Loudwire's 70 Best Rock + Metal Albums of 2020

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

Following up 2015’s oneiric modern classic "The Dreaming I", AKHLYS present the eagerly anticipated "Melinoë" - five paeans of hypnotic, metamorphic and dangerously addictive Black Metal titled after the Orphic Goddess, bringer of nightmare and madness. The most group-oriented iteration of AHKLYS to date here channel the structural arcs of dream experience as they weave martial drumming, swarming counterpoint guitars, spellbinding dark ambient textures and vocal paroxysms of euphoric terror into layered, multi-faceted songs that perfectly juxtapose meticulous craftsmanship and frightening pandemonium. Spiritual, mythic, emotional and physical, with "Melinoë" AKHLYS have deepened the mystery to draw yet more inside a new way of dreaming. In the words of the band’s prime architect Naas Alcameth: “From the gates of slumber, where succubi perch betwixt wakefulness and dream, to the dark lands beyond, where nightmare daemons and the gods of terror preside, Melinoë serves as noctuary, hymnal and sojourn.”

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

On their first album in five years, LA metal veterans Armored Saint deliver an updated version of their classic ’80s sound. *Punching the Sky* sees vocalist John Bush and bassist and main composer Joey Vera addressing society’s ills on “End of the Attention Span” and “Missile to Gun” while paying tribute to fallen neighbors on “Unfair” and offering a glimmer of optimism with the anthemic “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” Meanwhile, the song “Bubble” took on a prophetic tone when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. “These songs were written before the pandemic, but it’s weird how some of them take on different meanings now,” Bush tells Apple Music. “That’s the beauty of music and art. It can constantly take on a different face depending on the way life goes.” Elsewhere, Guns N’ Roses keyboardist Dizzy Reed contributed to “Fly in the Ointment” and “Lone Wolf.” Below, Bush discusses each track on *Punching the Sky*. **Standing on the Shoulders of Giants** “I originally didn’t want to have this song first because it’s the longest song on the record. But Joey thought we should open with it, and I agreed because it’s a great song and it’s very, very classic Armored Saint-sounding. The lyric and title came from a quote I read—I think it was from Isaac Newton. The idea is, you’re standing on this mountain that’s giving you a great view of the landscape, and you’re also on a giant—someone who inspired you—and you’re standing on their shoulders, so you’re even higher. It gives you a better perspective of how you want to conduct your life. It’s a way to remind yourself to do right and be a better person.” **End of the Attention Span** “Smartphones and computers basically do everything for us, and it’s affecting people’s focus. There are certainly amazing pluses to technology, but we’ve got to find the balance so computers don’t do everything for us and actually impede our growth and progress. There’s one verse of the song where I poke fun at people at the show who watch the band through their phone. Like, ‘You’re at a concert and you’re staring through your screen?’ It’s bizarre. On the other hand, I’m grateful when people record shows, because if I want to look back on something, I can usually find the show.” **Bubble** “The verses on this song have a big open-air kind of sound—a lot of space to sing through or over. It was challenging, but I liked it. Lyrically, it’s kind of about getting into a secret world—it could be a political world or an elitist club that alienates other people. It could be a circle of friends that you’re trying to break into. And then there’s a reversal as you say to yourself, ‘Oh, I see this now and I don\'t think I like this anymore and I want to get out of it.’ And then there’s this difficulty that you may find trying to get out of this world that you wanted to get into—the bubble. Again, all these songs were written before the pandemic happened, so it’s weird because now we’re seeing that term used all the time.” **My Jurisdiction** “This is a hard rocker with a big, cool riff. It sounds like vintage Saint, but modern. \[Drummer\] Gonzo \[Sandoval\] playing the ride cymbal brings this giant groove when he locks in with Joey. I think it’s a funkier way of playing than a lot of metal bands do, and we try to embellish that. There’s little shades of Aerosmith, too. Lyrically, I was caught up in all the political upheaval that’s taking place and just the silliness of it all. Whether it’s the courts or the government, you think, ‘I don’t even want to be a part of it because I just think it’s a mockery.’ It’s not directed at one particular political arm or anything—I just think sometimes the whole thing is ridiculous.” **Do Wrong to None** “The very beginning of this song is a recording of this weird creature, and we still don’t know what it is. We were in Italy doing a show near this boggy creek, and this animal sounded really scary so we recorded it. Then the song goes into a drum march, which Gonzo does with Jacob Ayala, the son of a good friend of ours. Jacob was in marching band in high school and he’s really talented. Some people have said the riff here has shades of \[Pantera’s\] ‘Cowboys From Hell.’ I don’t think that was intentional, but perhaps there’s a little inspiration there. The title is a Shakespearean quote that I felt was really fitting for the times we’re in.” **Lone Wolf** “I love this song—it’s one of my favorites on the record. I’ve said it’s like our Faith No More meets Earth, Wind & Fire meets Armored Saint kind of song. The background vocals that Joey did on the chorus are huge—it sounds like something you would hear on an Earth, Wind & Fire record. The verses have this bluesy thing that reminds me a little bit of Faith No More. Lyrically, it’s for the people who are on their own and don’t have a family or siblings or really good friends. I have a family now, but I was single for a long time in my life, so I can relate to the idea that you need to be strong to get through life if you don’t have the luxury of a support system.” **Missile to Gun** “This might not sound like a peace song musically, but it is. The first verse was inspired by one of the numerous school shootings that have happened. In the old days, if you had beef with somebody, you would pick a fight with them—or not, depending on your size. I’m a small guy—I haven’t had many fights in my life. But with a gun, you don’t need to be big. You can take out a lot of people, including the person that might be bullying you or whatever. The chorus is asking, ‘With more powerful weapons, are we possibly regressing?’ You can go as far as a nuclear missile, but reverse it all the way back to throwing stones at each other. We still act like cavemen but we’ve got insanely powerful weapons.” **Fly in the Ointment** “I think this is one of those songs that’s a sleeper. I really love this one—it’s got a big riff and a huge chorus. The title comes from the idea that no matter what happens, there’s always a fly in the ointment—something that is the irritant, the thing that prevents things from going smoothly. Like sometimes you get a flat tire on your way to work and you’re like, ‘Fuck, I don’t have time for this!’ and then you’re late and your boss is giving you shit. I actually wrote almost all of the lyrics when a pipe broke in our house in Big Bear and water leaked all over, so it’s got some references to the road signs you see on your way up there, like ‘Icy Conditions’ and things like that.” **Bark, No Bite** “There’s a lot of humor in this one, which I think Armored Saint doesn’t get enough credit for. And certainly there’s a little bit of Thin Lizzy influence with some of the double guitar leads and melodies. They’re probably one of the most underrated rock bands of all time as far as I’m concerned, and we channel our best Lizzy whenever possible.” **Unfair** “We’ve written numerous ballads in our past, but this one really had this melancholy feeling to it. And coincidentally, a tragedy happened right around the time that Joey gave me the music for this. These two children that my daughter went to school with were killed in a car accident. It was a drunk driver that killed them, but the parents survived. We’ve all had people around us die, and you try to find the silver lining, but with this it was just impossible. I felt I had to write about it, and I played it for the parents kind of reluctantly because I don’t want them to think I’m trying to capitalize on this tragedy, but I also wanted them to know I was paying tribute to them. So we dedicated the song to them, and I think it ended up being one of the best things we’ve ever done.” **Never You Fret** “We wanted to end the record on an uplifting note after ‘Unfair.’ Gonzo had this idea of playing a Native American flute on this, which really changes the color of the song in a cool way. And those monk voices are actually Joey, which I didn’t realize until he told me—I thought he pulled them off some chant record. To me, this song has a slightly Ministry feel, because it’s just relentless. Lyrically, I just wanted to write a song about our band and how, no matter whether we play in front of 10,000 people or 10 people, we bring it. It’s just who we are. We’re not always tight, but we always give it our all.”

