Kerrang!'s Albums of 2017

The Pittsburgh band\'s follow-up to 2014\'s I AM KING, FOREVER.

Following the crunchy, conceptual sprawl of 2014’s *Sonic Highways*—an album whose making was documented in an equally ambitious HBO series of the same name—Foo Fighters show no signs of slowing down. Recorded alongside The Bird and The Bee’s Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia) in just one L.A. studio, *Concrete and Gold* finds the Foos balancing Beatles-like pop (see: the psychedelic shimmer and lush harmonies of “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)”) with metallic abandon (see also: the quiet-LOUD thrills of “Run”), all while making room for guest appearances from Paul McCartney, Justin Timberlake, and Boyz II Men’s Shawn Stockman. Further proof that rock’s most reliable band can still surprise us.

Two members of Neck Deep lost their fathers after releasing 2015’s *Life’s Not Out to Get You*. Understandably then, this is a follow-up that asks some big questions, setting them to a soundtrack of punchy, quicksilver riffs and gripping hooks. At a fittingly careening pace, “Happy Judgement Day” wonders if the world is hurtling into oblivion, but the prevailing message here is to greet life head-on, embodied by the invigorating rush of “Motion Sickness” and “Where Do We Go When We Go.”

Rise Against have been one of hardcore’s most dissenting voices for nearly two decades and, after 2014’s introspective *The Black Market*, 2017’s political landscape has re-fired their righteous anger. They shape their hammering riffs and wind-tunnel choruses around hot-button topics including climate change (“Parts Per Million”), apathy (“B\*\*\*\*\*\*t”), and the inevitability—or otherwise—of war (“The Violence”). The Chicago band have never sought to disentangle the personal from the political though, and relationship dramas are played out on “Politics of Love” and “House on Fire.”

Beautifully crafted alt-punk that grooves and inspires.

“Don’t need a metaphor for you to know I’m miserable,” sings Lynn Gunn on “What’s Wrong.” After PVRIS’ conceptual debut, *White Noise*, singer/guitarist Gunn confronts heartache and anxiety with new candor and vulnerability. It fuels a darker, broader sound without sacrificing the trio’s gift for arena-filling choruses. Their compelling fusion of rock and electronic suggests Florence + The Machine on the soaring, percussive “What’s Wrong” and “Heaven,” while they pull off the difficult trick of making rock music that’s dramatic and grand but not overripe on “No Mercy.”

All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell is the upcoming second album by American rock band PVRIS. It is set to be released August 25, 2017. The first single "Heaven" was released April 30, 2017.

The debut album by Creeper scales all the joyful, maddening vicissitudes of youth. One minute they’re hurtling along at 100 miles per hour, as on “Poison Pens” and “Black Rain”, the next, they’re plying tender country laments over cheating exes (“Crickets”), and glamorous piano ballads about the necessity of survival (“I Choose To Live”). They touch on every nuance in between, too: “Suzanne” is operatic, “Down Below” triumphant, and “Hiding With Boys” is a perfectly puppyish pop-punk devotional.

A furious return to form for the veteran goth punks.

Pallbearer’s third album stretches the Arkansas outfit’s brand of doom metal to mountainous new heights. More polished—but no less punishing—than *Sorrow and Extinction* or *Foundations of Burden*, *Heartless* is a gleaming bulldozer of a record, shifting effortlessly from the operatic melancholy of “Cruel Road” to “A Plea for Understanding,” which blows out the spacey grandeur of Pink Floyd to nearly 13 minutes.

