writing of that music really seriously, it just never had its proper representation.” Mr. Bungle disbanded in 2000. Reunion rumors popped up anytime members performed together in their many other groups, and eventually, Dunn, Patton, and Spruance found themselves backstage at a Dead Cross show (one of Patton’s other bands, which also includes ex-Slayer and Suicidal Tendencies drummer Dave Lombardo). It was here that Dunn floated the idea to re-record with Lombardo—Slayer had been a massive influence when they first wrote it. “He essentially invented that style of drumming,” he says. “That was the whole catalyst, because he was the guy we had in mind when we were writing it in the ’80s.” Patton later suggested adding Anthrax and Stormtroopers of Death guitarist Scott Ian, who, it turns out, was already a massive fan. “That blew our minds,” says Dunn. “The first Anthrax record was big for us, too.” Mr. Bungle’s first live shows since 2000 took place right before the pandemic hit, but it allowed them time to warm up and relearn the music. “It wasn\'t easy,” he says. “I could pick a lot faster when I was 17 and full of angst. But it was super fun.” All but one track from the original demo was rerecorded, alongside three extra songs written at the time and two covers. “In the studio, Trey, Mike, and I were looking at each other as we were recording, like, ‘Can you believe this? We got these guys to agree to do this?’” Below, Dunn talks through each track on *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo*. **Grizzly Adams** “‘Grizzly Adams’ was Trey\'s creation. It’s a song we\'ve never played live, ever. Initially we just decided the band needed an intro. So he went home and made this. It\'s still hilarious to me because it’s too long for an intro, but that\'s what\'s great about it. I think Mike came up with the title. We didn\'t have a title for it—and this is the typical Bungle attitude—it’s just the most inappropriate title we can think of. It has nothing to do with Grizzly Adams, but in a way it’s this kind of heroic, melancholy piece.” **Anarchy Up Your Anus** “It\'s hard to remember exactly why we decided to \[sample Disney\'s *Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House*\]. We always liked that ungodly scream after the narration. It\'s supposed to be a ghoul or something. And screaming at the top of the song, when the beat kicks in, is such a metal thing to do. We decided it was going to be too much trouble to get the rights to use the actual Walt Disney version. We happen to know Danny DeVito, so we asked Rhea \[Perlman\] if she would narrate it. I think the way she did was really great. She’s also one of the most un-metal people you can think of. That\'s part of our MO.” **Raping Your Mind** “I feel like songwriting-wise, and lyrically, I can definitely tell it was written by a 17-year-old. At a pretty young age I definitely liked to mess around lyrically with the figurative and the literal. That\'s why I\'m using this sort of like a brainwashing metaphor—the idea of the brain being something that can actually be ‘raped.’” **Hypocrites / Habla Español O Muere** “‘Hypocrites’ on the original demo is a bit of a joke song. It was premeditating the direction we started to go in later, which is why we chopped off the second part—it didn\'t really fit with the rest. The lyrics are acknowledging our own hypocrisy. Now that I\'m a little bit wiser, I feel like it could be a mantra for human beings in general, if they\'re willing to self-reflect. With adding the Stormtroopers \[of Death\] song on there, well, we did a Slayer cover in the live set, and we wanted to do either Anthrax or Stormtroopers. It just became part of ‘Hypocrites,’ and plays into that because the original is a big, sarcastic joke that a lot of people might not get. So to redo it but then flip it around with the Spanish seemed to make sense.” **Bungle Grind** “That\'s Trey\'s song. When Bungle started, me and Mike were 17, and Trey was 15. Trey was sort of this guitar whiz kid who I met in a music class in high school, and he already had a really developed ear. That was always my favorite song on the demo because it\'s got this really interesting harmonic movement to it. It\'s unusual, almost leaning towards prog in a way. Trey wrote the lyrics too. I don\'t even know if he knows what it\'s about. Who knows what the Bungle Grind is? We\'re not sure.” **Methematics** “This one has complicated history. I think I wrote it after we recorded the demo, thinking we would eventually record more songs. At that point, we changed drummers, added a horn section, and totally started going in different directions. We never even learned those songs. They only existed as guitar demos I made at home. Then, as we were relearning this stuff, I started thinking it would be cool to ‘pay tribute’ to our hometown—I mean, there is some tribute in the lyrics that Mike wrote, but there\'s also some references to things that were kind of dark up in this part of north California. I sent Trey an email, asking for some stories. He sent me some ideas, and I had some other ideas, and then we gave it to Mike, who went with it and wrote these great lyrics. I think there are some definitely some references to meth addicts, and that\'s when we thought of the title, which totally worked.” **Eracist** “It’s almost a brand-new song, except for the main riff that was written in the ’80s. Mike had those two main riffs. I don\'t even know if there was a recording of it, but for some reason Trey remembered the riffs. So Mike arranged it and wrote a bridge for it, which is that double-time section in the middle, and he wrote the lyrics. We had the other \[previously unreleased\] songs on a cassette at my parents\' house. I’m a bit of a hoarder, and I have this box of tapes from my youth. Rehearsals, or riffs I was working on, songwriting stuff. So I had them in there and I knew where to find them. I had to digitize those from a cassette tape to send to the other guys. Keep all your crap. We\'re like the anti-Marie Kondo.” **Spreading the Thighs of Death** “The whole song is based on specific intervals. I was treating it like a composition, like, ‘What can I do with this one scale?’ The lyrics are somewhat existentialist in a way. I can\'t remember what it\'s called now, but there was some movie from the early ’80s where some geek kid keeps being harassed, being bullied by other people, and then he turns to the occult and conjures up evil spirits. Then it all goes haywire, of course, because he can\'t control him. It’s also making fun of Satanism in metal. And obviously the title has this sexual reference—I won\'t go into detail, but as a teenager there were some personal references there. Like, don\'t mess around with something you don\'t know about. Being horrified by the opposite sex at a young age is probably a better way to describe it.” **Loss for Words** “We used to play it in the ’90s with Bungle ‘proper,’ with Danny \[Heifetz, drummer\] and Bär \[Clinton McKinnon, saxophonist\]. That record, *Animosity* \[by Corrosion of Conformity\], was big for all of us in high school. We were rehearsing for the live shows when we found out that Reed \[Mullin\] had died. But that song was already in the set list. The slower section played into the sequencing for the record, especially after a song like ‘Spreading’ which is really intense.” **Glutton for Punishment** “It’s another one of the songs I dug out of my archives. The songs were so unclear from the YouTube feed, which is the only way we had access to them. So me and Trey went back and sort of re-demoed them so they were clear for everyone else, especially for Dave and Scott. The lyrics were complete; they\'re typical of where my mind was as a 17-year-old. Totally indecisive about how to deal socially with people, what I was going to do with the rest of my life, all that sort of stuff.” **Sudden Death** “The lyrics are so ’80s. It\'s essentially about fear of nuclear war. The heartfelt fear, the Cold War, worrying about whether the Russians are going to blow us up or not. For me, it\'s probably one of the hardest songs. Mike wrote it—aside from the main parts of ‘Hypocrites,’ it was his one contribution to the original demo. It\'s funny because he\'s the one guy who didn\'t have any musical training. He writes everything by ear. It rarely goes back to any previous idea. It’s hard to remember. You just have to keep playing it over and over again.”

