Loudwire's 50 Best Rock + Metal Albums of 2022

For their seventh album, rock troupe Alter Bridge decided to take a different approach from that of their 2019 full-length, *Walk the Sky*. “Before we embarked on the songwriting process for *Pawns & Kings*, we agreed that it was time to pull back a bit on the production relative to our recent recordings,” vocalist/guitarist Myles Kennedy tells Apple Music. “With that said, it was paramount that the riffs and melodies were strong enough to carry the weight without a lot of layers. This approach ended up making the record a little more direct and, to some degree, more aggressive.” You can hear what he means on bombastic opener “This Is War” and the towering, staccato riffs of “Silver Tongue,” among others. “There are still moments where we take advantage of the sonic density multitracking can bring to the equation,” Kennedy points out. “Aspects of ‘Fable of the Silent Son,’ among others, utilize this approach. But we were always cognizant of making sure we brought the arrangement style back around to the parameters established at the beginning of the process.” Below, Kennedy and guitarist/vocalist Mark Tremonti comment on the songs. **“This Is War”** Myles Kennedy: “This came from a dream. It was like the universe dropped it on me. It really pertains to struggles from the inside, like self-doubt, anxiety, or tension. You’re waging war within yourself.” Mark Tremonti: “The riffs, the melodies, and the lyrics are just striking. Since it’s heavier, everybody assumes it was one of mine, but that started with Myles.” **“Dead Among the Living”** Mark Tremonti: “This was one of the songs I brought to the table. I wanted to go back to a ‘Come to Life’-style song. When I think of Alter Bridge, I think of a bunch of different flavors. One of them is a riff-driven, empowering track. It’s important for us. If you’re having a bad day, maybe it gets you motivated or helps you feel better.” Myles Kennedy: “As soon as Mark sent it, I thought it was really groovy. Lyrically, it’s about somebody who gave up on life. This person fails to see his true potential, so you ultimately challenge him to live again. Our fans like this theme, and we’ve had a few of these ‘rock ’n’ roll Tony Robbins’ moments over the years.” **“Silver Tongue”** Myles Kennedy: “This is a theme I’ve touched on a few times in the past because it fascinates me. It’s about a charismatic figure who’s capable of seducing people with what he says. This figure knows he won’t be held accountable because he talks others into doing things and taking the fall.” **“Sin After Sin”** Mark Tremonti: “This is one of my favorites. It’s a captivating story that sets a powerful mood. It started with the drum loop, and I wanted to write a moody and gloomy riff over it. That’s how it came together.” Myles Kennedy: “It’s a journey. It basically calls out someone for hiding their dark character flaws behind a virtuous facade. I’ve had enough situations in my many years on this planet to come across this sort of thing and the hypocrisy of it. The lyrical concept matched the depth of the music.” **“Stay”** Mark Tremonti: “I heard this chord progression in my head. I wrote it down and started singing over it. Myles added the bridge. It has a ‘seize the day’ message between two people.” **“Holiday”** Mark Tremonti: “This was one of the tracks that Myles brought to the table, and I think it’s one of the coolest vocal performances. It has a lot of personality. It’s a fun, upbeat rock tune. It was necessary to lighten the mood here and there.” Myles Kennedy: “When we messed around with it, it became appropriate for this record. From a lyrical standpoint, watching The Great Resignation might have inspired it. After 2020, it seemed as if folks weren’t as interested in going back to the way things were. They were chilling out. A lot of people were asking themselves if there’s more to life than a living. Being a complete workaholic, I can’t say I’d totally abide by the song.” **“Fable of the Silent Son”** Myles Kennedy: “You can hear somebody being honest about past mistakes and saying, ‘Don’t make those mistakes.’ It’s imparting those lessons learned through struggle to someone else, so they don’t have to endure the same pain. It’s just heavy.” **“Season of Promise”** Myles Kennedy: “This has a ’90s vibe to it. It’s the idea of passing on wisdom again. It’s knowledge learned from previous generations being fostered and passed on throughout human history. It’s important. In Western culture, I feel like younger people should listen to the older, wiser folks who have been on the planet a little longer and maybe heed their advice. I’m saying this as an old guy.” **“Last Man Standing”** Myles Kennedy: “From a guitar perspective, this one is really fun. Mark and I got into new territory, and there’s an odd time signature happening. \[Lyrically\], it’s basically about the ambitions of someone who’s willing to sell his soul for material gain. You see it all the time, unfortunately. Once they’ve reached the summit and the pinnacle of life as the last man standing, was it worth it? That’s the theme.” **“Pawns & Kings”** Myles Kennedy: “This is a battle cry for the underdog. You’re not only going to face what could be considered the ultimate challenge, but you’re also going to overcome it. It’s a David versus Goliath story.” Mark Tremonti: “We were blown away when Myles showed it to us. It takes so many twists and turns. We put an Alter Bridge spin on it, but the genius of it came from Myles. It could be the best song on the record, and it’s perfect that \[as the lead single\] it will be the first thing everybody hears.”

Physical editions available here: lnk.to/PawnsAndKings/napalmrecords "Since 2004, ALTER BRIDGE has been one of the most consistent bands to successfully represent the rock and metal communities with their driving melodies, blazing guitar riffs and topical lyrics that resonate with fans around the globe. Their seventh album, Pawns & Kings, continues that trend with 10 unforgettable new additions to their catalog. Coming off the launch of what was shaping up to be one of the band’s pinnacle moments with Walk The Sky (#1 US Billboard Top Albums, #1 US Current Rock and Hard Music, #4 UK Official Charts, #1 UK Independent and Rock/Metal, #5 Official German Album Charts), everything came to a halt as the world would forever be changed due to the events of a global pandemic. The time the members of ALTER BRIDGE spent apart sparked a new fire and heaviness when the quartet comprised of Myles Kennedy on vocals/guitars, Mark Tremonti on guitars/vocals, Brian Marshall on bass and Scott Phillips on drums would reconvene for what would eventually become Pawns & Kings. Teaming with longtime producer and collaborator Michael “Elvis” Baskette, the album shines with massive, menacing arena-ready production while emerging as another sonic testament to the seasoned Kennedy/Tremonti songwriting dream-team. The band deliver three epic anthems, including two that clock in at over six minutes – the reflective and absolutely epic title track “Pawns & Kings”, grim-riffed, progressive influenced “Sin After Sin”, and the emotive eight-and-a-half minute journey “Fable Of The Silent Son.” “Silver Tongue” is backed by a punishing intro riff that gives way to one of the band’s most infectious choruses as Myles Kennedy sings, “Truth of a crime. You can’t outrun. Under the spell of my silver tongue,” while tracks like “Holiday” and “Season Of Promise” ebb and flow within the trademark multi-faceted metallic rock attack that has enchanted ALTER BRIDGE fans for a generation. Songs like “This Is War,” “Dead Among The Living” and “Last Man Standing” showcase the heavier side of a band firing on all cylinders, with soaring leads, hair-raising vocals and introspective lyricism abound. Mark Tremonti helms lead vocal duties on the uplifting track “Stay” – an interchanging of skills that first debuted on the band’s fourth album, Fortress, and continues to this day. Nearly 20 years into their celebrated career, one thing is for sure – Pawns & Kings offers a musical snapshot of a band that shows no signs of slowing down and continues to push itself creatively for the whole world to see. "