Pennsylvania metalcore stars and two-time Grammy nominees August Burns Red didn’t plan to have a theme for their eighth album, but that was before co-lyricists Brent Rambler (guitar) and Matt Greiner (drums) discovered that they were writing about similar ideas. “Matt and I don’t write lyrics together,” Rambler tells Apple Music. “When we were reading through them, we noticed the theme of the Good Samaritan helping someone, or reaching out in a time of need. So that’s where the title *Guardians* came from, and it’s a loose theme that appears throughout the record.” You’ll hear it specifically among the hammering grooves of “Defender,” the winding guitar lines of “Paramount,” and the soaring vocal melodies of “Lighthouse,” though it creeps into other songs as well. Rambler breaks it down for us below. **The Narrative** “‘The Narrative’ is more of a political song than we\'d normally write, but it doesn\'t pick a side. It\'s about how today you get pandered to, I think, more than we ever used to. You can just go online and the only things that\'ll show up in your news feed are things that you agree with—because if you don\'t agree with something, you\'re not going to click on it. So the song is encouraging people to maybe go outside of their personal box a little bit more and dig deeper into things, because you might learn something more than what you are currently comfortable with.” **Bones** “This is a really cool, thrashy song—I think it’s a little bit different for August Burns Red. The idea behind the lyrics is that a lot of times you tend to look at the way other people live and think that your version of life is better than theirs. Sometimes we’ll send people to other parts of the world to try and make the people more like us, without taking in the fact that most people are really happy with their existence. From colonialism to the way we came in and took over the Native Americans, we have a human history of it. But I think having different cultures is cool. I’d like to see other cultures celebrated versus constantly assimilating.” **Paramount** “The song ‘Paramount’ is about finding hope in a situation when you’re really struggling. Sometimes you can feel indifferent towards things that used to make you really happy, so it\'s about relighting that fire and trying to get yourself excited about the things in life that you may have put by the wayside. It’s about finding the person who will guide you through that and who can reinvigorate your life.” **Defender** “Matt wrote that one, and it’s about him going through his divorce and how he reached out to his father in that specific time of need and his father ended up being a big beacon of hope for him. He was the one who helped keep Matt grounded throughout the entire process. He was, for lack of better words, his defender—the one who was there for him, to make sure he was levelheaded and making good choices and not letting anger guide him through an extremely difficult part of his life. We actually kicked around the idea of calling the record *Defender* for a while, but then we tend to not like title tracks.” **Lighthouse** “‘Lighthouse’ is a song that is critical towards the church, which is supposed to be compassionate towards those in need. It’s also about how you don’t have to throw money at something to be generous—it’s more important to give your heart to something than it is to just throw money at it and hope it goes away. And it’s about how the people in your life who you view as heroes generally aren’t people who are famous. Nowadays you see a lot of people, when they do a good deed, it’s posted all over the internet. Was the point of that good deed to actually help someone or to gratify yourself?” **Dismembered Memory** “This song is about someone I know who was going through depression and other things that maybe they didn\'t understand at the time. You trust your doctors to take care of you and make good decisions based on what your current situation is, but in this sad and unfortunate story, the person got taken advantage of because the doctor just wasn’t paying attention to their specific needs. Because of that, the doctor ended up doing more harm than good.” **Ties That Bind** “This is an uplifting song about how the hardest battles in your life, if you go through them with somebody else, can make your relationships stronger. In general, I think the strongest relationships you see or that you have in life are with people that you’ve probably argued with and fought with or gone through a really tough time with. With the guys in the band, we’ve been through so much together and overcome so much that it’s only helped us maintain a stronger relationship.” **Bloodletter** “‘Bloodletter’ is probably the most brutal song on the record, so the lyrics needed to fit the bill. So it’s about how, within the music industry, there’s so many people who take advantage of artists. I think sometimes artists and people who are chasing a dream are easier prey, because when someone comes along saying, ‘I’ll help you fulfill your dreams—you’ve just got to give me my cut,’ most people think that sounds great. With August Burns Red, we’ve been lucky to have a great team of people surrounding us, but so many other bands have gotten taken advantage of.” **Extinct by Instinct** “This song is about how sometimes you have to make a really stressful decision that could be good for you personally but not good for somebody else. Sometimes you need to take care of yourself even though it might be hurtful for other people. It sounds selfish, but I think it can also be really hurtful and detrimental if you’re the one who’s constantly giving and giving in a relationship and you’re not really getting anything in return. So sometimes you have to do what’s right for you, and maybe in the end it’ll be right for everyone.” **Empty Heaven** “Obviously the title sounds terrible, but it goes back to when I was a kid. I grew up in a semi-religious home, and you always heard about how when you die and go to heaven, all of your relatives will be there waiting for you. And I remember thinking, ‘Wait, what if my grandparents are still alive? My mom and dad are still alive. All my friends are still alive. What if I’m the first person to go?’ So it’s about what heaven would be like if it’s just you.” **Three Fountains** “This is about how things in life aren’t as black and white as they seem. It’s about how sometimes you need to take a step back to view things from the right perspective. Sometimes you’re so deep in something that you can’t make the right choice. So it’s okay to take a big step back and reevaluate your choices and decisions from afar. I think we all need to do that sometimes. It can provide a whole new perspective on life.”