“Basically, we approached every single song with the intention of making sure that Chester would be proud of it,” Grey Daze drummer and co-lyricist Sean Dowdell tells Apple Music about *Amends*, which captures beloved late Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington in his first proper band. Originally recorded in the ’90s when Bennington was 18, *Amends* sees the surviving members of Grey Daze—plus new guitarist Cristin Davis—re-recording all their instruments to rebuild these lost songs around the singer’s original performances. Bennington had announced Grey Daze’s revival and started working on the album prior to his death by suicide in 2017. Dowdell, Davis, and original bassist Mace Beyers spent two and a half years meticulously finishing the project—a testament to their dedication, and to Bennington’s immense talent, that features guest shots from famous friends (guitarists from Korn, Bush, and Helmet, among others) as well as family members. “You’re going to get an insight into who Chester was before Linkin Park,” Dowdell says. “And a showcase of how great a singer he really was.” Below, Dowdell discusses each song on *Amends*. **Sickness** “Page Hamilton \[of Helmet\] and Chester were good friends, so we brought him in to play on this track. When I look back and read the lyrics, I can\'t help but think that this song is about addiction. We did a bunch of interviews when Chester was alive, and I heard Chester tell the story of why he wrote the lyrics the way he did—about being a malcontent, about being empty. But when I read them, I think there\'s a subplot in there about addiction.” **Sometimes** “Chris Traynor from Bush is playing guitar on this song with Cristin. Lyrically, Chester wrote this song all by himself. I think he had just broken up with a girlfriend because he had found out that she was cheating on him with one of his best friends at the time. He was just really disappointed in the way it turned out, because he felt like he lost a really good friend *and* his girlfriend. I remember he just walked into the studio, grabbed the microphone, and started screaming the chorus of what would become ‘Sometimes.’ It came together so quickly.” **What’s in the Eye** “Chris Traynor is also on this one, and so is Marcos Curiel from P.O.D. Chester and I wrote almost all the lyrics together, and this is one that I started and brought to practice. I remember Chester grabbed my notepad and put a big X through my chorus—I still actually have the lyric sheet—and then he starts screaming, ‘Don\'t go too fast, my friend!’ He had lost a friend in a car accident a week or two before we wrote the track, so he adapted the lyrics to the loss of his friend. The meaning of the song was really up in the air until Chester gave it literal meaning with a really strong chorus.” **The Syndrome** “This is a song that my son Carston plays drums on, and Carah Faye sings backing vocals. It’s about how sometimes people disappoint you and you just need something different to make you realize that what you thought was important or people who you thought were important really weren’t in the big picture. It’s a similar theme to ‘Sometimes,’ but kind of a different perspective based on moving past a situation—and then you can look back and see things a little more clearly.” **In Time** “Ryan Shuck, who was a good friend of Chester and myself, plays guest guitar on this song. He was in Orgy and in a band called Dead By Sunrise with Chester. I have an incredible memory of sitting with Chester as we were working on the melodies for this song. I was sitting on a couch in our rehearsal studio and I was kind of mouthing this word to him: ‘pain.’ And he stands up, grabs the mic, and screams the lyric as loud as he possibly could. And all of a sudden it really came alive. He was literally feeling that lyric—you can hear it in his voice. It’s an unbelievable performance, and it’s one of the tracks where I think you get an insight into the beauty of Chester’s vocal range and ability. This is one of the songs I get to sing with him on, which was always very difficult because you can’t help but pale in comparison.” **Just Like Heroin** “Back in the ’90s, we were losing guys like Kurt Cobain and Shannon Hoon and Brad \[Nowell\] from Sublime. It all seemed to be from heroin, and it was bumming us out. One of the lyrics in that song that\'ll help you kind of understand where we were coming from is ‘Just excuses.’ It seemed like these guys were just using excuse after excuse to keep using heroin. We kept losing our idols because of that, and it sucked. Chris Traynor plays on this one as well, and it’s one of my favorite tracks on the record.” **B12** “The guest guitar players on this song are Head and Munky from Korn, who were a pleasure to work with. You couldn’t pick a more relevant song as far as the state of the world right now, and it was written 20 years ago. Chester wrote 100 percent of the lyrics on this one, and it’s about the chaotic system we live in. He’s talking about governments crumbling, overbearing SWAT teams, and all the shit that’s happening around us. It’s got that angst that you know and love Chester for. You can hear it in his voice.” **Soul Song** “Chester’s son Jaime sings backing vocals on this, and it’s my favorite song on the record. You can hear Jaime singing on the chorus with his dad, and that’s something that us as a band were able to give back to Chester. He was never able to record anything with his children, and we were able to do that for him. It’s pretty intimidating to go in and sing along with Chester—yeah, he’s your dad, but he’s also Chester Bennington—but Jaime did a great job. I think his dad would be very proud of him.” **Morei Sky** “The chorus of this song says, ‘If I had a second chance I’d make amends, only to find myself losing in the end.’ As we were trying to find an album title, Cristin suggested *Amends* because of this lyric. Right when he said it, I knew that was it. There’s so much duality to that term with the events that transpired in losing Chester that it really just fits. A lot of people ask, ‘Is it you guys trying to make amends with Chester?’ No, it’s Chester making amends with the listener, because I really believe he regretted the decision to take his life the moment he did it. I think if he would’ve woken up the next day, he would’ve called me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.’” **She Shines** “The guest guitar players on this are Head from Korn and Jasen Rauch from Breaking Benjamin. Chester wrote the lyrics about his girlfriend telling him that she was leaving him to be with somebody else. I remember we all went on a camping trip up in Flagstaff, Arizona, and she told him in the middle of the trip that she was going to have a new boyfriend and it wasn’t going to be him. He just wrote word for word pretty much what happened in that conversation. So it’s got a lot of emotional torment, but that’s one of the gifts Chester had, if you can call it a gift: the ability to take that raw nerve emotion and pain and express it in a song.” **Shouting Out** “The guest vocalist on this is Laura ‘LP’ Pergolizzi. I remember taking a drive with Chester—he was the worst driver on the planet—and he wanted to play me this new song he had just heard from this girl named LP. This would’ve been 2016, and the song was called ‘Lost on You.’ He was so animated and jumping all over the car about how great her voice was. We knew we wanted a female vocalist on this track, so we reached out to her and she said yes right away. She does an amazing job. To me, the lyrics kind of sum up the idea that Chester never felt he was deserving of other people’s love. It breaks my heart, because so many people thought he was incredible, but he didn’t feel that way about himself. In my opinion, that’s the best way to sum up the tragedy of what happened: He just never loved himself.”