On their 11th album, international supergroup Arch Enemy deliver a master class in melodic death metal. With members spread out across Europe, Asia, and North America, the band managed to write and record *Deceivers* during the pandemic. “In some ways, it was business as usual, and we entered a deep artistic zone during the writing process,” guitarist and band co-founder Michael Amott tells Apple Music. “But this time, it was almost crucial for our mental health because when we were making this record, there was so much negativity and uncertainty in the world. I think we all needed this project to give us a focus and a purpose, and I think you can hear that in the album.” Below, Amott and vocalist Alissa White-Gluz comment respectively on the tracks for which they wrote lyrics. **“Handshake With Hell”** Alissa: “I like to let the music set the mood, and in this case the mood was classic heavy metal! What better time to include some powerful belting? Plus, the chanting in the bridge is an interesting feature. I wrote the lyrics based on the current climate of disillusioned personal importance and power. It has been a crowd favorite during our live show.” **“Deceiver, Deceiver”** Michael: “This song is an all-out attack on every level. Musically, it connects the dots between my old punk roots and the heavier thrash/death music I grew up with. The words to this song are mean, nasty, and relatable. I mean, we’ve all been deceived, lied to, and betrayed once or twice in our lives, haven’t we? We recently opened our live show with this in North America, and it was an absolute blast to feel how much it connected with the audience.” **“In the Eye of the Storm”** Michael: “I really enjoy the thunderous groove and melody of this one, and I’m excited to play it live. While writing the words, I was vibing off the music and created a little movie in my head about escaping a very bad situation. But I’m keeping it vague and ambiguous. Read into it what you will.” **“The Watcher”** Alissa: “This is a fast, angry song, and I love to play with phonic elements on tracks like this. These super-staccato vocals are quite challenging but so much fun. I borrowed lots of imagery from old literature to create a pretty complex environment. I wanted it to read like a rebellion against Scripture, and it’s the only song on *Deceivers* that includes this many literary references.” **“Poisoned Arrow”** Michael: “This one started out as a death-metal ballad almost, but it was a little too similar sounding to ‘Reason to Believe’ off our previous album. We reworked the song, and it turned into what you hear now. I would say that this is Arch Enemy at its most melodic, with a healthy dose of melancholy in the lyrics.” **“Sunset Over the Empire”** Michael: “We had parts of this song for many years—I remember jamming on the verse riff with Daniel \[Erlandsson, drums\] well over 10 years ago. Sometimes that’s how it is—you just can’t find the right context for the musical idea, and it’s never a good idea to force it. Anyway, finally it all came together for this one in a big way. I love the aggression and big, epic chorus with the chant. The lyrics talk about disillusionment regarding real change in corrupt societies around the world—sadly, a subject that is always relevant, maybe more so now than ever?” **“House of Mirrors”** Alissa: “The haunting, spiraling sound of the opening guitar riff immediately inspired me to write something psychological. The way the chorus settles into a perfect head-banging tempo and groove while the melody builds tension is the perfect lyrical companion, highlighting the way humans become comfortable with the familiar, regardless of how disturbing that might be. The metaphor of the house functions to symbolize the way we are both sheltered and trapped in our own minds and bodies.” **“Spreading Black Wings ”** Michael: “This is a unique song for Arch Enemy for a couple of reasons. To begin with, it doesn’t feature a single guitar solo, and it’s actually the first time I wrote a lyric about the Devil, Lucifer himself. I had fun playing around with the words, trying to avoid the worst clichés on the topic. Ultimately, it turned out to be a song about believing in yourself and, essentially, being your own god—which has always been my personal philosophy. At the time of writing this, my old friend LG Petrov \[ex-Entombed\] was battling cancer and, sadly, ended up leaving this world. I added the line, ‘Do not fear to tread the left-hand path’ as a nod to him, and the song is dedicated to his memory.” **“Mourning Star”** Michael: “We have a tradition of featuring shorter instrumental songs on our albums, with the intention of adding dynamics and tension to the overall picture. This one was written mostly by Daniel, but I had a small part of adding some extra spice to it and went a bit Ritchie Blackmore on the solo.” **“One Last Time”** Michael: “I remember putting together a demo of this with Daniel during a writing session in early 2020. The song felt powerful then, and I still dig it a lot. Lyrically, it’s an uplifting theme about overcoming struggles, ignoring the naysayers, and it never being too late to make a positive change in your life.” **“Exiled From Earth”** Alissa: “I felt it was important to give the climate crisis the spotlight for at least a moment on this album. Nihilism is at an all-time high, with good reason. We are all aware that it may be too late to reverse the damage we have caused, and that we are responsible for our own mass extinction. I wanted to take this wealth of hard truths and create something beautiful instead—the soundtrack to a marching exile from the planet we destroyed.”

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

You don’t become one of the most commercially successful metal bands of all time, or a fixture of rock radio, without putting in the work; you certainly don’t stay one without evolving your band’s sound. The Chicago nu-metal outfit kick off their eighth studio LP with industrial-noise, thrash-y electronics before marching into their characteristic chugging guitars. Thematically, “Hey You” and the majority of the 10 tracks on the release are centered on modern culture—“partisan tribal warfare,” as vocalist David Draiman has put it. Frustration makes for inspiration: The release is all fist pumps and fast riffing. A few tracks nod to their 2000s alt-metal (“Bad Man,” “Love to Hate”), and the sole collaboration on the LP, “Don’t Tell Me,” has Heart’s Ann Wilson duetting with Draiman—two of rock’s more distinctive voices meeting in a glorious heavy ballad.

Everywhere you look these days, hyper tribalism has taken hold. Those in power continue to use fear and hate mongering to further empower themselves, continuing to try to turn us against one another. Pick a subject…any subject, and those who wield power will do all they can to make it a divisive issue, encouraging people to pick a side, insisting that their viewpoint is the only correct one. This record is a critique of this dangerous status quo we are living in. - Disturbed

Over the course of 30 years, Eddie Vedder has evolved from wild-eyed spokesperson for a generation to spotlight-allergic grouch to, slowly but surely, one of rock’s elder statesmen—a guy who can comfortably share a stage with Bono, The Boss, and JAY-Z. And though his second solo outing (2011’s aptly titled *Ukulele Songs*) showcased his gentler side, its follow-up is more diverse: a panoramic sprint through blistering punk (“Power of Right”), classic pop (the Elton John-enriched “Picture”), road-ready anthems (“The Dark”), and the sort of tender ballads he’s penned for Pearl Jam this side of the ’90s (“The Haves”). Most of all, Vedder—long seen as self-serious by some—sounds like a kid in a garage here, calling out to ground control from the cockpit on “Invincible” or shooting himself out of a cannon on “Try.” It sounds like he’s having *fun*.

Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Zoltan Bathory says the band’s ninth album is his favorite so far. “I believe *AfterLife* isn’t just an evolution but possibly even a paradigm shift in our career,” he tells Apple Music. “This record is so vastly different from all the previous ones, yet it is still unmistakably us.” Indeed, the meaty grooves of “Welcome to the Circus,” “Roll Dem Bones,” and “IOU” will surely satisfy longtime fans of the Las Vegas metal squad, while the album’s lyrical themes take on a global perspective. “We believe the spiritual-intellectual trajectory of the planet has been rapidly shifting, and it is changing the conversation about our ‘agreed-upon reality,’” Bathory observes. “Since every album is a time capsule, in some way *AfterLife* is a snapshot of that change, so naturally it was destined to be different.” Because FFDP vocalist and lyricist Ivan Moody doesn’t like to explain his lyrics, Bathory walks us through his thoughts on the tracks. “It’s a picture of what the words mean to me, as I am, too, just one of the listeners when it comes to the lyrics,” he says. “Of course, I probably have a better guess than most, but the magic of this is that it’s still just a guess, which leaves space for your own interpretation.” **“Welcome to the Circus”** “This is a straight-up arena banger plowing through a not-so-subtle social commentary about the epic clown show we are all living in today. Addicted to likes and thumbs-ups, people really will do just about anything for that digital dopamine.” **“AfterLife”** “At one point, you’ll have to decide if the world is happening to you, or you are happening to the world. Time to move past the ‘prayers and wishes’ and actually use that free will you were fortunate to be born with and *do* something. Make your plans your wishes and make your actions your prayers. You are here to manifest. Your time is short here on Earth. You don’t wanna wait for the higher power to intervene on your behalf.” **“Times Like These”** “It’s the artistic way of saying a giant turd-meteor is on a collision course with the fan and almost everyone is ignoring it. The world is too noisy or too busy to notice, let alone care. You wanna grab and shake people and wake them up, but it seems futile, so you just have to let it burn.” **“Roll Dem Bones”** “It’s an old-school Five Finger Death Punch smasher. Musically speaking, it’s a flashback to our first two records. It’s about that moment when you finally smash the eject button. Sometimes you just have to get rid of certain ideas, ideals, situations—or just the wrong people from your circle.” **“Pick Up Behind You”** “Everybody has that one friend or relative that keeps stumbling and falling down. You have to pick them up and glue the pieces back together, but they keep doing it and it’s harder and harder to be there for them. The more you care, the more damage they cause—and yet, out of loyalty, you pick them up anyway.” **“Judgment Day”** “This is one of the most adventurous songs on the record. Sort of a musical kaleidoscope of sacred geometry, Hemi-Synched minds, and the strange world of the machine-elves. Something you will all experience when Judgment Day comes and you cross into the afterlife. Were you good, bad, an angel, the devil, or a saint—it all ends the same.” **“IOU”** “This track is about entitlement. The world owes you absolutely nothing. So, just like every other creature that was ever born, you just have to stop whining and figure out how to survive. Between the lines, I think I can hear Ivan extending his middle finger toward some well-deserving individuals.” **“Thanks for Asking”** “Metaphorically speaking, what is your heaven and what is your hell? Sometimes the line gets blurred between the two. You all have been in that relationship, friendship, or job where you stayed much longer than you should have because, most likely, you got addicted to the drama or the pain. Heaven or hell, you can’t tell which is which.” **“Blood and Tar”** “Ivan is throwing some verbal darts in this one. In every situation, everyone has their own perception about past events—everyone is either taking credit for certain things or pointing fingers at each other and passing the blame. But when and if they realize that we—people in general—are all mad in some way, then ‘life stands explained.’” **“All I Know”** “You don’t think you are crazy, but how would you know? There is that moment when you start maniacally laughing into the face of adversity because you have been living in hell so long that nothing can scare you anymore. ‘The devil you fear is all I’ve ever known.’ If you recognize that you hit rock bottom and the only way is up, then you have nothing to lose and there is a lot of power in that.” **“Gold Gutter”** “This one is another old-school piece. It’s about the outcasts and the black sheep, the ones who were not born with the silver spoon in their mouth. No matter how far you came, how far you are reaching up, you never forget, and ‘they’ will never let you forget where you came from. So, even if your fist is in the gold, your foot will always be in the gutter. And that’s OK.” **“The End”** “On Earth, there are no survivors. Death takes out everyone. Both physically and metaphorically, everything is trying to kill you; everything is trying to take you out—be that your life, job, career, social position…you are always under attack, there is always a struggle. ‘The End’ is about the acceptance of the battle we have had to wage from the moment we came into the world. So, let the arrows fly—we won’t go down easy. It’s not over until it’s over.”