Pallbearer’s third album, Heartless, is an inspired collection of monumental rock music. The band offers a complex sonic architecture that weaves together the spacious exploratory elements of classic prog, the raw anthemics of 90’s alt-rock, and stretches of black-lit proto-metal. Lyrics about mortality, life, and love are set to sharp melodies and pristine three-part harmonies. Vocalist and guitarist Brett Campbell has always been a strong, assured singer, and on Heartless, his work’s especially stunning. This may in part be due to the immediacy of the lyrics. Written by Campbell and bassist/secondary vocalist Joseph D Rowland, the words have moved from the metaphysical to something more grounded. As the group explains: “Instead of staring into to the void—both above and within—Heartless concentrates its power on a grim reality. Our lives, our homes and our world are all plumbing the depths of utter darkness, as we seek to find any shred of hope we can." Pallbearer emerged from Little Rock, Arkansas in 2012 with a stunning debut full-length, Sorrow and Extinction. The record, which played like a seamless 49-minute doom movement, melded pitch-perfect vintage sounds with a triumphant modern sensibility that made songs about death and loss feel joyfully ecstatic. Pallbearer possessed what many other newer metal groups didn't: perfect guitar tone, classic hooks, and a singer who could actually sing. For their 2014 followup, Foundations of Burden, the band worked with legendary Bay Area producer Billy Anderson (Sleep, Swans, Neurosis) for an expansive album that was musically tighter and especially adventurous. Armed with a more technical drummer, Mark Lierly, Foundations feels like it was built for larger shared spaces—you could imagine these songs ringing off the walls of a stadium. It was a hint of things to come. While the debut earned the band a Best New Music nod from Pitchfork and rightly landed the band on year-end lists at places like SPIN and NPR, along with the usual metal publications, Foundations of Burden charted on the Billboard Top 100 and earned the band album of the year from Decibel and spots on year-end lists for NPR and Rolling Stone. Returning to where it all began, the quartet recorded their third full-length, Heartless on their own in Arkansas, and it’s grander in scope, showcasing a natural progression that melds higher technicality and more ambitious structures with their most immediate hooks to date. The collection, which follows the 3-song Fear & Fury EP from earlier this year, was captured entirely on analog tape at Fellowship Hall Sound in Little Rock this past summer and then mixed by Joe Barresi (Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Melvins, Soundgarden). From the gloriously complex, sky-lit opener “I Saw the End” to the earth-shaking (and heartbreaking) 13-minute closer “A Plea for Understanding,” the entire group puts forth the full realization of their vision: More than a doom band, Pallbearer is a rock group with a singular songwriting talent and emotional capacity. Heartless finds the group putting forth their strongest individual efforts to date: Campbell and Rowland, along with guitarist/vocalist Devin Holt and drummer Mark Lierly, turn in peak marathon performances. Both Campbell and Rowland also handle synthesizers alongside their normal duties, and there are plenty of gently strummed acoustic guitars amid the crunchy electric ones, adding a moody, ethereal spareness to the towering metal. The almost 12-minute “Dancing in Madness” opens with dark post-rock ambience and moves toward emotional blues before exploding into a sludgy psychedelic anthem. A number of the seven songs feature a humid rock swagger. By fusing their widest musical palette to date, Pallbearer make the kind of heavy rock (the heavy moments are *heavy*) that will appeal to diehards, but could also find the group crossing over into newer territories and fanbases. After having helped revitalize doom metal, it almost feels like they’ve gone and set their sights on rock and roll itself. Which doesn’t seem at all impossible on the back of a record like Heartless.

A master of showmanship, shock value, and theatrical controversy, Marilyn Manson has unquestionably cemented his place in American pop culture. The Antichrist Superstar’s industrial-strength 10th album is as diverse as it is brash. Bluesy riffs violently fling from beat to beat on the swaggering “Tattooed in Reverse,” the deliberately obnoxious “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” shrieks and shakes with the disemboweling aggression of *Mechanical Animals*’ finest moments, and, in a rare moment of (relative) fragility, Manson pleads for understanding on “Blood Honey,” insisting, “I’m not being mean/I’m just being me.”