“Rock ’n’ roll has become so tame,” Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong told Apple Music in late 2019, just after unveiling “Father of All…,” the opening track and semi-titular single on his punk outfit’s 13th full-length. “A lot of rock acts are always trying to look for the feel-good song of the year. I think rock music should make you feel bad.” The irony was that the Motown-inspired “Father of All…”—all handclaps, blistering guitars, and Armstrong singing in an unrecognizable falsetto—was nothing if not feel-good. Green Day has become a cross-generational punk band by pairing bright, unshakable melodies with thoughts on death, war, anxiety, insomnia, masturbation, the fall of empires, masturbation, and so on. Imagine how they’d respond to the Trump era. *Father of All...* finds them at their most succinct, clocking in at just 26 minutes—less than it’d take you to listen to “Jesus of Suburbia” just three times. (“I realized I hate long songs,” Armstrong said.) Though 2004’s *American Idiot* is channeled in spirit—its iconic album art is referenced on the cover here, just behind the unicorn puking up a rainbow—Green Day trades operatics for dystopian jukebox fare. There are slightly ominous calls to the dance floor (“Meet Me on the Roof”) and tales of love gone violent (“Stab You in the Heart”) and Springsteenian scenes of crumbling cities, each gifted the natural bounce of an early rock ’n’ roll or R&B single. “Oh Yeah!”—itself a psychedelic skewering of social media addiction and American gun violence—lifts its opening notes from Joan Jett’s 1981 take on now-disgraced glam artist Gary Glitter’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me?” It feels highly intentional—a provocation wrapped up in a catchy riff. “There’s a lot of depression, but with a sense of humor,” Armstrong said of the record’s balance between light and dark. “I think we live in just a time of complete and total chaos—or else we’ve always been, but now it’s turned up to Trump. So it’s just trying to reflect what’s going on. And it’s not really writing political songs, but just writing the shit that you see every day.”

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

\"When we were finishing everything up and getting this music finalized, this record feels like all of our previous stuff wrapped up together, which you don\'t always end up with,\" vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell tells Apple Music about Pallbearer\'s fourth album. Equally cathartic and melancholic, the record\'s eight tracks grapple with the strangeness of memory and the concept of time, with heavy subjects surrounding disease, death, and loss anchoring songs like \"Caledonia\" and the title track. Produced by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth), *Forgotten Days* incorporates moments of soaring prog-rock (\"Stasis\" and \"Silver Wings\"), furious thrash (\"The Quicksand of Existing\"), and sweeping aggression (\"Vengeance & Ruination\") into the band\'s relentless doom metal sound, threaded together in a cohesive collection that showcases Pallbearer at their darkest. \"I like the dynamism in general,\" says Campbell. \"I feel like on this album, each song is notably different from each other while maintaining some similar elements as well.\" Below, Campbell walks Apple Music track by track through *Forgotten Days*. **Forgotten Days** “This song was inspired by these ideas of identity and memory, sort of inspired by seeing my grandmother go through Alzheimer\'s over the last several years and just watching her slip away. She\'s still alive, but there are fewer and fewer recognizable moments of her being in there. I just used it to explore the themes of how much your memories of your life or your conception of yourself—how does that define who you are? If you can only remember versions of yourself from long ago, are you lost in time? A lot of Alzheimer\'s patients seem like they are displaced, because they have these memories that to them seem current, but it could be from 50 years ago. I feel it\'s got to be a very strange way to exist.” **Riverbed** “The skeleton of that song is from \[bassist\] Joe \[Rowland\]. So he demoed it and sent it to us, and I really liked it from the very initial moment. It sounds new, it sounds different than our old stuff. It\'s got the trade-off vocals—Joe does the softer vocals, and I do my typical thing. It will probably end up being a live staple, if we ever get to play shows again.” **Stasis** “I\'ve been flirting with writing more rock-ish songs lately. I wanted to have more of a swagger and groove to it rather than either something that hammers or big sweeping sort of stuff that we often do. I just wanted to test the limits of the Pallbearer format. The lyrics on that are essentially a reminder to not get stuck in shitty behavioral patterns that just drag down. Because you really only have so long to live, and if you waste lots of time just wallowing in misery or just the patterns that you\'re comfortable with, you don\'t get that time back.” **Silver Wings** “I always like to write at least one long, epic song per album. That\'s probably my favorite of mine on the album. And it\'s kind of concerned with similar ideas as \'Forgotten Days.\' I think I sort of have a fixation with this sort of concept in general. Just the idea of the unstoppable march of time and the inevitability of change. You find a person at a time that they\'re much different than they once were.” **The Quicksand of Existing** “We ended up really kind of having a ball over Devin \[Holt\]\'s guitar solo. We do a trade-off in the middle. Mine is the sort of more florid-sounding one, and then Devin just comes in with the fucking face-melting, fucking *Reload* guitar. You can hear the black-nail-polish-era Kirk Hammett rocking out. We were losing our minds in the studio when he recorded that, laughing our asses off. It\'s probably our simplest song we\'ve ever done, but it\'s a lot of fun to play.” **Vengeance & Ruination** “I\'ve had kind of a difficult time coming up with lyrics for that song because the music itself is so aggressive. I was kind of trying to approach it almost like a hardcore song, although it really ended up not sounding like that. I saw these pictures from probably 120 years ago of these victims of the death by a thousand cuts where they\'d like flay you alive, this Chinese capital punishment. It\'s horrifically, incomprehensibly cruel. And I use that as a jumping-off point as a kind of discussion of a state-sponsored cruelty.” **Rite of Passage** “Solstice is kind of one of our influences from early on. And we\'ve always really enjoyed that stuff, just kind of classic epic doom. And we haven\'t really done a straightforward Solstice-esque song before. So we just went for it. I think that the chorus ended up being pretty cool in that, because once we got to the studio, one of Randall\'s suggestions was to play the chorus on the toms instead of just playing it through, which I think was a really great suggestion and it opened up the chorus a lot.” **Caledonia** “It\'s pretty fucking weird. The really bizarre guitar solo from Devin, quadruple-track harmonies on there, I think it\'s pretty rad. But it\'s also just crushingly sad. That was another one of those songs about dealing with his mother\'s death. It\'s pretty heavy subject matter, but I like all the various textures and directions that that song goes in. It feels inherently progressive in the sense that there are so many different sonic directions throughout that song. It flows really well together and doesn\'t seem disjointed, which it could have felt with all the different things going on.”