“Honesty keeps getting refined with each album,” Avatar vocalist Johannes Eckerström tells Apple Music. “Each one peels away another layer of bullshit from us.” It’s that incremental truth-seeking that propels the Swedish metal band’s eighth full-length, *Hunter Gatherer*. While album cuts like “A Secret Door” and “Wormhole” feature contributions from Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor, lead singles “Colossus” and “Silence in the Age of Apes” stand as propulsive anthems concerning humanity’s struggles with the relentless march of technology. “For the most part of our existence as a species, we lived as hunter-gatherers,” Eckerström observes. “That seems to have been what we were hardwired to be by nature. But as we have evolved, we have slowly made our civilization more and more complex. We’ve created a way of life that is completely detached from where we came from. This album very much tries to deal with what it means to be human right here and now, with all our shortcomings and all the damage that we do.” Below, Eckerström takes us through the keenly observed dystopia of *Hunter Gatherer*. **Silence in the Age of Apes** “It’s definitely one of the songs that is thematically closest to the title of the album. We can\'t go climb trees and call ourselves monkeys and think things will be fine again. There\'s only forward. The future is coming and things are speeding up. Our imminent destruction is accelerating. We now have to start outrunning the clock to reach a better future before everything collapses. That sense of urgency and that need to accelerate and trying to outrun destruction—lots of the emotion of the song comes from there.” **Colossus** “I read about this project where some scientist wants to recreate a fully functioning human brain inside of a computer—like a simulation. That\'s fascinating. Then I start to think that if we are to succeed with that, if something behaves exactly like a human brain, well, it must be a human. We must have created life as we know it, as we perceive it within ourselves. There\'s a sense of existential dread that came with that realization. We’ve named the song after the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven World Wonders. This would be our world wonder—this Frankenstein\'s monster Colossus that we tell to arise. It\'s one of those scary things in the murky waters of ethically questionable science.” **A Secret Door** “This song has a whistling melody that was inspired in part by Ennio Morricone and in part by a Swedish guy called Björn Olsson, who is basically an indie-pop fellow that has done a lot of light, pleasant summery tunes with whistling on them. And we got Corey Taylor from Slipknot to do the whistling. Thematically, it’s about all hope being lost. It does move more in the plane of relationships, when things might look really dark but you try until the bitter end and see something crash and burn completely instead of giving up along the way. Or like going out to the front line of battle knowing you’re going to die there. But you’ve chosen your hill to die on, which would be the secret door that you keep hoping for, the way out of the situation.” **God of Sick Dreams** “I had a string of very vivid apocalyptic nightmares for a while. In the dream, I\'m in an apartment and I look through the window at a city, and purple lightning starts to strike the ground and these weird glowing spheres are coming up, and there’s the sound of an explosion and poof—everything that was within the sphere is just gone, like the world is going away bit by bit. I’m there with my niece and I pick her up in my arms to run away, thinking I have to find someplace safe. I run downstairs in the apartment building but there’s no place to go—and then I wake up. More than anything, I think it’s a song about facing yourself, because ultimately, those images were created by me. I am the god of my own sick dreams.” **Scream Until You Wake** “This one deals with a sense of being lost. In the verses I\'m spitting out all kinds of questions and being desperate. So I guess it\'s about that feeling of being completely lost in your life, in the grand scheme of things but also in this smaller perspective, and desperately looking for a way out and begging for help. Again, it goes into the realm of nightmares, and then hoping that the cure will be that if you scream loud enough maybe you\'ll wake up.” **Child** “This is a bit more out of left field for a metal song, but the story that came into my head when I heard the instrumental for the chorus was about an affluent family in the late 1800s or early 1900s, a time when a woman speaking up or being upset or being depressed—being anything except obedient—would be deemed hysterical. And the treatment for this at the time would have been lobotomy. So it’s a story about the slow destruction and suffocation of this woman. Her child is the witness to all of this and deals with it in the way that children deal with and process life—through play. The child understands that what is happening to the mother is deeply wrong, but its pain is never acknowledged, its questions are never answered.” **Justice** “‘Justice’ deals with certain thoughts and feelings you have when you end up doing this kind of angry and aggressive album as an adult. Having lived from teens to young adulthood into what I guess would be considered adulthood, somewhere along the way there have been attempts to maybe want to fit in, to face the world with good intentions. But you feel it backfire and now you’re spitting at conformity again, finding your own voice and acknowledging there’s no need to conform. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to fit in, and there is no reason to be quiet about the ugliness, because that is not how change will come to the ugly side of things.” **Gun** “This song took seven years to write. Most of it existed seven years ago—the main piano part and the four lines of lyrics starting with ‘You give a boy a gun.’ But finishing it was a big challenge, because through various attempts you suddenly would hear drums coming in and an electric guitar and it would turn into a power ballad, like, ‘Oh, it’s Bon Jovi now. Let’s throw it away again.’ So it took us seven years to understand something that you learn over and over again when working on music: Just let it be what it is. So it’s a vulnerable song *about* vulnerability, and as such it was the hardest song to sing on the album, because there’s the musical challenge of wanting things to sound nice and then there is the conveying of the emotion that sadness is. And we are ugly when we cry.” **When All But Force Has Failed** “This is the biggest case of finger-pointing that I\'ve done in lyrics ever, probably. If I’m going to express anger over certain things wrong in the world—if I\'m going to put that out there—then I have to be willing to hold myself accountable as well, and us accountable as a band. Because if you want change in the world, you have to deal with the ways you participate in the things that are right and the things that are wrong. So hence the two initial lines are ‘Bird carcass with a belly full of plastic, one more year and I\'ll be a millionaire.’ It’s about how we participate in the destruction while at the same time allowing ourselves to be pissed off at people who participate even more. But you have to hold yourself accountable.” **Wormhole** “When I first heard the riff for this, I thought, ‘Oh wow, this is exactly what I feel like if I wake up in the middle of the night and have to go puke.’ So this song called for a certain type of release, but not too pretty. Lyrically, it is about facing the truth and how we hope to not do it alone. We were not quite finished with the song when we entered the studio, so we sent it to Corey Taylor—a metal icon and one of the great voices of our generation—who offered to lay down a track or two. He came up with the pre-chorus melody, which helped us flesh out the song.”