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

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

Platinum-certified and twice GRAMMY-nominated Michigan powerhouse I Prevail are back with their third full length offering on Fearless Records. The new record, once again produced by Tyler Smyth, features stadium-sized riffs and unforgettable melodies that will camp out in your brain for weeks at a time. The band combines screamed vocals that crawled from the depths of hell with soaring vocals and intimate lyrics resulting in an album that resonates with the listener in the most personal way.

“Every time I go in, I\'m trying to do something I haven\'t done before,” Jack White tells Apple Music. “And it\'s not like something that *other* people have never done before. It’s whatever it is to get me to a different zone so I\'m not repeating myself.” On *Fear of the Dawn*—the first of two solo LPs White is releasing in 2022, and the first in over four years—that zone is the world of digital studio effects, new territory for an artist who’s long been an avatar and champion for all matters analog. Here, working in lockdown and playing most of the instruments himself as a result, White’s challenged himself to make a rock record that’s every bit as immediate and textured as what he’s made before. The guitars are scrambled and fried, blown out and buffed to an often blinding shine (see: the crispy title track; “The White Raven”). Keys squiggle and giggle (“Morning, Noon and Night”), drums stutter and skitter and hiccup (“That Was Then, This is Now,” “What’s the Trick?”). It’s a real studio record, saturated and collage-like—White flexing his muscles as a producer. “I don\'t know how many, but there\'s dozens and dozens of tracks,” he says of the recording process. “I never used to do that. I made mistakes—I would play drums last, which you\'re not supposed to do. But then I started to feed off of that. I liked that it was wrong. It\'s nice that time goes on and you get better at certain things in the studio.” And having been so dogmatic from the start—famously dedicated to tape, vinyl, and primary colors—White sounds free to experiment on *Fear of the Dawn*, whether he’s dusting off a Cab Calloway sample and joining forces with Q-Tip for “Hi-De-Ho” or pasting together shards of radioactive guitar and mutating vocals on “Into the Twilight.” But that doesn’t mean he’s any less disciplined. “It\'s delicate—when you have eight tracks only, there\'s not much you can do,” he says. “If someone says you can have as many tracks as you want, now you got to be your own boss. You got to be hard on yourself. All the years of the razor blade editing gets you to a point where I don\'t want to waste my energy on that when I could put that energy to this now.”

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

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

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

After the release of their 2016 album *Dystopia*, metal masters Megadeth went through some drastic lineup changes. First, session drummer Chris Adler (formerly of Lamb of God) was replaced by longtime Soilwork drummer Dirk Verbeuren. Then, Megadeth ringleader Dave Mustaine fired longtime bassist Dave Ellefson and brought in Testament’s Steve DiGiorgio to play on *The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!* “Having a new rhythm section doesn’t affect how I approach things, but it certainly changes the way things are approached,” Mustaine tells Apple Music. “When you have different people involved, there’s going to be different recording techniques and different psychology involved. In that situation, communication is one of the most important things.” Below, he comments on each song. **“The Sick, the Dying ... and the Dead!”** “The lyrics are about the Black Plague and how critters on a boat brought the disease onshore. It\'s also about that really morbid child\'s nursery rhyme, ‘Ring Around the Rosie’: ‘Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies.’ The ‘rosies’ were the scars on your face from the disease, and the posies were to cover up the stench of all the dead bodies everywhere. The end of it, ‘Ashes, ashes, they all fall down’: Well, everybody\'s falling down because they have the plague, and you have to burn the bodies. So, that sweet little nursery rhyme isn\'t quite so innocuous.” **“Life in Hell”** “The title ‘Life in Hell’ was tongue-in-cheek about *To Live and Die in LA*. I liked that movie, which was about somebody who was so self-absorbed that all they think about is themselves. This song ended up not being even close to what the movie is about, but \[that was the initial inspiration\].” **“Night Stalkers” (feat. Ice-T)** “This song was written about the helicopter special ops forces up in Fort Campbell. Some friends of mine were pilots there—they have since retired, but they were really important in a lot of the rescue missions and famous raids. It\'s a great inspiration to see people who can endure life-threatening situations and basic training that’s basically a freckle away from torture. It’s a different breed of person that’s able to endure it. Ice-T is a part of the song because he was in the military, too. When I first met him, he told me he was a ranger. I thought that was pretty badass.” **“Dogs of Chernobyl”** “It\'s basically about a relationship that ends, and the person is going through the feeling of abandonment. One moment, he\'s in a relationship. The next moment, the significant other is gone out of his life forever and there\'s no explanation. Essentially, that\'s what I felt when I watched the specials they had on Chernobyl. One was a sci-fi movie about these four kids that go to see the nuclear meltdown site, and they come across these dogs. I just thought about how awful it must have been to be a dog in that situation, where your caretakers just leave them. What do they do? I wrote down, ‘You left me like the dogs of Chernobyl,’ and that was the germination for the whole song.” **“Sacrifice”** “Years ago, I went to an after-hours party in Los Angeles. There were some famous musicians there, and one of them was wearing these expensive sunglasses. I don’t know how they ended up on the ground, but I remember seeing another guy go over and step on them. I remember thinking, ‘That’s so uncool.’ And this guy who had the sunglasses was like the Michael Jordan of guitar players, so obviously the other guy felt threatened or intimidated. ‘Sacrifice’ was inspired by a song that the guy with the sunglasses wrote many years ago.” **“Junkie”** “This song is about somebody who has character traits that lead them to live their life in excess. When you\'re just starting out in life and you get around the wrong people, you start having some areas of your life ruined. When I was little, my mom would say, ‘Show me your friends and I\'ll show you who you are.’ I thought, ‘Mom, stop.’ But when I looked at that sage advice from my mom, there were a lot of friends I had that needed to go. Once you make some of the necessary changes that you need to make, it makes things way better.” **“Psychopathy”** “‘Psychopathy’ and ‘Killing Time’ are a one-two punch. The beginning of ‘Psychopathy’ is obviously about a psychiatrist talking about the dangers of mental illness and how often people will get misdiagnosed. I’ve had a lot of things said about me because of my health when I got cancer, when I got married, when I got saved, and I\'ve just grown accustomed to the fact that whatever I do, people are going to talk.” **“Killing Time”** “If I\'m in a relationship with somebody, they\'re always going to put their best face on when we first meet. But then when stuff starts to get a little sticky, you start to see who people really are. ‘Killing Time’ has nothing to do with killing—it’s about procrastination. It’s about people who are lackadaisical and waste their time. But time is the most valuable thing we have in this world. How many beats of the heart do I have left? How many breaths I am going to take before my last? How many times will I get to say ‘I love you’ again to my wife, to my kids, to my fans? I don’t know, but I’m going to cherish every moment.” **“Soldier On!”** “If you look at the lyrics on this, it clearly tells you who it is \[about\]. If you\'re part of the inner circle here, if you know what\'s been going on over the past 10 years, you\'ll be able to recognize some of the shenanigans that were taking place in the band and in our presence, and sometimes behind our backs, too. ‘Soldier On!’ was one of those things where I knew that in order for me to continue to experience any happiness in the world, I was going to have to walk away from the relationship that I had. It was much like ‘Tornado of Souls.’ If I told you ‘Tornado of Souls’ is a failed relationship song, most people would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t get that,’ but it’s the truth.” **“Célebutante”** “I had heard Yngwie \[Malmsteen\] when he first came over to the United States—he was an artist that Mike Varney had signed. Back in the Metallica days, James \[Hetfield\] and I went over to Varney’s house to go meet this Yngwie dude. He wasn’t there, but his cabinets were. He had ‘666’ painted all over his cabinets, and I thought, ‘Oh, boy.’ I ended up meeting him later, and I think he’s a brilliant guitar player.” **“Mission to Mars”** “This was inspired by all the sage wisdom from TED Talks and a lot of other discussions about space travel. I remember going down to NASA in Houston because the Japanese had sent a professor into space to blow bubbles to see if bubbles were capable of being blown in zero gravity. I said, ‘You\'re kidding. You\'re spending 15 million fucking dollars to send a scientist into space on our space shuttle to blow bubbles?’ One of the astronauts’ wives heard me on the air and took exception and invited me to come down there. I don’t really know much about what I saw, but it looked like there was a bunch of stuff going on that we couldn’t even fathom. It’s exciting, the space race.” **“We\'ll Be Back”** “This is about persevering in the end. You know you can\'t hold me down, and no matter what, I am not going to give up. The things you can count on in this world are death, taxes, and Dave Mustaine coming through any kind of hardship.”