Such is the emotional weight of *Cannibal*, the sixth studio album from British metalcore band Bury Tomorrow, that frontman Dani Winter-Bates had moments of doubt about whether they should be releasing it at all. Detailing the depths of his own mental health struggles, *Cannibal* presents as a record of unbridled intensity, both musically and thematically. Though, away from music, the vocalist has long worked a career in the NHS and even organized safe-space workshops for fans to discuss their own issues, it wasn’t until recently that he felt ready to detail his own battles. “Truthfully, in the past, I don’t think I was well enough to have properly addressed what I have gone through,” Winter-Bates tells Apple Music. “But in sitting down to write this album, I felt I had reached a point where it was time for me to articulate my own journey to people.” In doing so, he hopes listeners can look past the darkness that engulfs the album to find a comfort in the nakedness of his most mature songwriting yet. “Going through the process has given me a really strong understanding of my resilience, but also where I need support in my journey. If people can take one thing from it, take that you’re not alone.” Here, Winter-Bates takes us through that process, track by track. **Choke** “The album’s opening lyric is one that really resonates with me, and which sets up what you’re coming in for on the record: ‘Sick of hiding the truth/Fucking lying to you.’ As brash as it is, it reveals that I’m opening the book and telling you something honest and meaningful now. I wrote that line very early on in the process. I tend to live by the notion that you shouldn’t always dismiss your first idea, because it can often be your best. I think it really encapsulates what the album is about.” **Cannibal** “As the title track for the record, this thematically really tells the story of the album, and musically is also very representative of what Bury Tomorrow is about—past, present, and future. It was actually one of the latter songs I wrote, and it works through my personal timeline in song. As a species we eat away at other humans in the way we treat each other, and the manner that we treat ourselves eats away at our own mental and physical health. I felt it was important to present these important themes as openly as possible, and not to wrap them in metaphor. It would be negligent to do that, almost.” **The Grey (VIXI)** “I believe this song takes the band to a whole new place. It has an off-time, waltz-like feel to it that provides space to think, which I believe is a real key to getting people to truly listen to the meaning of the song. We’ve felt a really deep connection with our fans through this song. ‘VIXI’—‘I have lived’ in Latin—really struck a chord with me, and was something I’d noted down a good six months before I got to writing this song. It connected with me in the darkest moments. What have I lived? What have I achieved? If I were to ‘go to the grey,’ what would people say about me? The lyrics in the breakdown have a nod to mindfulness, of which reconnecting to nature and understanding our core purpose is a big thing. A lot of people find a solace in that.” **Imposter** “Imposter syndrome is something I both live with and also teach leadership groups on. It’s the feeling that you’re going to get caught out in what you’re doing. You could be the top-tier data analyst in the world yet feel like you can’t even open a spreadsheet; you could be a revered musician who has had every accolade thrust upon them, but still feel like you’re phoning it in every night onstage. The song builds to a frantic breakdown that reflects reaching the point where you simply want to remove your brain in order to be free of these thoughts. It’s a condition that particularly affects aspirational people—it preys on the vulnerability of people who want to further themselves or progress. I’ve had it with my vocals, but I have also really noticed it in my professional work with the NHS. I’m not someone who took the traditional route of education or a degree with my career, and that leads your mind to prey that people might be judging you for it.” **Better Below** “This song finds me at my most vulnerable, and is the most honest song I have ever written. It outright calls myself out for hiding warning signs and symptoms of my depreciating mental health. I want the song to be a discussion of how someone can end up feeling this way about themselves. It has plenty of ‘space,’ and the space allows us to bring more emotive feel to the song. It’s interesting for us to place our most brutal lyrics and place them within the most melodic song on the record; it really shows the place I was in–or am still in now, even, as the lyrics are written in the present participle.” **The Agonist** “The worst part about anxiety is something called scanning, where your brain is actively looking for something to be anxious about. Subconsciously we look for these situations that lead you to have such debilitating feelings. We almost put ourselves in the piranha tank, knowingly or otherwise, and expect not to get bitten. I think ‘The Agonist’ is a reflection of what it’s like to be disenfranchised from your own mind, and to live with those feelings constantly.” **Quake** “‘Quake’ is probably the only song on the record that is wrapped in a metaphor. I wanted to talk about that snap from reality to breaking point, from stability to instability; the feeling of your world being shook and being thrust into chaos. The only way I could to really convey that was as an earthquake. From my own journey, I was living my life, walking along—and then one day, suddenly the world opened up and swallowed me. I think for a lot of people, that is the reality of mental health problems. It makes it a hard thing to recover from, too. Without that validating moment, almost, of a traumatic event, it can be really difficult to understand. There’s a guilt attached to it, even.” **Gods & Machines** “This continues the theme of ‘The Agonist,’ about putting ourselves into positions to then be destroyed by them, and relates in particular to the digital world and social media. These things have almost taken over as the new religion, and we’ve lost a sense of these things being designed to connect with people. The facelessness of the digital age has bred a level of incivility and unkindness that can kill people. The term ‘trolling’ frustrates me a great deal because it’s putting a juvenile face on something that can ruin someone’s well-being. We’re never going to win a battle to change the world we’re in, but we can educate people on the impact of these things on their lives, and how to be kinder to people as a whole.” **Voice & Truth** “The freeing nature of truthfulness and honesty is really, really important, certainly from a mental health perspective. It gives you vulnerability, and vulnerability, I believe, is power. Suppressing that has a detrimental impact upon a person, while in lying and behaving in an uncivil way to others, you are a contributing factor to what that person goes through as a result. It’s one of the most aggressive, savage songs on the record.” **Cold Sleep** “This is another particularly brutal song. When we were going through the record, the guys were like, ‘Really? Another brutal one?’ and I said, ‘That’s what this is like, it’s not a nice journey.’ ‘Cold Sleep’ as a title has obvious connotations, but for me it’s also representative of that feeling of lying in bed, being unsure of whether you are able to face what’s going to happen when you wake up—or even if you want to.” **Dark, Infinite** “I’m expecting this song in particular to be a tough listen for people. I can hear the emotion in my voice from when I was recording this; I can hear the cracks and imperfections, where I’m hitting a certain emotional depth. Ending the record in such a dark place, rather than closing it out with a more hopeful song, demonstrates that this struggle isn’t an isolated experience–I will have these feelings, ups and downs, for life. It’s very grounded in that reality. It’s a message I want to stay with people long after the record is over.”