AVATAR returns in 2020 with a bold manifesto called Hunter Gatherer. The band’s eighth album is an unflinchingly ruthless study of a clueless humankind’s ever-increasing velocity into an uncertain future, furthering the reach of the band’s always expanding dark roots. Songs like “A Secret Door,” “Colossus,” and “Silence In The Age of Apes” are ready-made anthems for the modern age, each struggling for a collective meaning amidst the savagery of technology.

-------------------------------- Buy items from BÜTCHER on OSMOSE PRODUCTIONS store: bit.ly/butcher-webstore -------------------------------- The question is not “can it be done?” The question is: “what happens when you forge classic speed metal on the anvil of wild thrash metal, and hammer it down with reckless abandon?” And the most important question is: “What happens when you take that particular piece of glowing Steele and melt it into the same massive warhead where a mixture of occult and epic heavy metal, first wave black metal, and guitar leads of hard rocking magnificence are already nucleating to the point of destructive atomical power?” The answer to these questions is BÜTCHER, and BÜTCHER is about one thing. One thing only. To define Metal in the way the band sees fit. Metal in the sense of the absolute riffing madness that ruled both the airwaves and the underground tapetrading scene during the late 70’s, through the genre-defining 80’s, and well into the early 90’s. BÜTCHER’s unique blend of metal music is certainly rooted in both German and US Speed Metal, but owes equally as much to proto-metal, hardrock, South-American and Australian black/thrash, NWOBHM both obscure and world dominating, and the Scandinavian cult from the early 90’s. To put it simply: BÜTCHER operates in a spectrum influenced by the twin lead masters from the UK – yet derives as much from the legacy of Sweden, Switzerland, Canada and Brazil. These maniacs thrive on the combination of the musical and artistical significances we have come to adore, and deliver a furious frenzy of speed, black & heavy metal – all brewed in a cauldron of analog & vintage recording material. An acquired taste in these modern times then, but surely to be savoured by the legion of metal maniacs that have an affection for everything that made the older eras of heavy music so magical in the first place. The band originated in the early 2000’s, had several line-up changes, suffered a long hiatus… and none of it seems to matter: it brought the armoured core of the band together. Since 2014, through toil and thunder, shredmaster KK Ripper and vocal performer R Hellshrieker have moulded BÜTCHER into a machine of vicious and unrelenting Metal Power. Currently joined by the immense qualities of LV Speedhämmer and AH Wrathchylde the band has really formed its own identity, and the BÜTCHER name is spreading like wildfire throughout the metal underground worldwide – ready to burst out! BÜTCHER is fully embracing its vision, its members willing to push through. To bring unadulterated metal pleasures to anyone that feels to crash, bang & wallop. The metal community is both united and fragmented – let others be the judge of what’s what. But during their intense live performances the bands knows, sees and feels the confirmation of their specific style in the reaction of the crowd. Their musical integrity stems from the conviction of crafting their wide array of influences into a premise of their own. Add to that their dedication to bring the most energetic live show one can give, and it is sparking a fire in the audience. A fire that more often than not engulfs in a consuming blaze of metal mania. Consider the lack of edits, digital sound compression or most modern recording techniques on their debut BESTIAL FÜKKIN’ WARMACHINE (Babylon Doom Cult Records, 2017) and the sophomore album 666 GOATS CARRY MY CHARIOT (to be released by Osmose Productions in 2019). Take a look at their stage wear, taking cues from the classic acts yet adorning it with a blood oath of their own. But above all, absorb the full-on metal assault that has been edged into black wax, burned into silvered discs as well as coded into streamable format. Then you will realize: this is Metal. Metal defined. Forever in service to the ancient godz of Steele! -------------------------------- Buy items from BÜTCHER on OSMOSE PRODUCTIONS store: bit.ly/butcher-webstore --------------------------------