“The album is very much based on the time spent between realities—real life and pandemic life,” Motionless In White vocalist and ringleader Chris “Motionless” Cerulli tells Apple Music about the band’s sixth album. Through their dramatic fusion of metalcore, industrial, and gothic influences, Cerulli and his bandmates examine the impact of lockdown on a personal and collective level, as well as the unending social and political turmoil taking place in America. “At the start of the pandemic, it began to look like the end of the world,” Cerulli tells Apple Music. “Everybody freaking out, total chaos, all these different negative aspects coming to light in terms of how things are handled, the people in power, George Floyd—and just the sheer pandemonium of everything. At the same time, my personal experience during that time frame was really dark with emotional and mental trials. I thought it would be cool to split the lyrical content between my observations of the world ending and the end of my world internally.” Below, he describes each track. **“Meltdown”** “I wouldn’t say this is tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic, but certainly it’s one of those ‘we’re so fucked, I’m just laughing at what’s going on’ kind of things. I wanted to make a song that felt like, musically and melodically, we were placing you inside that scene in a movie right before everything comes to an end and collapses—the camera’s shaking, everything’s getting crazy and frantic. The lyrics are kind of looking at it like we’re invited to an end-of-the-world party.” **“Sign of Life”** “This comes from feeling like, ‘How am I going to get myself out of this and find that sign of life within me during all this darkness?’ I felt dead inside, at times, because I didn\'t really have much of a will to do anything and felt just hopeless. I was trying to look for and cling onto any sign of life within myself and to push out the negative side that was kind of taking over.” **“Werewolf”** “I think this is the band’s favorite track on the record—it’s definitely mine. We wanted to create an iconic Motionless song. We feel like we have a lot of good songs, but we don’t have an *iconic* song yet. This was an effort to create something that felt like you’d never heard anything like it but branded as Motionless’ icon song. It’s very Michael Jackson- and very Muse-inspired, which are two very different but very similar artists in our opinion. We wanted to do something that felt like Motionless joining them.” **“Porcelain”** “This is the companion track to ‘Werewolf.’ Both of them are about the conversation between the two parts of myself. I have my normal, compassionate self that I typically live my daily life with. Then I have what I think is a really ugly side of myself, which is really angry with explosive rage. That side of myself has ruined things in my life many times because it just takes over, and I can’t control it. In my therapy sessions, we refer to it as the werewolf because it’s appropriate to my personality, being a big fan of horror and Halloween and everything. So, ‘Werewolf’ and ‘Porcelain’ are essentially the same lyrical track split up over two songs.” **“Slaughterhouse” (feat. Bryan Garris)** “During the pandemic, I was made a lot more aware. I had a lot more time to focus on tons of injustices around the world—in this song’s case, specifically the US. The biggest target of the song would be capitalism and how that affects everybody in such a negative way. We live a life where a system is in place to make the rich richer. We’re essentially the products in a slaughterhouse. They’re selling our lives and our essence to make money off it. I’m fucking sick of it, and a lot of people are sick of it.” **“Masterpiece”** “It’s hard for me to let go of stuff and not ruminate on negative emotions that I have about myself, and that got really bad over the pandemic. ‘Masterpiece’ is asking myself and others for forgiveness for all the damage I’ve caused in my life—all the way from relationships and friendships to my relationship with myself and my own happiness and well-being. It’s really just an open letter saying, ‘Can you forgive me? Can you get past this? And how do I get past it?’ It’s just a big plea for forgiveness.” **“Cause of Death”** “This is a companion track with ‘Sign of Life.’ It’s somewhat similar to the ‘Werewolf’/‘Porcelain’ concept where it’s two people communicating with each other, but it’s two sides of myself. That’s the common thread that exists between all of the personal songs—they’re all written from one side of myself to the other. It’s about these two sides squaring off and fighting to the death, trying to bury one another and take over.” **“We Become the Night”** “This is similar to ‘Slaughterhouse,’ where it just tackles more of what’s going on in the world. The chorus is dedicated to the people that *don’t* live their lives like this. This is for the people that are on the right side of history and want to make the world a better place. We stand together to be positive and resist all the tyranny that we face. That’s the general essence of the song.” **“Burned at Both Ends II”** “The original ‘Burned at Both Ends’ turns 10 this year. I wasn’t waiting on the anniversary or anything, but once I started to think about the lyrics for this song, I felt like it was a perfect time to do a sequel. I feel like the original was a very underrated track that has very similar lyrical content to what I was trying to do with this record. And 10 years later, I’m still dealing with the same shit. So, I wanted to write about how far I have—or haven’t—come in 10 years.” **“B.F.B.T.G.: Corpse Nation”** “B.F.B.T.G. is ‘Broadcasting From Beyond the Grave,’ which is a song we did in 2019. But this isn’t a sequel like ‘Burned at Both Ends II’—it’s a series. I thought it would be really cool to have a recurring song title across albums where it’s essentially a unique episode each time. I don’t recall seeing that done, so I wanted to try it. This song was very heavily written by our bassist, Justin Morrow, and it’s a big fuck-you to QAnon. It’s just a huge middle finger to people who perpetrate insane lies and misinformation to hurt the reality we live in.” **“Cyberhex”** “During the pandemic, I reached out to fans and just let people know that I was struggling. I think I was just looking for support and for people to let me know that they still care about the band. It’s really weird—I’ve never felt like reaching out for support like that, but I was at such a low point that I did. The reaction that I received was overwhelming positive energy. I was so grateful for that, I wanted to write a song based on how I felt about it. So, I imagined a cyberwar between good and evil and wrote this song to the fans to stand together and help each other out through all of the evil shit happening.” **“Red, White & Boom” (feat. Caleb Shomo)** “I think this is the weirdest song on the record. It kind of happened piece by piece in ways that just did not fit together, but then somehow fit together. It felt very punk rock, like, ‘Let’s fucking rip it up.’ When I think about bands in the rock world that are doing that right now, I think of Beartooth and Caleb. I wanted to have him feature in the song to kind of put the cherry on top of the feeling it gave me. It’s loud, in your face, and doesn’t give a fuck.” **“Scoring the End of the World” (feat. Mick Gordon)** “The title track is similar to ‘Cyberhex’ in that it’s about people that are fighting the good fight for our world and making sacrifices that might be tough but are actually beneficial to humanity. ‘Cyberhex’ is more from the personal side, and this song is coming from the observational side and feeling proud to be part of that group of people that are writing the end of the world as we know it, to then make a better one out of the ashes. Mick Gordon is one of our favorite composers—we play all the games he writes for—and he ended up transforming what I thought was a really good song into a great song.”