It took getting to the end of their second album to remind Royal Blood what they loved about being in a band. The huge success of their self-titled debut in 2014 had thrust bassist and singer Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher into a world of rock stardom they hadn’t planned for, and now they had to follow it up. “We were terrified,” Kerr tells Apple Music. “Suddenly, what we thought was a bit of fun, something our mates would hear, had become this traumatically amazing experience. It was awesome, but after every high, there’s a low.” “Daunting” is how Thatcher remembers it, and as people around them began to bandy about the phrase “difficult second album,” the duo struggled to generate momentum. “It became like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” recalls Kerr. Propelled by a breakthrough in the form of the gnarly rock groove of “Lights Out,” they found forward motion. Their second record’s title might give some insight into Kerr and Thatcher’s warped mindset at the time—“I was in a pretty mad place,” says Kerr—but the songs here chart a thrilling evolution, expanding their drum-and-bass setup with subtle flourishes of keyboards and Rhodes while retaining the epic minimalism of their debut. *How Did We Get So Dark?* cemented Royal Blood’s status as a new rock superpower. “It’s almost like we had to remind ourselves who we were,” says Kerr. “As soon as we put the chemistry of the band as the priority, that’s when the songs began to come to us.” Kerr and Thatcher put themselves through the wringer, but they got there in the end. Here, they guide us through their triumphant 2017 album, track by track. **How Did We Get So Dark?** Mike Kerr: “I think we probably mixed it and finished it days before the deadline. It wasn’t until it was on the record that we had time to sit back and go, ‘Oh. This song is actually really good.’” **Lights Out** MK: “I was doing some writing with a friend of ours, John Barrett, who’s in a band called Bass Drum of Death. I showed him a few ideas I was working on. One of them was the groove of what would become the verse of ‘Lights Out.’ He was like, ‘This is amazing. This has got something to it.’ And I was a bit like, ‘Has it?’ It was nice to have someone who wasn’t in the band, to give us that sense of relief, basically giving you a bit of a hand. This song, for us, was a big slap in the face, like, ‘Wake up. You’re really, really good. Now fucking finish.’” Ben Thatcher: “We were trying to find the blueprint, and when ‘Lights Out’ came, we knew it was a good song and that we just needed to follow up with nine others.” **I Only Lie When I Love You** MK: “I wrote this in an Airbnb in Brighton. I think I was trying to write songs that sounded like The Hives, a mixture of The Hives and a Jack White song. Someone told me this quote: ‘Women fake orgasms, but men fake relationships.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god. That’s brutal.’ I thought of the phrase ‘I Only Lie When I Love You’ and it was so horrible. I paired it with the riff and I was like, ‘Actually, this is really, really sick.’ It was different for us because the song is made up of, essentially, the same riff throughout. We were listening to a lot of songs that did that—hip-hop does it all the time—and we were like, ‘How do you write a song that’s essentially the same the whole way through?’ We realized how much more complicated it actually is. There’s lots of tricks to keep it interesting.” BT: ”It’s quite bold, too. Straight away, it’s in your face. We hadn’t got a song like that, that starts with the words.” **She’s Creeping** MK: “I became really interested in the vocal melody and the bass melody doing two different things and creating two countermelodies. Before, I played riffs and sung over them, whereas this is when I was really getting really into the idea of creating harmonies with the basslines. It was the first time I was singing more falsetto, and I guess that really comes with confidence, and allowing more of my voice to be heard, and more of your influences to be heard. Just getting a bit more comfortable in your own skin.” **Look Like You Know** MK: “This is one of those songs that was trying to reveal itself in loads of other ideas. And it was really the rhythm and the groove of the song that helped it come alive. We started adding keyboards to it and suddenly it felt almost like a James Bond ballad, which was cool. We’d made a whole record with just a vocal and a bass and drums, so adding keys felt fun. But we were very cautious and tried to remain as tasteful as possible, as to what purpose it’s serving.” **Where Are You Now?** MK: “This was written on the road. It was for a TV show called *Vinyl*, which Martin Scorsese was producing. They sent us the trailer for the first series and it was just mayhem in the ’70s music industry, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, trashing shit. I realized that I’m quite stimulated when I see something. It was the first time I’ve written a song with a real brief to it.” **Don’t Tell** MK: “This was another leftover idea from writing ‘Lights Out’ with John Barrett. We were listening to a Beck song called ‘Debra.’ It has a ridiculously high vocal, and John was like, ‘Can you sing that high?’ I said, ‘At karaoke, I can, yeah.’ I think we were writing a song for John, because he was like, ‘Oh man, I want to sing that high on stage.’ But I called him and said, ‘Hey, remember that idea we started? We’ve actually made it a Royal Blood song, believe it or not.’ The solo section was just desperately trying to sound like Jimi Hendrix on a bass and tremendously failing, but I gave it a shot.” **Hook, Line & Sinker** BT: “This was one of the first songs to be written. At that stage, we didn’t know what the second album was gonna be like. When you go back to writing an album, you just want to do the craziest thing you can do. And it was just really heavy. I think the end of this song is the heaviest thing we’ve done.” **Hole in Your Heart** MK: “‘The Keyboard Song,’ as it’s known on tour. ‘Hole in Your Heart’ and ‘Sleep’ were two songs that kept borrowing from each other. We tend to write in puzzle pieces and we wait until we have enough pieces that come together to make a song. And we couldn’t work out which chorus was for what song. At the time it seemed crazy, but we were just like, ‘What if we had most of the track on Rhodes and used a Fender Bass Rhodes?’ Playing different instruments, suddenly you prove to yourself you can actually change quite a lot and it doesn’t change quite a lot. You can actually be more varied and you can’t escape the band’s sound.” **Sleep** MK: “The lyrics are so comically dark. I like the idea of it ending and someone being like, ‘Oh. There’s no hope at the end.’ We already thought the album title was funny, because why would you want to listen to an album called that? What possesses someone to put that on? Finishing it on this is like, ‘Remember: You wanted this.’ This was one of the last songs we recorded. You can probably hear that I’m like, ‘Thank fuck it’s over.’”