“Human beings are the most savage things walking the earth,” Body Count frontman Ice-T tells Apple Music. “We’re in this form of denial about why the earth is fucked up and why life is fucked up, but all we do is eat and destroy shit.” It’s the kind of shrewd observation that has propelled the gangsta rap pioneer since the early ’80s, and which catapulted Body Count into the public eye with 1992’s ultra-controversial “Cop Killer.” But Ice assures us that the title and overall sentiment of the LA metal band’s seventh album doesn’t just apply to meat-eaters. “It has nothing to do with your diet,” he says. “Vegans might think they’re on some type of higher level because they don’t eat animals. But they still eat life—plants are alive too—so don’t try to tap out of being human with that bullshit. We’re all part of the same human nature—we’re all carnivores.” Here are the stories behind each of the album’s tracks, directly from Ice-T himself. **Carnivore** “My overall belief of human nature is that we’re very violent, we\'re very dangerous, and it’s self-preservation over everything. Humans are the only thing that kills for sport. We’re very interesting creatures, and we figured out ways to justify the shit we do. So that\'s what the carnivore is: animals that stand erect. That\'s us.” **Point the Finger (feat. Riley Gale)** “This was Riley’s idea—he wrote the outline of the song. It’s about one of those cases we’ve seen too many times, especially recently, where people are getting shot by the cops and then the cops vilify the victim. ‘They used to be this, they used to be that, they were bad.’ It’s common tactics: An unarmed person gets shot and it’s like, ‘How the fuck do I end up being the problem?’ Now, as far as Riley, I got turned on to Power Trip when I was out on the road. Everybody was telling me they got big riffs that are heavy like Body Count. So I went to see them, and I was blown away. Riley’s bad as a motherfucker and the group sounds dope. So when it was time for the collabs to kick in for this album, it was natural to get him. I think it’s one of the hardest crowd-moving tracks on the album.” **Bum-Rush** “‘Bum-Rush’ has got a little Public Enemy going on, a little Prodigy vibe to it. In order to conquer they have to divide, but the sooner we figure out that we\'re all on the same side—that we all have the same issues—we become a problem. So they got to keep throwing out all this extra bullshit: Get mad at this, get mad at that. And we as stupid human beings do it, instead of realizing that a focused attack cannot be stopped.” **Ace of Spades** “Ever since \[2014’s\] *Manslaughter*, we made it a thing on our albums to do tributes to bands that influenced us. On *Manslaughter* we did Suicidal Tendencies, and then last time we did Slayer. On this one we did Motörhead. People ask, ‘Where’s your Motörhead influence?’ and I’m like, ‘Listen to “Cop Killer.”’ ‘Cop Killer’ is Motörhead—it’s got those open guitars and that sound of being on a Harley going down the highway. I was fortunate enough to work with Lemmy on *Airheads*—we did a song called ‘Born to Raise Hell.’ In this song, he says he doesn’t want to live forever, but I think everyone wanted him to live forever. The funny thing is, I didn’t realize I was going to have to actually *sing* this. But fortunately Lemmy wasn’t Céline Dion and I was able to pull it off. It’s Ice trying to sing Lemmy—I did my best.” **Another Level (feat. Jamey Jasta)** “Jamey has been a fan and friend of Body Count since the beginning. I met him when he was the host of *Headbangers Ball*. They told me his band was called Hatebreed, which sounded like the Klan to me. But when I got to know him, I realized he couldn’t be further from a racist. He’s a cool-ass dude who understands hardcore music like pretty much nobody else. My name on Twitter is Final Level, so he came in with this track like, ‘Yo, man—“Another Level”—this is your shit.’ So I started writing about overcoming adversity and not letting people tell you what the fuck you can’t do. And that shit slams—it’s one of the heaviest tracks on the album, and it’s got a really good hook.” **Colors - 2020** “When we do Body Count shows, there’s always an Ice-T fan yelling for ‘Colors’ or ‘6 in Tha Morning,’ but we never had it in the set list. So \[bassist\] Vince \[Price\] was like, ‘We should just cover your songs so we have them in our clip.’ So we did ‘Colors’ and it came out hard. We got \[ex-Slayer member\] Dave Lombardo to play drums on it, and it’s a trip that you can do a metal rendition of a song and it doesn’t change it much. It just makes it harder. And that goes to show that there’s a lot of similarities in this shit.” **No Remorse** “‘No Remorse,’ to me, is the hardest song on the record. It\'s just brutal. If you look at my albums, if you hold them up to each other, they\'re kind of like blueprints. So ‘No Remorse’ is in the place of \[2017’s\] ‘All Love Is Lost,’ with that same anger and emotion, ’cause what I try to do with records is hit emotions. That’s where the best songs are written. The feeling of ‘I fucked you over, but I meant to’ is a real emotion. That’s where the fire of the lyrics comes from. I can’t really make records about outer space or dragons and shit, ’cause I don’t know. I’ve never met a dragon, but I can sing about a motherfucker that crossed me and now thinks I should give a fuck. And I’m like, ‘Nah, motherfucker. Die slow.’ We all have somebody that we could dedicate that song to.” **When I’m Gone (feat. Amy Lee)** “When Nipsey Hussle passed, they sold the Staples Center out in two hours for his tribute. But could he sell it out for a concert that quick? It’s kind of fucked up that we’ll rally when someone’s dead, but not really pay attention when they’re alive. So it triggered an emotion in me and I started writing this song. We’ve got a tech in our group named Tyler who is connected some way to Amy, and somehow or another they got the song to her and she wanted to fuck with it. I didn’t know she was on it until she had done it. So I get the track and I’m like, ‘How the fuck did you get Amy Lee on this track? That shit is fire.’ She took the record to another level. And then she wrote me an email saying she had lost somebody too soon, so you got a song where both people are writing from the heart, which is very rare.” **Thee Critical Beatdown** “This is aimed at internet tough guys. Kind of like ‘Talk Shit, Get Shot,’ but instead of getting shot, I’m just going to beat you down. It’s textbook Body Count grindhouse. I always call my band grindhouse because it’s like wild karate movies or the blaxploitation films where motherfuckers knock you through three walls and shit. It has a touch of humor, and if you don’t get the humor, then you’re missing the point. It’s ultraviolent to the point that you laugh. It’s some motherfucker talking shit and me saying, ‘Let’s meet up,’ but just like a bitch he never wants to meet up. And then finally in the end of the song we meet and we got like a kung fu fight, with sound effects and everything. It’ll definitely be fun to perform.” **The Hate Is Real** “Jim Jones from Dipset wrote on Twitter, ‘The love is fake but the hate is real.’ I was like, ‘That’s a fucking song right there.’ So I started thinking about how we throw the word ‘love’ around loosely, but when someone hates you, they *really* fucking hate you. They wish you bad luck. They wish you bad health. They really wanna see the worst shit happen to you. And now we live in a world with so much racial hate and religious hate—it’s unfortunate, but that’s what it is. This one also has a cool guitar solo with Ernie C and Juan \[of the Dead\], where they harmonize at the end, which is some classic rock shit. And we’ve got Jello Biafra doing the intro—he’s been down with me from the beginning. That’s Jello talking shit over a Black Sabbath track on one of my Ice-T albums. He’s always put that politics and real shit in music, so he was perfect for this.” **6 in Tha Morning - 2020** “This is a bonus track. We wanted to have some Ice-T songs in our clip, so we did ‘Colors’ and this one. ‘Colors’ was my biggest record that broke me nationally, and ‘6 in Tha Morning’ was the record that was considered the invention of gangsta rap and started everything. If there was never a ‘6 in Tha Morning,’ there would never have been a Body Count. If the song hadn’t hit, I’d probably be in prison. That record detoured my entire life. And it’s a fun song—we took the breakdowns in it and used drum fills. It’ll be dope to play in concert.”