“We’ve always tried to create a weird world with our lyrics, so it’s not the same thrash-metal themes about nuclear war or the president sucks again.” So says Municipal Waste vocalist Tony Foresta about *Electrified Brain*, which takes its title from a lyric on the Richmond, Virginia, thrashers’ 2005 breakout album. “We have, like, six or seven running themes on our albums, and that one’s from the ‘Deathripper’ storyline that started on *Hazardous Mutation*,” Foresta tells Apple Music. “We also do Kurt Russell songs—although not on this album—and songs about Municipal High, which is a fictional high school we made up. On our seventh record, we still crack up about some of the dumb shit we think of. Wait, not dumb shit—I mean brilliant shit.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Electrified Brain”** “This is part of the storyline from ‘Deathripper,’ which was the first song on *Hazardous Mutation*. There’s a lyric about ‘seeking out justice with an electrified brain,’ which is where the title comes from. We made a video for this song that’s out of control. Norman \[Cabrera\], the director, is a fucking genius. It’s kind of cool and inspiring to have a visualization of someone else’s take on the lyrics.” **“Demoralizer”** “Lyrically, this is about overcoming obstacles—not just overcoming them but obliterating them. I got the concept from when we had these basketball tournaments in Richmond. If you were up by, like, eight points and then, instead of getting the last point to 21, you shoot a three-pointer just to shove it in someone’s face even further—we call that ‘the demoralizer.’ I think it’s one of the stronger tracks on the record. It’s got a real old-school Metallica vibe to it.” **“Last Crawl”** “This is one of our obligatory drinking songs—there’s a few more, of course. It’s just about looking out for each other when you’re out late at night and everyone is raging. You’ve got to keep track of your surroundings and make sure everyone gets home safe. It’s like a youth-crew song, but it’s about going the long haul at a bar.” **“Grave Dive”** “This one is \[guitarist\] Ryan \[Waste\]’s baby. He wanted to write a song about digging up our dead fans and throwing their corpses into the audience—so, instead of ‘stage dive,’ it’s ‘grave dive.’ I think I said somewhere that it’s supposed to be an inspirational song for the kids or some dumb shit like that, but corpses in the mosh pit is actually what it’s about.” **“The Bite”** “Blaine from The Accüsed does guest vocals on this. The Accüsed are a huge inspiration to us, which is probably obvious to anyone who listens to heavy metal. The other fun thing about this song is that our drummer, Dave Witte, wrote the lyrics, and then I adjusted them to fit the song. Sometimes it sucks writing lyrics because we have so many fucking songs on every record, so I was stoked that he wanted to do this. It’s about the lawnmower scene in *Dead Alive*.” **“High Speed Steel”** “We have a couple of heavy metal-leaning songs on the record, all written by Ryan, and this is one of them. He wrote the lyrics to this one, too, and he likes writing songs about heavy machinery going fast down roads. If you’re a fan of his other bands, Bat and Volture, I think both of those bands have songs about being in a car and driving fast. So, this has got that rolling-down-the-street, running-over-shit vibe to it.” **“Thermonuclear Protection”** “I think this was kind of inspired by Dog the Bounty Hunter—it’s not actually about him, but it’s more about that type of dude. Not the racist shit, but the persona, if that makes sense. I always wanted to write a song called ‘Thermonuclear Protection’ because of the Oakley ads I saw when I was a kid. Whenever I see a guy like that, I’m like, ‘Don’t fuck with that guy. He’s got thermonuclear protection.’ So, it’s not about Dog per se, but that kind of energy.” **“Blood Vessel / Boat Jail”** “This idea came from when we played one of those metal cruise-ship things, like Barge to Hell or something. I was sitting at the bar with Tomas from At the Gates and our friend Greg when we saw this dude on the ship just punishing everybody and throwing shit around, just being a total piece of shit. Then these big guys came out of nowhere and took him away. We never saw him again for the rest of the four days we were on the ship. So, the song is about partying too hard on a boat and getting sent to boat jail.” **“Crank the Heat”** “I always wanted to write a seasonal song, like ‘Cruel Summer,’ you know? Especially living up north, you’re pent up all fucking winter, just waiting to get out. But this kind of means a little extra because everyone has been pent up for two fucking years. Now everyone is going out to the festivals and having a good time—everyone’s just extra excited to see each other and be out again. So, this is a positive, fast thrash song, like, ‘Let’s get up and go outside.’” **“Restless and Wicked”** “That’s another one of the heavy metal songs that Ryan wrote. I like singing over his version of writing. When he writes this type of song for Bat, it’s for him to sing, but when it’s for us, I’m obviously singing it. I also really like how the vocals came out on this one. I was doing something a little different than what I normally do. To me, it’s a standout track because it sounds way different than our other shit and it’s really catchy.” **“Ten Cent Beer Night”** “This is about an event that happened in Ohio in the ’70s. It was based around a feud between the Texas Rangers and the Cleveland Indians. They got into this gnarly fight during a game in Texas, and both teams were talking shit before they went to Cleveland. I’m gonna fuck up the story, but basically the stadium decided to serve 10-cent beer in order to pack the place, and shit just escalated into a huge riot with fans storming the field, throwing shit, and getting naked. It got to the point that the players who were fighting each other had to team up to fight their way out.” **“Barreled Rage”** “This song is cool because \[bassist\] Phil \[Hall\] sings on it. He doesn’t sing on many Waste songs, but I always encourage him to because he’s, like, the evil genius of the band. He writes a ton of shit and has a lot of input on our records, but he likes to sit back in the cut. Another cool thing is that Phil and Witte teamed together to write the lyrics. They’ve never done that before. The title is a beer reference, obviously.” **“Putting on Errors”** “I did an interview with someone in Europe yesterday, and I had to explain that this is a play on ‘putting on airs.’ They had no idea what I was talking about, but the song is basically saying that we’d rather be fuckups than what society deems proper. I feel like it fits the band pretty well. It’s actually a really chaotic song, but it has some cool sing-along parts. We got Barney from Napalm Death to do guest vocals to make it extra confusing.” **“Paranormal Janitor”** “Hopefully, we’ll do a TV series about Municipal High one day. There’s definitely a lot of shit we could work with there. This is about a person who is sentenced to work as a janitor at Municipal High for eternity. They’ve gotta pick up grime and shit and slime and trash and whatever else. We’ve got some spooky sound effects in there to get the vibe we were going for.”

“It was nice to actually find something that we weren\'t good at, and actually try and get really good at it,” Muse singer Matt Bellamy tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Because metal, it turns out these metal players are absolute geniuses.” He is, of course, referring to “Kill or Be Killed,” arguably the heaviest track in the English rock band’s 28 years and nine studio albums. In many ways, it sets the tone for *Will of the People*, Muse’s ninth full-length and first LP in four years: They needed to sound louder and angrier than ever before, because they’re no longer writing about future anti-utopias—the struggles are here, now. “It feels a bit closer to reality this time,” Bellamy says. “I think in the past, a lot of our stuff\'s kind of delved into fictional dystopia, like George Orwell.” Now we’re in it, and so are the songs: The Queen-esque “Compliance” takes aim at a culture of bad-faith actors; “Liberation” is glam rock against disinformation. Frustration abounds, and the band has never sounded so large. “If I had to pick one thing that I\'m fighting for, it\'s can we create a revolution? Can we create change here, where it isn\'t violent and it doesn\'t lead to an authoritarian vision? We\'ve still got ideas and things we want to do that we haven\'t done yet. So we\'re excited for the future.” Below, Bellamy talks through some of the tracks on *Will of the People*. **“Will of the People”** “Our generation has seen this huge change. Something’s going on in the West—a kind of collapse, a kind of division has been emerging. And now we\'re dealing with real external threats. We just feel like we\'re a part of this generation where something\'s going to go down in a major way.” **“Liberation”** “It’s idealistic, but I always try to have some hope that these two schools of thought, which are opposing each other in the US right now, can come together. The question is, is there any common ground here that can be found to bring these people together? I think the common ground is that there\'s a need for systemic change, like in the way politics is done, potentially. I think the democratic structure is amazing in \[the US\], but as everyone knows, the lobbyists, there’s so much corruption there.” **“Ghosts (How Can I Move On)”** “That one is an unusual one for us. I was surprised that \[drummer\] Dom \[Howard\] and \[bassist\] Chris \[Wolstenholme\] even wanted that on the album. During the pandemic, I did a couple things on my own, just on the piano, acoustic. This song was in my mind in that world: me on the piano, singing alone. It really is a direct expression of that loneliness, and also the tragedy of what was happening for so many people.” **“Kill or Be Killed”** “It\'s the first death growl ever on a Muse record. Well, the \'ugh!\', it just came out like a high-pitched falsetto wail. Whenever I go loud, that’s where it goes. That is us going, \'Okay, if we\'re going to go heavy, let\'s go heavy.\' Dom had a different kit for everything, pretty much. But I was really pushing him on the double bass drum stuff.” **“We Are Fucking Fucked”** “That\'s the anxiety. Right there. There you go. That song literally sums them all up, I think. I don\'t have it very often, but if I did ever have a moment where, late at night, I can\'t sleep, and all those thoughts start going around, like, \'What\'s going on? All these natural disasters, all this stuff that\'s happening, civil unrest, blah, blah, blah.\' It puts you into a panic. That song was written literally at that moment.”