It doesn't come much more grim than life in a gritty, remote Scottish city like Aberdeen. So says northeast native Ross Gordon, anyway, vocalist with rising, heart-on-sleeve rock four-piece, Cold Years. If you want a sense of the true sound of youth disaffection in post-Brexit Britain, look no further. This summer, the band will finally release their highly anticipated debut album Paradise ­– a title bearing more than a suggestion of sarcastic snarl to go along with the considerable bite found on the music contained within. "Our hometown is a shithole," Ross spits, with characteristically direct candour. "The album is called Paradise because Aberdeen is not a paradise. It's horrible, it's grey, and it's cold all the time. We all live and work here, and it's not very happy. It's quite morbid when you stop to think about it. But at the same time, it's home." Unlike the often-bleak subject matter that inspired them, however, the songs of Paradise burst from the speakers with a 'clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose' soul, spring boarding off timelessly vintage-tinged sounds, fueled by lung-busting choruses and buffed-up with a thoroughly modern-day, blue-collar punk rock sheen. It's a proud rock'n'roll record, capturing with unflinching honesty a world that offers little reason for hope, even if the songs sound anything but hopeless.

For PVRIS frontwoman Lynn Gunn, her band’s third album *Use Me* marked “a line in the sand.” Sonically, that meant stepping away from the expansive rock that defined the Massachussetts trio’s previous two albums and embracing altogether more hook-heavy, dark-edged electro-pop. “This is where we’re at now, and we’re not going back from here,” says the singer of PVRIS’ new dawn, which Gunn honed with US producer and Paper Route frontman JT Daly. “You can hop on or you can hop off. I follow my taste and my interests, and I never want to compromise that for nostalgia or for the comfort of preserving old expectations.” But *Use Me* also represented another clear-cut change: the moment Gunn—for years reluctant to take full credit for PVRIS’ output—allowed herself to step out of the shadows and into the foreground. “The process of this album was a very singular, solo endeavor,” she says. “Things were naturally happening that way anyway, but we never really had the direct conversation about it. Everyone was down for this, because it’s a healthier, easier method. Finally being like, ‘This is actually how it’s operated,’ and having that conversation has been a really positive shift for us. It allows more freedom.” It’s not hard to see why *Use Me* catalyzed that new direction: This is an intensely personal record on which Gunn documents—and exhales—the turbulence of her life during the years leading up to its creation. “It was a really overwhelming time,” says the singer of the period after the release of 2017’s *All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell* and into 2019, when she began to write *Use Me*. That turmoil is spread across the record, from the pent-up ferocity of opener “Gimme a Minute”—a shuddering anthem which sees Gunn desperately placing a protective layer around herself—to “Good to Be Alive,” on which the singer ruminates on her ill health, sarcastically wondering, “Is this body even mine? Feels good to be alive but I hate my life.” But amid all that restless energy, there’s also release; as the album reaches its close, Gunn sails into noticeably calmer waters. That shift you can hear, she says, was “internal healing. It’s funny, because while we were making the album, I still felt I was holding on to a lot of things. The chaos was just very, very present. But speaking about it now, I feel healed from a lot of it.” Here, let Gunn walk you through the exhilarating *Use Me*, one song at a time. **Gimme a Minute** “This song feels like a really good start, especially if you’re looking at the album as a storyline. There was a lot of change during this album: personal changes, mental changes, physical changes. And I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease as well as Crohn\'s disease around this time, so it\'s navigating a lot of health factors within that chaos. I also have a hard time setting boundaries and asking for help or time off. The song is a cry out and just a catharsis of what I really wanted to say, which was just, ‘Give me a minute. I need a minute. I need to process what has happened in the last few years. I need to process what is happening to my body. I need to process what\'s happening to my heart.’ It was just a lot. Sonically, the song emulates that stirring stress and anxiety, and it eventually leads to this explosive breakdown and the ultimate freak-out.” **Dead Weight** “Again, this was about reflecting on being a people-pleaser and always putting others’ feelings and expectations before mine. The song is about wanting to shed those habits and patterns. But also about shedding people who don\'t understand that and won\'t allow you to set those boundaries—old friendships, old relationships, old anything that don’t allow you to be your best self. The dynamic of the song really ties into the sonics; they reflect this dance that I feel I am always having. I always want to be straightforward and transparent with the people around me, but I always want to do that with love and do that in a way that\'s not going to upset anybody. But sometimes the truth is you need to just set that boundary and do it unapologetically and not worry about it.” **Stay Gold** “‘Stay Gold’ just flew out—it was a really quick song to write. The message of the song is wanting to write a song for somebody, but also not wanting to, because when you write a song about somebody, they\'re immortalized. They can be consumed by a listener in whatever way they want, whether that\'s to put them up on this grand pedestal or to tear them down. And this person just felt so special that I didn\'t even want to give the chance for either of those things to happen. I just wanted to keep them safe. I didn’t want to let their greatness die as we would play the song over and over. So, ironically, I ended up writing a song about them, which is the song about not wanting to write a song about them.” **Good to Be Alive** “The line in this—‘It feels good to be alive but I hate my life’—is supposed to be a little cheeky and a little bit funny. But it’s also supposed to be completely honest. JT had set up a little miniature writing camp with some awesome writers. And there was one day we were just working alone, and during this time, I was having a really bad flare-up in my stomach and in my body. I just wasn\'t feeling good, and it was really hard to just show up to the session and be on and be present. I was feeling a lot of the weight of those health issues, which was ironic because mentally I was in excellent health—the best place I\'ve been in my adult life and in our career. What I think music is really great for is delivering the deep, honest, and maybe difficult message, but if you can make someone dance to it or sing along to it, it just feels so much better.” **Death of Me** “This is about that fine line you dance right when you are interested in somebody and you realize you really