Playing video games has served as a reprieve for many during the lockdown, but for Oli Sykes, these virtual post-apocalyptic adventures also influenced the shaping of Bring Me The Horizon\'s new EP. Drawing inspiration mainly from DOOM Eternal, the Sheffield quintet tapped Mick Gordon, who composed that game\'s soundtrack, to produce this collection and capture the spirit of a big-budget video game. The angsty \"Dear Diary,\" begins the record with an airing of grievances, the LINKIN PARK-leaning \"Teardrops\" channels nu-metal\'s glory days, and tracks like \"Parasite Eve\" and \"Ludens\" build off the heavier moments from 2019\'s *amo*. The EP features collaborators that span multiple genres: \"Kingslayer\" fuses *Suicide Season*-era deathcore with BABYMETAL\'s kawaii metal stylings, while \"Obey\" weaponizes YUNGBLUD\'s raspy vocals alongside Sykes\' menacing growl to tackle societal oppression and corruption. And the haunting kiss-off \"One Day the Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest as You March Towards Your Death\" features a chilling duet between Sykes and Evanescence\'s Amy Lee, the track\'s glacial funeral march offering nothing more than a bleak look into the future.

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

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

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

On their 15th album, Norwegian prog-metal warriors Enslaved explore a landscape from Norse mythology known as Utgard. “It\'s where the giants dwell,” bassist/vocalist Grutle Kjellson tells Apple Music. “The giants are a metaphor for the more uncontrollable forces in nature and in your own mind, so it’s a realm of chaos, of dreams, of the more frightful fantasies you have. It’s something you can’t control, but also something you are deeply in need of, because it’s the realm where creativity, humor, and your wild side dwell.” *Utgard* also marks the official debut of Enslaved’s not-so-secret weapon, new drummer/vocalist Iver Sandøy, who has worked with the band as an engineer and coproducer as far back as 2010’s *Axioma Ethica Odini*. “He also did some backing vocals on *E* and *In Times*, so this was like a continuation of the collaboration, but this time we have some lead vocals and drumming from him as well,” Kjellson explains. Below, the bassist guides us on a journey through *Utgard*. **Fires in the Dark** “This begins with some chanting in Old Norse, and it deals with the creation of the world according to the Norse mythology. It is also very much touching on the concept of Utgard, because it\'s kind of, ‘In the beginning, there was nothing—only fire and ice.’ And it\'s really connected to the lyrics, with the fires in the dark, something in the making, something both wonderful and hostile at the same time, really uncontrollable. Interestingly enough, it was the first song that was written for the album and ended up as a natural opener. I think that’s the first time that’s ever happened.” **Jettegryta** “In English, ‘Jettegryta’ can be translated into ‘the giant\'s cauldron.’ There are these holes all over the world called ‘giant’s cauldrons’—they were made by waterfalls after the Ice Age. In folklore, it’s said that they were made by the giants because they’re really big and look like big pots or cauldrons for the giants to cook food in. It connects back to Utgard as well, and it’s easy to picture the people that lived thousands of years ago—they obviously didn\'t have the kind of science to explain phenomenon like we have. So to them, that was a totally logical explanation. Musically, we always end up making a song that sounds like Bathory, without being conscious about it. And this ended up being that song on this album. \[Departed Bathory mastermind\] Quorthon is still there, fucking with our lives—in a good way.” **Sequence** “I think that was the second song we wrote for the album. It’s a surprisingly catchy song, but then we kind of tore everything apart with the inclusion of a session performer at the end of the song—a musician called Martin Horntveth. He is playing some electronics, some bells and xylophones and stuff like that. So he takes this mellow, esoteric part and turns it into kind of a sonic nightmare in the background there. You feel you are listening to something really beautiful, but don’t be tricked, because there’s always a dark side to things. There’s something disturbing in the beauty there.” **Homebound** “This one has lead vocals by our new drummer, Iver. Such a nightmare, right? A combination of a drummer and a singer, like the worst of both worlds. You have the nutcase and the diva in one. No, seriously—he is a fantastic drummer and a great vocalist, a great musician. He’s been in the background ever since *Axioma* in 2010, working with us as a coproducer and engineer for many albums. So he was the natural choice when \[former Enslaved drummer\] Cato \[Bekkevold\] decided to leave. We’re really, really satisfied with him.” **Utgarđr** “In the song ‘Utgarđr,’ we have a spoken thing in an archaic dialect that used to be spoken in our area. It’s a sort of concentrated narrative of the whole album. It really somehow tells you everything. It’s both an epilogue for the first songs and an introduction for the remaining songs. And it was actually recorded in my living room. It was probably the last recording we did for the whole album, and all the guys in the band were present and it was late at night. We had many drinks. It somehow concludes and introduces the album.” **Urjotun** “Many people look upon this opening as a dance beat or like a modern electronica thing, but it’s actually the most old-school part of the whole album, because it’s an analog Moog sequencer like they used in the late ’60s with bands like Silver Apples and the Krautrock scene later. And then comes this distorted bass, so we like to explain this song as a fusion between Kraftwerk and Hawkwind, with a little Scott Walker/David Bowie influence on vocals. So that’s really perhaps the most old-school song we’ve ever done, and it might be my favorite song on the album.” **Flight of Thought and Memory** “This is the story of Odin’s ravens, basically. The ravens are called Huginn and Muninn, and they represent thought and mind. So it\'s basically a dream about a flight into the realm of Utgard and all the things that are. It’s about accepting something you cannot conquer, but also a thing that you have to remain trying to conquer—otherwise you will pretty much cease to exist. You have to be a seeker or you will die. It also has the longest guitar solo we have ever done—it’s like one and a half minutes. It’s like I can almost hear the chest hair growing on \[guitarist\] Ice \[Dale\], because it’s a really cool rock ’n’ roll solo.” **Storms of Utgard** “I remember me and Iver, our new drummer/vocalist, arranged that song and did the demo recordings in a hotel room when he was on tour with one of his other bands—he plays drums for this woman that records children’s music. This song is really like hard rock, so I thought maybe Iver finally has been listening to classic hard rock albums. I’m a really big fan of early Scorpions and UFO, but I don’t think Iver has ever picked up a UFO album. So I think it sounds like this by accident, but I really love the vibe in this song. It’s another one of my favorites.” **Distant Seasons** “This is the really mellow closer, and \[guitarist\] Ivar \[Bjørnson\] wrote this song to his daughters. They are even participating in the last chorus, singing on the album. I really love this song. It’s sort of like an airy Pink Floyd-ish tune. And it’s a perfect song to conclude such an album. It really connects with the other songs, and it was the last song we made for the album as well. So the opener is the first song we wrote, and ‘Distant Seasons’ is the last one. So it was really, really logical.”