On their 10th studio album, Canadian rock band Nickelback set their sights on heavy metal. Opener “San Quentin” is a high-octane moment in the band’s discography, a hulking narrative written from the perspective of an inmate, with a shredding chorus. Released five years after their 2017 full-length LP *Feed the Machine*, an album that doubled as a miracle following singer Chad Kroeger’s vocal cord surgery, *Get Rollin’* is a bold release from a band that’s only more successful than they are divisive. Elsewhere, Nickelback touches on stoner country rock (“High Time”), indulges in screamy gang vocals and hair-metal riffs (“Vegas Bomb”), and delivers on the stadium-sized rock ballads they’re best known for (“Does Heaven Even Know You’re Missing?”). At the emotional heart of the release is “Steel Still Rusts,” an acoustic song that thoughtfully details the challenges combat veterans face when returning to civilian life.

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

“We’re making a fresh start with the experience we’ve gained in the US,” Taka of ONE OK ROCK tells Apple Music. *Luxury Disease* is the band’s 10th album and first in three and a half years. “As I reflected on our past, I remembered that when we released our first album in Japan, *Zeitakubyō* \[2007\], we were in a similar situation where we felt uncertain about lots of things. So, this time, we’ve translated \[the ethos of\] *Zeitakubyō* into English to show that we’re determined to do our best on the world stage.” Taka says their previous modern pop album, 2019’s *Eye of the Storm*, played a huge role in getting to this point. “Years passed without a resurgence of rock culture in the US, and we wanted the emo and punk scenes we admired so much to make a comeback,” he says. “However, we felt that it wouldn’t make sense for us to suddenly start making rock music in the US, as we lacked the knowledge and experience to do so. Convinced that maybe rock could be revived once again, we wanted to make an album that captures the essence of rock music.” *Luxury Disease* was produced by Rob Cavallo, who has led Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and many other bands to worldwide success. Before recording began, Cavallo interviewed ONE OK ROCK about what kind of album they wanted and what message they wanted to convey. During these discussions, Taka recalls, he spent lots of time reflecting on the music. “It takes a lot of ‘rehab’ to swing so far from the pop style of the previous album to a new album with an extremely rock-centered theme like this one,” he says. “We were also influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, so we felt lots of emotions which were both negative and positive. It was important for the band’s future and for my own self to be able to face those feelings as we produced the album.” Although ONE OK ROCK is a world-renowned rock band, “we are by no means supermen or heroes,” says Taka. “Like everyone else, we started from nothing with a dream and we believe that if we keep on doing what we do, there will be something left as a result. Believing in this while doing what we do is what brings me joy every day.” He shares his thoughts about some key tracks from *Luxury Disease* below. **“Save Yourself”** “We’ve kept this song for quite a while, but it was rather difficult to produce and a lot of trial and error was involved. I was already thinking about making the album in a rock style, but creating this song really sealed the deal. We decided to make this the first single from the album, with the hope that everyone would get the message that ONE OK ROCK has made a comeback with this one.” **“Neon”** “I co-wrote this track with our labelmates Panic! At the Disco’s Brendon \[Urie\] and his producer Jake \[Sinclair\]. We make our recordings at the same place as they do, so when I happened to bump into them one day, I shared this song with them to see if they had any interesting ideas, and they came back with a completely different chorus. It was also their idea to put the word ‘Shibuya’ in there. The word was included to show how the glittering, neon-lit city of Shibuya has become very quiet since the pandemic happened.” **“When They Turn the Lights On”** “I kept musicals in mind when I sang this song. Rob is a legendary producer who is well-versed in Queen and 1970s and 1980s rock, so I knew he liked operatic songs like this one and I knew I’d get a good reaction out of him when I made it.” **“Let Me Let You Go”** “This song came from sessions with Colin \[Brittain\], whom we’ve worked with for quite a while; Ashton \[Irwin\] from Five Seconds of Summer, whom we toured with; and more. Ashton is actually a close neighbor in LA. I remember Colin calling me and saying, ‘Dude, we have to make a session. Let’s write a song together.’ I was like, ‘Sure, let’s do it.’ The songwriting session was very exciting and I got great rock ’n’ roll vibes from them. After finishing the song, I felt if I did more writing sessions with various rock musicians, I could succeed in making a rock album that was full of good vibes.” **“Prove”** “Failure is always part of pursuing a dream, so there’s a risk when claiming something will succeed, since it might very well fail. However, I think people can really grow and develop when they use strong words and actions, and doing this can help them keep their motivation high. When I sing in this song, I’m partly singing it to myself, and I hope that I can give something back to our fans by showing them how we’re moving towards our goals.” **“Mad World”** “Now that I’ve had enough time to resolve the issues, frustration, and despair I had when I was about 15 years old, I decided to look back on my old self and take on the challenge of writing the story. As a musician, I think it’s important to cherish the fragile nature of adolescence. I, too, always refer back to the impact that rock music had on me and I try to include elements of that when I perform onstage.”

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

More than two decades after 2000\'s slashing \"Last Resort\" made them stars, Papa Roach continue to fly the nu-metal flag while using savvy collaborations to keep their music sounding fresh. With their 11th studio album, the Vacaville, California, group once again work with songwriters Nick Furlong and Jason Evigan (who also contributed to the preceding *Who Do You Trust?* and *Crooked Teeth*), while welcoming new faces such as producer/writer WZRD BLD (ICE NINE KILLS, Silent Planet). The result is an album that illuminates the band\'s strengths: aggressive hard rock (as heard on the groove-heavy rap-rock standout \"Bloodline\" and electro-shocked \"Dying To Believe\") and, on the flip side, introspective ballads (such as the solemn \"Leave a Light On\"). *Ego Trip*\'s major highlight is the hip-hop-influenced \"Swerve,\" which features livewire frontman Jacoby Shaddix going toe-to-toe vocally with FEVER 333\'s Jason Aalon Butler and rapper Sueco. \"Swerve\" isn\'t just a generation-bridging song—it\'s a sterling example of how Papa Roach sound as energized as ever.

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

“One more time, for whatever reason, the universe saw fit to inject this band with another giant shot of plasma,” Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis tells Apple Music. “Left to our own devices, we probably would\'ve withered on the vine somewhere along the line, as we all do at some point. But it wasn\'t quite time for us to do that yet.” The shot of “plasma” that Kiedis is referring to is, in large part, the (second) return of guitarist John Frusciante, after roughly a decade away. You can immediately hear the difference—in the aqueous funk of “Poster Child,” the stadium-ready swings of “These Are the Ways,” or the acoustic phrasing of “Tangelo,” the album’s delicate closer. “It\'s so clear when he writes and when he plays,” Kiedis says of his bandmate, whose guitar work proved galvanizing on career highlights like 1991’s *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* and 1999’s *Californication*. “It\'s really fun to listen to because it’s sound and emotion and color. He\'s not trying to play the right notes—he\'s just trying to play the notes that are truly him.” Also back in the fold: producer and honorary fifth Chili Pepper Rick Rubin, who—absent on 2016’s *The Getaway*—accompanied Kiedis to Kauai for a songwriting retreat that was unexpectedly extended by lockdown. “Nobody could come, nobody could leave,” Kiedis says. “It was six months of being in the land that time forgot.” For the five of them, the aim was simple: Be together, play together, and, in Kiedis’ words, “write and write and write and write. Maybe we\'ll keep all of it, maybe we\'ll keep some of it. The process that it had to go through to become this record was very democratic in the sense that we all voted, including Rick.” The result is 17 songs that pay tribute to the veteran outfit’s chemistry and affection for one another, a magnetic coming-together that’s apparent anytime they play. “We\'re older and different, and enter *Unlimited Love*, a really fun and wild experience,” Kiedis says. “We accept each other and we love each other and there is an endless friendship going on there—which is not to say that we want to hang out every day. It\'s nice to go away from it and come back to it, go away from it and come back. But it never dies.” Here, Kiedis takes us inside a few highlights from the album. **“Not the One”** “This idea came out from ‘I think I know who you are, but maybe I don\'t. You think you know who I am, but maybe you don\'t.’ Especially in intimate relationships, we all present something and people always have an idea, but what would happen if we just showed each other our very worst from the very start? Like, not trying to impress each other, or just ‘I’m kind of a fuck-up and here\'s my weak suit and my flaws.’ And then we would never have to discover that down the line and go, ‘What?’” **“Poster Child”** “I didn\'t think that the music from ‘Poster Child’ was going to survive, because Flea brought in two painfully funky basslines on the same day, and they weren\'t similar, but the way I was hearing it was like, ‘I have to choose. My plate\'s too full.’ And so I chose the other one, which ended up becoming a song called ‘Peace and Love’ that didn\'t make the record. The one that I thought was the superior funk was not the superior funk, and then it just took me a long time of living with this music before I found my place. I can\'t say that any of them were really a struggle or a battle, but it’s the one that I was surprised came to life.” **“These Are the Ways”** “That\'s a song that John brought—the arrangement and a version of that melody. I’m never able to recreate his melodies perfectly—he\'s just on a different melodic level—so I usually put it through a simplification machine. I didn\'t overthink it. It was the first idea that came to my mind when I heard that arrangement, which is very bombastic and almost like a huge classical orchestra, exploding and then going way back. It was a reflection on life in America, but not a good or a bad reflection—just, this is it. We might be bloated, we might be overloaded with more than we can handle, and let\'s just take a step back and rethink it just a little bit. But it’s not ‘this is wrong and that\'s right.’ It\'s just ‘this is who we\'ve become.’”