care about them and like them. And you have to surrender in a way, or at least for me. I\'m go hard or go home. If I\'m going to commit to somebody, I\'m fully committed and ready to just dive in (that’s definitely a good indication of the no boundaries thing). It’s about the risk you take when you are connecting with somebody and putting it all out there. Sonically, it\'s similar to ‘Good to Be Alive,’ where I feel like if you just read the lyrics straight out, it can sound pretty dark and maybe not the most positive. I knew I would need somebody who could bring that perfect element of a little bit dark, but a little bit fun, and I chose Daniel Armbruster from Joywave. He helped like really capture that dark energy, but also a little bit of a cheeky wink in there.” **Hallucinations** “It\'s funny, I didn\'t think the song would make the album. I was reading this book at the time about hallucinating, and it just kind of felt like I was living in a weird little dream. There were a lot of areas of my life where I was kind of contemplating what was real and what was something I was thinking up or projecting, and trying to identify and really pin those things down. The book really lined up with how I felt at that point in my life. A fan actually gave me that book, too, so whoever it was, I owe them a huge thank you.” **Old Wounds** “I think this is the most directly I\'ve ever written about love. It feels like a love song—it’s about that all-or-nothing mentality and that willingness to get hurt again from somebody the second time around. I wrote it about three or four years ago. I had this really short-term but really special connection with somebody, and it just ended very abruptly. And there was a time when they had come back just to talk about it and for us to process something, and I remember one of my friends just said to me, ‘Don’t open up old wounds, don\'t do it.’ I was like, ‘That\'s a good lyric, that\'s a good song idea.’ At the time I was staying in a hotel in New York and I just went back to my room and blurted the song out in a day. And I had the demo for a really long time; I just wanted to finish it and wanted to get it out. I showed it to JT one day and a couple of people on our team, and everybody was like, ‘We need to finish this.’ I was like, ‘Thank you. I thought so.’ I\'m definitely a hopeless romantic, and this captures that.” **Loveless** “When I wrote this, I was dealing with a breakup and I just didn’t want to write about it. I didn’t want to give it any more attention or energy, I guess. But I knew, deep down, that I needed to write about it and get it out. So I very reluctantly wrote about it. But I think making the song allowed for that final release and that final acceptance and just surrendering to it for a moment. Once that energy was pulled out, it allowed for this breath, which I think the end of the album has. It feels lighter, it doesn\'t feel as chaotic, even if there is still a little bit of sadness. The song is about admitting that you\'ve been defeated and admitting that somebody hurt you and that you\'re giving them this salute. Like, ‘You hurt me, dude, you hurt me real bad.’ I feel like this is the first song where I\'ve just fully laid that out there. Something about admitting that takes the power back.” **January Rain** “A much more retrospective reflection on that same situation. JT and I were just finishing everything and finishing tracking, and just kind of getting everything together. But I woke up one morning with the vocal melody for this song and the chorus in my head and I just jumped to my computer immediately. I wrote the track and got the melody before it ran away and I brought it to him. I didn’t have the lyrics and I didn’t know what I was feeling. But ‘January rain’ just kept popping up. It was looking back on that relationship a year later and reflecting on what it all felt like, which was it was really special to me. But which, very early on, I knew was doomed. I just remember there was one week where it just rained and rained and rained and rained, and that\'s when that feeling felt the heaviest.” **Use Me** “There\'s harp in here, plus strings. This was one of the songs, along with \'Stay Gold,\' which we were fighting really hard to get onto the album. I was watching *Euphoria* and I just really loved the soundtrack for it. I loved the dynamics between Rue and Jules and just the concept of using a person as your escape or your medicine—whether it\'s good or bad. You can see it as a really healthy thing or unhealthy, it just depends on the situation. I tend to get very singular and solo in my own life. I almost wrote it as a love letter or a love song from someone else\'s perspective, and the dialogue or message that I wish someone would be able to speak to me and sing to me. So it was like this weird backwards love song and kind of putting that into the universe. Maybe one day somebody will be able to be that for me and be that person to lean on. But there’s a double-sided energy to it. Because you could almost look at the song as a kind of funny, passive-aggressive, ironic message of just saying, ‘Just go ahead, use me. Do whatever you need.’ It’s very empowered. There\'s also an empowering component to it as well, if you\'re looking at it from that angle.” **Wish You Well** “I never want to burn bridges with people. I never want people to be hurt. Even if a situation was toxic or wasn\'t healthy, I still always just want the best for somebody. But sometimes you need to let things go and you got to let certain people go. I feel it\'s right to have this at the end of the album. It just really captures that no matter what somebody\'s put me through, I\'m not going to hold that against you. I\'m always going to hope that you can grow from this and heal. But I also love a good four on the floor, really groovy bass, fun song. So it was the first time we\'ve really gotten to make something like that. It had to be on the album.”

Some years you have to wonder how Public Enemy sustains such righteous indignation. Others—let’s say 2020, just for example—you wonder why everyone isn’t as angry as they are. That they have strong thoughts on the 45th president of the United States isn’t surprising (“State of the Union”), nor is their crusade to uphold old-school values about hip-hop and art in a frictionless digital world (“Public Enemy Number Won,” “Toxic,” the Ice-T-featuring “Smash the Crowd”). The surprise is how vital, engaged, and unflinchingly on message Chuck D and Flavor Flav sound this side of their 60th birthdays, and on their prodigal return to Def Jam. If you think YG’s line “Pull the trigger, kill a negro/He\'s a hero” on the revamp of “Fight the Power” sounds hyperbolic, remember George Zimmerman and welcome to Kyle Rittenhouse. Breonna Taylor is mentioned, but because systemic racism comes in many forms and flavors, so are Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. And if PE\'s politics seem preoccupying, listen to “R.I.P. Blackat”—their feelings about friends are just as strong. Yes, they’ve been confronting us with the same stark reality for more than three decades. But that’s not their fault, it’s the world’s. And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.