“This is not a test,” vocalist Ivan Moody intones on “Full Circle,” one of the key tracks from Five Finger Death Punch’s appropriately titled eighth album, *F8*. It’s a song about previous civilizations destroying themselves, which is a fitting metaphor for a band that almost imploded in recent years under the weight of substance abuse. But guitarist Zoltan Bathory has said that sobriety prevailed for the recording of the album, bringing sharp focus to tracks like the crushing “This Is War”—one of the heaviest songs in FFDP’s ever-expanding repertoire. Elsewhere, lead single “Inside Out” distills the Las Vegas-based crew’s twin strengths of anthemic choruses and thudding riffs into a beefy metallic groove, complete with radio-ready bonus version. Meanwhile, “Living the Dream” name-checks a litany of superheroes and fictional royalty in the service of social commentary. All told, it’s a triumphant return for a band that could’ve easily fallen by the wayside.

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

With 'Alphaville', the enigmatic New York City Extreme Metal trio has successfully broken with all genre conventions and elevated into a realm of Avantgarde Metal that is as fascinating as it is scary. Not that conventions ever held back Imperial Triumphant, but this album is certainly their most obscure and experimental yet. The good news is that it's not at the cost of intensity. The demanding, yet always intriguing clash of jarring atonality and gloomy Jazz fusion ('City Swine') finds its match only in the city it is so openly inspired by. There is plenty of both ends of the spectrum - and everything in between - on 'Alphaville', which will undoubtedly go down in history as the band's magnum opus. For fans of: Ved Buens Ende, Portal, Oranssi Pazuzu Under exclusive license from Century Media. TDW023