Sustained passion and crushing power are the dominant textures emerging from the Essex band’s second album. Credit singer Conor Mason, who lets his multi-octave voice proudly unfurl like a terrace banner. They rock with razor focus and an ear for sublime hooks and audio tricks on tracks like “I’m Not Made By Design” and “Amsterdam.” When they slow it down, like on “Particles,” “Hell, Yeah,” and “Soda,” Nothing But Thieves unlock stadium-anthem levels on par with Radiohead or Keane.

Politically turbulent eras traditionally breed angry, young bands. However, six middle-aged veterans of rap and rock have made one of 2017’s most bracingly polemic albums. Addressing racism, poverty, and social injustice, MCs B-Real and Chuck D retain all their intensity and verve, the latter lacing every syllable with a penetrating, imperious punch. Behind them, founding members of Rage Against the Machine crystallize anger and resistance into razor-edged, metallic funk as if it were 1992 all over again. “Hail to the Chief” and “Unfuck the World” are as zealous as you’d expect, while “Legalize Me” adds an intriguing psych-glam stomp to their sound.

The English quintet have escaped a period of ennui and dissatisfaction that nearly curtailed them for good after 2013’s *Old Souls*. However, their most musically adventurous record yet still finds frontman James Veck-Gilodi processing his demons to transfixing effect. “Fever”’s grungy charge juxtaposes a searingly honest account of alcoholism with one of their most infectious choruses, the homesick “Seattle” tips gracefully into country-rock, and “England” expresses weariness with their homeland over a restless funk-rock groove.