Unlimited Love is Red Hot Chili Peppers' twelfth studio album, released on April 1, 2022 and coming six years after their previous full-length effort, The Getaway. The record also marks the return of two key figures in the band’s history: guitarist John Frusciante, who re-joined RHCP in 2019 and scores his first contributions since the band’s 2006 LP Stadium Arcadium, and long-time producer Rick Rubin, who returned to work with the group after a whopping eleven years (since I’m With You came out in 2011). RHCP started recording and working on the album in 2021, at Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu: a initial selection of around 100 tracks was trimmed down to slightly less than 50 recorded songs, 17 of which would eventually make the cut for the album’s final tracklist, while “Nerve Flip” would be the bonus track added to the Japanese Import of the album.

“We were not thinking about making a new album at all,” Scorpions vocalist Klaus Meine says of the fateful day in 2018 when Germany’s biggest rock band decided to do just that. “We have such a huge back catalog, so we could probably be touring forever and ever.” Then a longtime friend—and diehard Scorpions fan—from Athens, Greece, encouraged them to write something in the anthemic, MTV-storming style of their ’80s classics *Blackout* and *Love at First Sting*. “He said this is what the fans want to hear from us,” Meine tells Apple Music. “We thought, well, that’s 40 years ago—come on! But he threw this challenge at us and then we decided, okay, let’s go for it.” The result is *Rock Believer*, their first new studio album in seven years, which recaptures their triumphant ’80s sound amazingly well. It’s also their first album with all-star drummer Mikkey Dee, formerly of Motörhead. “Having Mikkey in the band was really like a shot of fresh energy and great fun,” Meine says. “We recorded the basic tracks all together in one room, and I think it shines through when you hear the songs.” Below, he discusses each song on *Rock Believer*. **“Gas in the Tank”** “Usually, \[guitarist\] Rudolf \[Schenker\] sends me some demos and I start writing lyrics, but this time I started writing lyrics first, so it was all upside down. I sent them to Rudolf when he was down at his studio in Thailand, and he would come back with some killer riffs. It was like, ‘Hey, there’s still gas in the tank, my friend!’ So we rocked through this very difficult lockdown times.” **“Roots in My Boots”** “With the new songs, we wanted to go back our roots. We simply wanted to reactivate the original Scorpions DNA—great riffs, strong melodies. We tried to bring that feeling into the studio by playing all together in one room. We’re so connected with our music still, after so many decades, and this is the most important part. This is ‘Roots in My Boots.’” **“Knock ’Em Dead”** “This is about when we played in the US for the first time back in ’79. For a German band like us to play in the US was like a dream, you know? Our first time was in Cleveland at a huge stadium show with so many great bands—Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, Journey. We were the first band early in the morning, and our manager said before we walked out, ‘Guys, go knock ’em dead.’ We had only 30 minutes, but it was a magic moment for us.” **“Rock Believer”** “Over the years, again and again, we heard them say rock is dead. But there\'s still millions of rock believers around the world that prove them wrong. Our fans are the best in the world, and when you think about shows like Hellfest in France, where we\'re booked for this year, there are more than a hundred thousand tickets sold already. Wow. So that means rock is very well and alive. So this album is dedicated to all the rock believers out there.” **“Shining of Your Soul”** “There is a reggae kind of feel to some of this, and when it came up, of course it reminded us of ‘Is There Anybody There?’ from the \[1979\] *Lovedrive* album. Someone asked me who the reggae guy is in the band, and for sure it’s Rudy who came up with this. The song is very hooky, and it’s one of the very few love songs on the album. Sometimes a person enters a room and you can feel how the atmosphere is changing, you know? It feels like the shining of a soul. That’s what the song is all about.” **Seventh Sun** “When our friend from Athens said in 2018 that we should make another album like *Blackout* or *Love at First Sting* or *Lovedrive*, automatically you think about songs like ‘Animal Magnetism’ or ‘China White.’ They’re very heavy, but they have this kind of laidback feeling. So we were focused on this, and then Rudy came up with this heavy riff in ‘Seventh Sun’ that carries the whole song. It’s in the best tradition of those big classic songs.” **“Hot and Cold”** “This is one of the songs \[guitarist\] Matthias Jabs came up with, and I think it’s a cool uptempo rocker. The song takes you to a strip joint on the dark side of town, where you come down with a crazy fever, hot and cold, because you cannot stop thinking of all the craziest things she might do onstage swinging around the pole. The connection to write those lyrics came from when we would go to strip clubs in the ’80s, and many girls would dance to Scorpions songs. One of their favorites was always ‘The Zoo,’ but we never thought about strip clubs when we were writing that song.” **“When I Lay My Bones to Rest”** “This is a fast rocking track, and it has really great power. I think Mikkey was in a Motörhead mood on this one. It’s a song about my songwriting partner Rudy and myself, after all these years of Scorpions. It’s a song that proves we are still rocking like hell. I think it’s one of the songs on the album where our fans will be surprised that we came up with something in the best tradition of songs like ‘Can’t Get Enough,’ for example.” **“Peacemaker”** “I was just playing with words, and I came up with the line ‘Peacemaker, peacemaker, bury the undertaker.’ In times when so many people are dying because of the worldwide pandemic, devastating war, and other crimes—the scenarios we see in Belarus, Ukraine, and Afghanistan—it seems like the undertaker is working overtime, you know? But we think the peacemaker should rule the world. And it’s all up to us to support the peacemaker in order to make the world a better place.” **“Call of the Wild”** “That’s a bluesy song that makes you feel the heat of the night on your skin. It’s got a heavy guitar riff and a groove. It’s another love song, but it’s more of a sexy love song. ‘You’ve got the funky rhythm, girl. I got the rocking drive.’ Nothing more to say. I think you got it.” **“When You Know (Where You Come From)”** “This is the only ballad on the album. The song is saying that it’s important to be true to yourself. If you reach out for the stars on your way up, you should never forget where you come from. Travel the road of respect and laughter and you always know where you’re going. This actually started out as an acoustic song—the acoustic version is on the deluxe version of the album—but we liked it so much we made a rock version.” **“Shoot for Your Heart”** “This was really the song that I wrote first, back in 2019. It kicked off the process of writing lyrics. And in this case, I wrote the music as well. It’s another fan-related song in the tradition of ‘Can’t Live Without You.’ We can’t live without our fans. When we’re on the road, our only goal to achieve every night is to have a place in your heart.” **“When Tomorrow Comes”** “It’s a very uptempo song with unusual lyrics. It was our producer’s idea to record the vocals in the verses so it almost feels like a megaphone. It’s very much an environmentally inspired song—the dirty ocean, climate change, so many wildfires and disasters around the world. Some of it was written during the lockdowns, and it is directed to the young generation to take good care of our planet. You hold the key for the future and hopefully you’ll be smart.” **“Unleash the Beast”** “That’s a crazy little song that was very much inspired by going from lockdown to lockdown. We were in our own little bubble in the studio here, trying to get away from the cruel reality of the pandemic. ‘We keep dancing in the dust until the super-spreader kills us all’ is one of the lines there. It sounds like a bad movie from the ’80s, but I’m afraid this is 2022, and this is the world we live in.” **“Crossing Borders”** “This is another song Matthias came up with. In the world of music and the world of emotions, there are no borders. When we’re rocking the global stage, we’re crossing borders every other day, leaving our comfort zone. But this song is more about sex and rock ’n’ roll, I think. This is another bluesy type of song, and Mikkey and our bass player Pawel came up with a great rhythm for this.”