In calling their fourth album *Splid*—their native word for “discord”—Norwegian metal squad Kvelertak acknowledges a polarization both external and internal. As political and social conflicts rage across the globe, the band experienced their own divisions when vocalist Erlend Hjelvik and drummer Kjetil Gjermundrød left in 2018 and 2019, respectively. “‘Splid’ is a cool-sounding word and also a good overall description of the lyrical themes on the album, with some of the stuff going on in the world today and band members leaving and new members coming in,” guitarist Vidar Landa tells Apple Music. “Our new singer Ivar \[Nikolaisen\] has brought new energy to the band, so it definitely feels like a new version of Kvelertak.” Below, Landa takes us through the songs of *Splid*. **Rogaland** “Rogaland is the area where most of us are from. So this is sort of a tribute and sort of a mild criticism of that region in Norway, because it brings in a lot of money for the rest of the country. Stavanger, the city where the band started, is the oil capital of Norway—that’s where Norway’s gold was found and distributed to all the citizens. So there’s a lot of resources in Rogaland. It’s a beautiful place, with some amazing beaches and fjords and mountains, but it’s also a place of big industry. A lot of the old black metal bands have songs about the epic Norwegian landscape, so maybe this is a more sarcastic look at those kind of tributes.” **Crack of Doom (feat. Troy Sanders)** “This is sort of the rock song of the album. We always have a couple of those. It was written not long after we were on tour with Mastodon in Europe. We’ve been fans of Mastodon for a long time—even before we started Kvelertak—and they’ve always been very supportive of us, so this was a cool opportunity to do something with them. We have other songs on the album that are maybe more similar to Mastodon, but we wanted to have Troy on a track that wasn’t typical of something he’s done before. This is also one of the only songs we’ve done with English lyrics. We thought it would be easier than having Troy learn Norwegian.” **Necrosoft** “This reminds me of the first couple of songs we did on our early demos and maybe on the first album. It’s a bit hard to translate the lyrics, but it kind of touches upon the idea of always wanting more, but at some point you have to make some choices. For example—even if you switch to a more environmentally friendly industry, as long as people always want more of everything, there’s always going to be a problem. There will come a time when people have to choose between the free flowing river and the electric guitar.” **Discord** “The title ‘Splid’ came up for this song, even though we didn’t have any lyrics for it when we entered the studio. Then we had Nate \[Newton\] from Converge and Doomriders sing on it, so we wrote all the lyrics in English. And then we decided it would be cool to have the song title in English, which is also the title of the album. The song kind of sums up everything the album is about in one song. And the main guitar part in the chorus was very fun to record because we used an arsenal of guitar effects and pedals.” **Bråtebrann** “I haven’t really found a fitting English description for what ‘Bråtebrann’ is, but I think ‘bonfire’ is maybe the closest you get. There’s a tradition with people in the countryside of Norway where they burn things to get rid of them, like grass and leaves. Every spring, some of these fires get out of control and the forest starts burning and the fire department has to come out and clean up. It’s actually a tribute to Ivar and his childhood friend, who used to set fire to stuff when they were kids. His friend would always get blamed, even when he didn’t start the fire. This friend tragically passed away in 2018, around the same time the song came about, so it’s a tribute to him.” **Uglas Hegemoni** “It means ‘owls hegemony,’ and it’s basically a song about us, like our song ‘Kvelertak’ from *Meir*. It’s a song about how awesome we are.” **Fanden Ta Dette Hull!** “The title is a quote that basically means, ‘Damn this hole!’ It was written in an old jail cell where a thief and murderer was held. The guy was named Even Olsen Tagholdt, and he murdered a rich guy in Stavanger in the 1800s. His skeleton was on display at a museum in Stavanger for many, many years. Then a couple of years ago there was this debate about whether it was morally right to have human skeletons on display at the museum. So he was actually buried in 2018, very close to where Ivar grew up. This song is about his life and how he ended up as a thief and a murderer.” **Tevling** “We have a sweet spot for old ’80s and ’90s power rock ballads, so this has a riff inspired by that—even though it takes more of a typical Kvelertak turn in the chorus. So it’s our attempt at a power rock ballad. The riff also has a vibe sort of like The Police song ‘Message in a Bottle.’ The title is an old Norwegian word for…well, sort of like a competition.” **Stevnemøte med Satan** “This means ‘a date with Satan.’ The character described in the song is not doing very well. He’s sort of on a date with Satan. The song talks about how you can’t really get away from your own destiny, and then you sort of come to the end of the line to your final destination—which in this case might be hell. We did a tour with Mutoid Man, and they have a song called ‘Date With the Devil,’ so maybe it was in the back of our heads to have a little tribute to them.” **Delirium Tremens** “I think the music sounds like psychosis, so ‘Delirium Tremens’ felt like a fitting title. I think it’s just a good musical description of how that state of mind can feel. The riffs kind of came out like stream of consciousness, which was very fun to do. So it’s maybe more experimental than anything we’ve done before. And it actually has every one of us singing.” **Ved bredden av Nihil** “The title means ‘On the banks of Nihil.’ The main tremolo riff is one we’ve had laying around for a while. We all like it a lot, so we were very happy when we finally managed to make a whole song out of it. Lyrically, it’s a description of a wealthy middle-aged man with wife and kids, a big villa and a government grant—but he’s yearning for the abyss.”