In 2014, Lower Than Atlantis’s self-titled fourth album finessed their emotive grunge-rock into stadium-ready anthems. They return to that territory here, especially with the limber groove and big choruses of opener “Had Enough”. However, “Boomerang” also echoes the artful, digitized pop of The 1975 before “Could Be Worse” confidently merges aggression with invention. “I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore”, meanwhile, is a skilful fusion of raw emotion and orchestral grandeur–the sound of band investigating rock’s possibilities.

The stormy blend of pop-punk and emo surging across Knuckle Puck’s debut carries over to this equally volatile follow-up. “Twist” nearly tears itself apart with cyclonic drum patterns and stuttering start-stop guitars that smack into each other like agitated atoms. Singer Joe Taylor’s lyrics turn inward on numerous songs, especially on the tearing, hardcore-fueled “Everyone Lies to Me” and “Want Me Around,” which addresses the hurdles and losses that accompany maturity.

Myrkur’s second album is a haunting journey into the bad dreams (the title means \"Nightmare\") of Danish singer and multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun. Writing in English for the first time on “The Serpent” and “Funeral” (which features American songstress Chelsea Wolfe), Bruun also uses various Scandinavian languages in her alluring amalgamation of classical music, black metal, and Norwegian folk. With traditional rock instrumentation against a backdrop of strings and her own piano, violin, and nyckelharpa playing, Bruun deftly balances beauty and darkness.

Stone Sour push their catchy hard-rock elements to the front by replacing burly riff-fiend Jim Root with melodic shredder Christian Martucci on *Hydrograd*. A whiplash ode to love and loyalty, “Song #3” soars with passion, while the equally infectious “Taipei Person / Allah Tea\" has Corey Taylor howling about rock ’n’ roll abandon over tight AOR-style solos. Their dark-metal roots pop up throughout, but as “Fabuless” demonstrates, the album is defined by its complex breakdowns.

It’s easy to think of *One More Light* as LINKIN PARK’s pop album: Not only is it their mellowest, but it’s the one where they sound most (relatively) at peace. But part of what made the band interesting is the way they always managed to bring pop to them instead of the other way around. So, while tracks like “Battle Symphony” and “Invisible” fit neatly in the hybridized, post-EDM world of 2010s pop, they’re also examples of one of the biggest rock bands of their time steering their sizable audience in new musical directions. “I’m holding on/Why is everything so heavy?” Chester Bennington sings on “Heavy.” Good question—and from LINKIN PARK, a sign of maturity.

Following 2013’s *Paramore*, Hayley Williams became “tired of self-doubt and losing friends” and considered decommissioning the band. It makes this rich, vibrant, defiantly poppy return as surprising as it is satisfying. On an album indebted to the ’80s, there are echoes of Talking Heads (“Hard Times”) and Blondie’s forays into reggae (“Caught in the Middle”), while guitarist Taylor York’s love of Afro-pop informs “Told You So.” Darker moods sit beneath the shiny surface though, and Williams’ lyrics offer compelling studies of frustration and self-sabotage.

The Japanese band makes alt-rock as scrappy as it is precise.

On their second album as Grave Pleasures, the band formerly known as Beastmilk have revived the infectious post-punk songwriting that made the latter’s *Climax* one of the most compelling records of 2013. Taking their favored nuclear-fallout-as-love-song formula to gloriously catchy heights with “Doomsday Rainbows,” “Be My Hiroshima,” and the highly danceable “Falling for an Atom Bomb,” the Finnish five-piece employ stentorian vocals, thundering bass grooves, and post-apocalyptic beats to detonate a mushroom cloud of modern romance rock.

All Time Low began as windswept emo-pop faves. They’ve taken giant steps towards adulthood, and *Last Young Renegade* shows the lessons learned. “Life of the Party” flicks the light switch on and off, exposing crumpled cans and bodies. They bid farewell to youthful habits on “Nice2KnoU” and cut off bad relationships on “Drugs & Candy.” Their horizons expand with help from Tegan and Sara (“Ground Control”) and the uplifting “Afterglow” shows the band is here for the long haul.