“The record is about not losing our humanity. It’s about not bowing to chaos.” That’s Shinedown frontman Brent Smith talking about the Florida rock band’s seventh album. Written during the pandemic, *Planet Zero* captures their perspective on the world-altering events of 2020 and 2021, and how those events were filtered through the media. “The process of this album was looking at the decay of society and the way the internet, the news, and social media affect everybody,” Smith tells Apple Music. “If we don’t try to understand each other, even if we disagree, we’re not going to have a future. The only way to do that is to communicate and be respectful.” Below, he talks about some of the album’s key tracks. **“2184”** “The intro is a bit of an homage to *1984*—Orwell’s book, not necessarily the Van Halen album, which is also badass beyond belief. But the album starts with that kind of ’80s synth feeling, where we want the listener to be like, ‘What are they doing? What is this?’ And then, the next song hits like a sledgehammer.” **“No Sleep Tonight”** “This is a rallying cry to society. At the end of the day, for us, it’s all about the people of the planet—not just the United States or one specific country. The chorus is making a point: ‘We’ve had enough of being powerless/We’ve heard it all and we’re not impressed/We are the nightmare that brought you to life/So, don’t turn out the light/Because there’ll be no sleep tonight.’ Because we’re coming for you. What are we coming for? The truth. And there’s more of us than you.” **“Planet Zero”** “‘Planet Zero’ was written at the beginning of the pandemic. It felt like the world had gone back to the beginning almost. It was like this awful reset button, but not to the benefit of society or the public. It almost felt like all the knowledge that we had of life and existence and common sense was thrown out of the window. It just felt so surreal, like the world had started over on some kind of catastrophic, weird planet. That’s why the song’s called ‘Planet Zero.’” **“Dysfunctional You”** “We’ve been writing about mental health in Shinedown for the better part of 20 years, even before it was a headline in the media. One element of this band is that we want people to be themselves because we’re all a work in progress. If people don’t agree with you or don’t understand you, or they think there’s something wrong with you, celebrate that. Because there’s no right or wrong when it comes to an individual. You have to feel comfortable in your own skin and your own heart, your own mind, body, and soul.” **“A Symptom of Being Human”** “This kind of lives in the same world as ‘Dysfunctional You.’ We have a staff of about 70 amazing men and women with us when we’re on tour. Some of them have been with us for the better part of 15 years, and part of this song was inspired by them. There’s a line that says, ‘I got my invitation to the lunatic ball/And my friends are coming too/How about you?’ And that really is about all the people in our lives who inspire us to be better individuals. It’s also about finding your true friends, the people that mean the most to you, that you want to share your existence with.” **“Daylight”** “This is about the people or the elements in your life that get you to tomorrow. It could be your wife or your brother or your sister or your best friend—anyone or anything like that. You know, the thing that motivates you to get up in the morning. It could be your dog. It could be your favorite coffee place that you go to in the morning for 30 minutes before you go to your job because it gives you some serenity before you have to tackle the day. The song really was a gift to the record because it was written in about 25 minutes.” **“The Saints of Violence and Innuendo”** “That song is about the media during the pandemic and watching what almost felt like some kind of horrific movie. I spent 28 weeks in California during the pandemic before I was able to leave. Every day, I would wake up in this hotel like, ‘This isn’t really happening. It’s all a dream.’ But then, I’d turn on the TV and there it was. The song came from feeling that the media was trying to scare everybody, like, ‘We’re all doomed!’ I remember thinking they should stop scaring people and start giving people the confidence to educate themselves about what’s actually going on. I don’t mean *all* media, by the way. But the media I am talking about, they know exactly why I’m talking about them.”

On his fourth album with Alter Bridge vocalist Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators, Slash delivers what he describes as their most spontaneous collaboration yet. The perpetually top-hatted guitarist brings some of his inimitable Guns N’ Roses grit to lead single “The River Is Rising” while unleashing hooky, soaring hard rock on “Call Off the Dogs.” Elsewhere, the sentimental “Fill My World” might seem like it’s about a romantic relationship between humans, but Kennedy actually wrote the lyrics from the perspective of his beloved Shih Tzu, Mozart.

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

“Our main lyrical concern is just writing about death—not necessarily dying or anything being killed, but shit about dead stuff.” That’s what Undeath guitarist and main lyricist Kyle Beam tells Apple Music when asked about the theme of the band’s second album, *It’s Time…To Rise From the Grave*. Building on the breakout success of their 2020 debut, *Lesions of a Different Kind*, the Rochester, New York-based death metal crew honed their songwriting into a tighter and even more effective verse-chorus-verse format this time out. “We just wanted to take what we had before, make it a bit more concise, a bit more focused, to make sure the songs really stand on their own,” Beam says. The album even has a loose storyline that reads like *Army of Darkness* meets *The Terminator*. “It’s basically about dudes in hell equipping undead soldiers with sick guns,” he offers. Below, he discusses each track. **“Fiend for Corpses”** “We get a lot of comparisons to Cannibal Corpse just because we love them so much. I’d say this is the most Corpse-esque song on the record, so it had to be brutal lyrically. It’s a song about digging up bodies in the cemetery and banging them and eating them. It’s the first track on the record, so we just wanted to set the tone.” **“Defiled Again”** “When you first read the title, it sounds way more brutal than the song actually is. You’re kinda like, ‘Oh, no. Is this a sexual assault song or something?’ I didn’t mean for it to sound like that—I just wanted it to be brutal. The lyrics are just about reading a spooky book in a cemetery. It’s not the main character’s first time reading this book, and every time he reads it, it’s like his mind gets melted by the eldritch truth.” **“Rise From the Grave”** “This one is like the modus operandi of Undeath lyrics. It’s just skeletons with bronze swords and shields and bows and arrows, and they’re fucking clambering over parapets to get your village. It’s the title track, basically.” **“Necrobionics”** “This song gets into the nitty gritty of how the army of the dead is outfitted and equipped in the next track, ‘Enhancing the Dead.’ It was inspired by this game Quake 4, where your character is human in the first part. In the second part, he gets captured by alien forces, and they cut off his arms and legs and attach sick robot arms and legs so you can reload faster and run faster—all kinds of shit. But you don’t even have to be alive for it to work.” **“Enhancing the Dead”** “This one is sort of the overarching story of this conflict. The first lyrics are, ‘Cities of life, now cities of dead, bolstering the undead army,’ because the more people fall, the bigger the army gets—and eventually the whole planet is done. There’s nothing left, so they take off, onto the next planet. When they peace out, the lyric is like, ‘Take this foot beyond this earthly realm,’ or some shit like that.” **“The Funeral Within”** “This one is about going crazy. It’s about the death of oneself on the inside because of all the terrible things you’ve done.” **“Head Splattered in Seven Ways”** “This is about an interrogation. It was really inspired by Cannibal Corpse, too, because they have a track on *Kill* called ‘Five Nails Through the Neck.’ It’s the fifth song on that record, and a couple parts of the song are in five. Ever since I was a kid, I just thought that was the coolest thing. It’s kind of nerdy but brutal at the same time. So, ‘Head Splattered in Seven Ways’ has got seven syllables in the title, the whole song is in seven, and it’s the seventh track on the record.” **“Human Chandelier”** “If Corpse did this one, I like to think it would be about how this guy’s actually going out and killing people, taking their bones, and making them into a chandelier. But it’s actually a tamer track for us, lyrically and musically. Maybe not intensity-wise, but harmony-wise. It’s less grammatically dense and less atonal. It’s about a guy who lives alone in this dark-as-fuck mansion like *Beauty and the Beast*, and he goes to the local cemetery to pick out bones for the human chandelier he’s building. He’s not malicious—he’s just a weirdo.” **“Bone Wrought”** “Most of the riffs on this song are from our bass player, Tommy \[Wall\]. I gave him some direction for the lyrics, but he wrote those as well. I think they’re some of the best lyrics on the record. It talks more about how the army of the dead are forging the weapons they use.” **“Trampled Headstones”** “The lyrics to this one are kind of goofy. It’s about a cemetery cult who eat flesh, but they also eat gravestones. They can’t get all their nutrients just from eating each other, so they eat rock as well. They take bites right out of the headstones.”