From pandemics to protests, 2020 was a year of sheer, relentless chaos. And in its final month, LA-via-Toronto songwriter Jordan Benjamin—aka grandson—has dropped a powder keg of a debut record that’s positively juddering with the tension of the times. Amplifying the agitated energy of his 2017 alt-rock hit “Blood // Water,” *Death of an Optimist* finds Benjamin raging like a fiery ’60s folk singer who’s been transported into a modern America soundtracked by trap and ravaged by politics (with a pit stop in the ’90s to stock up on Nine Inch Nails CDs). Throughout the album, Benjamin’s existential crisis—build a better world or give up the fight?—takes the form of competing characters, the idealistic grandson and his nihilistic alter ego X, waging a 12-track battle royale for control of his soul, with guest collaborators like LINKIN PARK\'s Mike Shinoda and blink-182’s Travis Barker serving as referees. “I spent two years on tour with songs like \'Blood // Water\' and \'Thoughts & Prayers\' that were angry but very optimistic about change being around the corner,” Benjamin tells Apple Music. “But then I was watching progress take a slower march than I could have expected, and there were all these very public setbacks—like Brexit, or seeing somebody like Beto O\'Rourke lose to Ted Cruz again. So I have songs on here that are excited for change and ready to take up that fight. And then we have other songs that are more unsure and critical and confused.” Here, Benjamin presents the track-by-track scorecard to his concept-album cage match. **Death of an Optimist // Intro** “With the introduction, I wanted to play out that deep-rooted fear that I\'ve had every night onstage, which is that I\'m going to look like a fool or, even worse, be completely forgotten, because I had hope in a time of hopelessness. And so I play out these different scenarios of a song that’s being sung to an empty room. It\'s rooted in those questions of nihilism, where you think, ‘Maybe this is all for nothing.’ It’s in those moments that this other character, X, begins to talk. And I wanted to introduce that character, and my fear of becoming him, early in the process. This was also an opportunity to do something more cinematic than I\'d ever done—it’s got that Hans Zimmer kind of quality. And actually, in the midst of the cacophony that the song concludes with, I had my siblings and my parents sing along to the chorus. That was a cool moment: I got to sneak everyone into my first album! It wouldn\'t have felt right without them.” **In Over My Head** “This is something that I\'ve been navigating my whole life: I\'ve always questioned authority. I grew up in an environment where a lot of people never leave; it\'s a bit of a fishbowl, and it\'s easy to feel claustrophobic. You look around and see people around you living, getting married, having children, and dying in the same area code. I always questioned that, and I didn\'t know where I would end up. I\'ve had that feeling for a long time that there\'s something bigger out there that I need to get to the bottom of. And sometimes that\'s a really lonely feeling, and sometimes it\'s exhausting. But I do have that big dream that I can do anything, so I wanted to start the album on that note.” **Identity** “Life doesn\'t have a very linear narrative, so why should my album? This song is about this identity crisis playing out where, similar to the introduction track, I wonder: If nobody remembers you, then did any of it even happen? I wrote the whole song in maybe a half an hour. I just had a whole bunch of shit on my mind. We have a line in there, in the second verse, about a ‘Mass epidemic/No mask is gonna mask it\'—that was written in January! I don\'t really know where that line came from, but it was pretty freaky once everything started getting shut down. So yeah, this is a pretty dark one, with a really big angry drop that pays homage to Nine Inch Nails.” **Left Behind** “I think the lyrics to \'Left Behind\' might be the actual thesis of the whole album. You want to hold on to hope, but it\'s okay to question it, it\'s okay to be scared. I wanted to stand for something, but I don\'t want to be caught in a one-man march. So many young people\'s imaginations have been captured by the rise of the progressive left in politics, both in Canada and America. But those ideologies have yet to take root in the highest positions of power, where so much cooperation and diplomacy is needed to accomplish any sort of bipartisan progress. So these moments make me question: Is it really that naive to believe there is a much more progressive, ambitious way we could take care of ourselves and look out for our neighbours? Or are we too idealistic, and are we not living in the real world?” **Dirty** “My songs in the past that served as a call to action have had much more of a sense of urgency—like, ‘Wake the fuck up, this is happening right now, and if you don\'t do something about it, then you\'re going to have to answer for your apathy.’ But with \'Dirty,\' I was looking to recontextualize that story for somebody who might not resonate with \[my past approach\]. I had gone to Nashville to write, which I had never really done before. And I got to work with songwriters who encouraged me to draw inspiration from artists that I had liked growing up but I hadn\'t found room for in the grandson project yet. So this is a bit of a nod to Amy Winehouse and Outkast—a sort of tongue-in-cheek retro production juxtaposed with very contemporary lyrics.” **The Ballad of G and X // Interlude** “I wrote the whole album prior to the lockdown, but it was during the lockdown that X as a character got fleshed out more clearly in my head. And this interlude gave me a chance to more deliberately let that dichotomy play out where I keep on looking at the world like I\'m an optimist, but he says, ‘We can\'t go back.’ I do one thing; he does another thing. All the while, I\'m watching everyone else and they seem to have it all figured out. So I\'m asking: Why isn\'t it as easy for me?” **We Did It!!!** “Some of my favourite pop culture that I draw inspiration from comes from the \'90s, and I just love the use of sarcasm to make a point. I loved *South Park* growing up, I was completely enthralled by *The Slim Shady LP*, *The Marshall Mathers LP*, Marilyn Manson, Nirvana. I just loved that \'90s attitude—the juxtaposition of something kind of sneering and laughing at itself, while also calling truth to something much more serious that\'s happening under our noses. That was kind of my intention with this one.” **WWIII** “This was inspired by speaking to fans who\'ve been deployed in the military, and it\'s another manifestation of that question of ‘What is any of this even for at the end of the day?\' But it\'s playing out in a scenario where there\'s so much to lose, and so much consequence—not just for those who are lucky enough to come home and then have a lifetime of pain and confusion, but for the very communities where these wars are being fought in. These countries and cultures are completely buried underneath a geopolitical fight that is often kind of lost on us.” **Riptide** “Working with Mike Shinoda is always a fun challenge. He is so precise. He\'s so tormented by what he wants, and what he feels is right. There\'s no limit to what you can learn from him on the songwriting and production side of things. We wrote this song at the beginning of 2019, but it kind of came in at the end of the process. It felt like a crossroads for X—we see the motivation and intention behind this more cynical character who\'s done bad things to good people and feels blinded by his own vices. It felt like a crack in the foundation of this more cynical character that can maybe lead us to a more ambiguous conclusion.” **Pain Shopping** “\'Pain Shopping\' was a phrase that my girlfriend used at the beginning of the year, and it\'s something that I relate to certainly, as I\'ve lived out different toxic relationships in my life and indulged in thought patterns and habits that were not in my own best interest, often to mask issues that I hadn\'t yet dealt with in my life. I\'ve met so many people through touring who come to this type of music looking for that visceral expression of their anger. And I wanted to make a song for all of us that spoke to that.” **Drop Dead** “If there\'s any one person who embodies the intersection of hip-hop culture and rock culture, it\'s Travis Barker. Working with him was really fun. There\'s just nothing like sitting in the control room while Travis Barker does a pass on the drums—it was just such a gratifying feeling. I\'m such a fan of blink-182, I\'m a fan of the new Machine Gun Kelly album that he produced, and I wanted that very classic kind of optimism that a blink song makes you feel. Despite all of this static noise, despite all of the ways in which the past is obscured this year, we still just keep putting one foot in front of the other. That was the spirit that I wanted to leave people with.” **Welcome to Paradise // Outro** “For this song, I worked with one of my favourite songwriters, Ross Golan—he\'s super talented and has worked on all different genres of music. This felt like it could be the first song on the album, but there\'s something cool about concluding like this. There\'s this quiet kind of uncertainty: Okay, you\'ve gone on this journey with me, I\'ve presented you with as compelling a reason I can to stand up for what you believe in, and I\'ve also somehow simultaneously painted as real a reason that all of it will be for nothing, so where do we go from here? I think \'Welcome to Paradise\' is kind of stepping out into this new landscape.”