The intertwining concepts of motherhood and Mother Earth are just two of the reasons LA alt-metal stars In This Moment decided to title their seventh album *Mother*. “My own mother is so sacred to me, and mothers in general are powerful things,” vocalist Maria Brink tells Apple Music. “And my fans started calling me Mother Maria, so in a way they kind of named it, too.” In addition to the album’s nine original songs and two interludes, *Mother* includes an almost accidental cover of the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” a haunting version of Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust,” and a rousing rendition of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” the latter of which features guest shots from Lzzy Hale of Halestorm and Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless. Brink explains all below. **The Beginning (Interlude)** “I love movies and soundtracks, so we just wanted to create that kind of feeling for the intro. I think there’s something special about the art of listening to something from the beginning to the end, and I think the interludes take you on a journey in and out of the songs.” **Fly Like an Eagle** “I love this song—obviously, it’s such an amazing song—but it wasn’t even meant to be covered. We actually wrote all the music that you’re hearing to that song without singing on it at all. So it was completely separate. We were trying some things, but it wasn’t quite there yet. And I don’t know if we heard the song that day or how it came up, but we just heard the melody and started singing over it. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ So we mixed our music with their \[vocal\] melody and it was so beautiful. It just felt very empowering and uplifting.” **The Red Crusade (Interlude)** “This basically has the same idea behind it as the other interlude. It helps you get into the zone and go on the experience. But it’s really just the intro to the next song.” **The In-Between** “I’m always about balance, and that’s what ‘The In-Between’ is about. We all have to find a healthy balance and learn how to understand that the things that are maybe part of your darker side—or darker things we’ve been through or are drawn to—they’re blessings and they make you stronger. It’s okay to embrace those things.” **Legacy** “My grandfather was a World War II hero, and he played the role of my father in my life because my mother was a single mother. And then my son didn\'t have a father either, so he really played the role to my son as well. He passed with his entire family around him—all of us holding his hand and singing to him. It was so sacred and so special. And right around the same time, Chris \[Howorth\], our guitar player—his father passed away. And then our other guitar player’s father passed. So there was this feeling that we needed to honor them. The album is called *Mother*, but I thought we should reflect on that beautiful father love as well.” **We Will Rock You (feat. Lzzy Hale and Taylor Momsen)** “It\'s one of the best songs ever. It\'s the all-empowering anthem. And I wanted to really see if we could pull together these powerful voices and these beautiful women that represent our community. They\'re so different and unique in their own ways, but they all have this power, and I thought it would be really cool for us to all just come together and spread that kind of energy. It was a real big honor to work with both of them. I have a lot of respect for them and they’re both so very, very talented.” **Mother** “I’m not someone who always writes super literally, but this song is about my mother. My grandfather, who I just talked about, was my mother’s world. She took care of him. She was holding his hand as he passed. So this song is me letting her know that I’ll be there for her and always take care of her. And actually, I have two mothers—I’m double gifted. My mother has been with her wife for a really long time, and she’s been a big part of raising me. They’re beautiful singers, so they’re both singing on this song with me, doing the backup vocals and harmonies.” **As Above, So Below** “This is another song about balance. This album has a lot of that kind of back-and-forth play and embracing the organic wild side. The song is also about not selling your soul for something you don’t believe in. Whatever you’re passionate about, it can’t be about money or fame or whatever. People should hold on to their souls.” **Born in Flames** “This song is for my son. He was struggling with just being. I saw him growing into something and kind of having to go through a little bit of a hard time. And then I saw him power through and become who he is, which is just so beautiful and bright and strong. So it’s about how I watched him go through a kind of struggle and heartache before blossoming and becoming who he is. And I’m just so proud of him.” **God Is She** “This song is about how I think everything is connected in this beautiful feminine energy, which is mother and god and deity. To me, God isn’t just a he or she—it’s an energy. But I see it in this song in a very feminine way. It’s also tied to Mother Earth and my hippie ways. We’ve got to take care of the Earth or she will attack back.” **Holy Man** “I wrote this song when I was going through a hard time and I was just needing to feel some sort of sacred something. I was needing a sign. It was just a vulnerable moment for me, and I was saying, ‘Show me a sign of kindness and love and understanding.’ It’s ‘Holy Man’ because the album is not just about women—I believe in holiness and godliness within everything—men, women, animals—equally.” **Hunting Grounds (feat. Joe Cotela of DED)** “This is about when you’re magnetically drawn to something—no matter how hard you fight it, it’s going to happen regardless. So it’s kind of this fight and this hunting and this awakening, but something inevitable is going to happen. I wanted Joe on this because I love his voice so much. He has a new album coming out that shows this whole other side of his voice that people haven’t really heard tons of yet, and I wanted him to use that type of voice on this song. It sounds perfect, and it was an honor to have him on here.” **Lay Me Down** “This song is about how you just can’t let other people’s perceptions or energy put your fire out or stop you. I had an experience where somebody tried to hurt me really badly, and that tended to hold me down. But you have to learn that your power comes from within yourself. You have to just worry about yourself and not other people’s ideas about you or who they think you are. So this is about not giving them that power and not being held back.” **Into Dust** “I love Mazzy Star, and this particular song has been my song for so many years. If I’m sad or I have to go into my deeper self or when I paint, I put on this song. I paint to that song on repeat sometimes for a few hours. I zone out on that song. There’s something about it. So I figured I’d just do my interpretation of it because it’s meant so much to me for so long. And it felt like a nice way to end the album.”

“This band has been going for a very long time,” Katatonia vocalist Jonas Renske tells Apple Music. In fact, Sweden’s reigning kings of melancholy have been at it for nearly 30 years, a timespan that led the Stockholm-based group to go on hiatus after the touring cycle for 2016’s *The Fall of Hearts*. “We never really had a proper break before,” Renske explains. “We wanted to get some perspective and see if the band is really what we want to do. It turns out we all missed it very much.” In his downtime, Renske wrote the bulk of the music and all of the lyrics for Katatonia’s 11th album, *City Burials*. “It’s a pretty lonely job to write music,” he says. “The whole creative process can be very tedious—if you’re struggling with something, it takes forever if you’re just by yourself. But of course it’s very rewarding when it’s done.” Below, Renske guides us through the many rewards of *City Burials*. **Heart Set to Divide** “To me, it\'s a pretty epic track. I think it sort of starts where the previous album left off, because it\'s very adventurous and there\'s a lot of things going on—a lot of layers. And it\'s kind of long, but it still has some kind of heaviness to it. It sets the tone and the standard, pretty much. It’s hard to explain the lyrics, but it’s about changing your mind and doing something that maybe you didn’t expect yourself to do—maybe because there’s something difficult about it.” **Behind the Blood** “This song is a little bit different for Katatonia. When we did our last tour, we ended the set every night playing a Judas Priest cover—‘Night Comes Down’ from *Defenders of the Faith*. I think it had something to do with why I started writing ‘Behind the Blood,’ because it definitely brought me back to the music I grew up listening to. I just had this idea that I wanted to try and write a song like that for Katatonia, but in our style. Lyrically, it’s not the usual gloomy atmosphere because the song is more uptempo, so it ended up being about drinking—but in an abstract way, of course. We can’t wait to play it live.” **Lacquer** “We had already started the recording of this album—we were doing the drums—and I felt that maybe we should have one more song to record, maybe to become a B-side or something. So I started working on this song, and by the end of the drum recording, the whole song was finished. But we couldn’t put any real drums on it by that time, so we kept it electronic. And then we decided it should be on the album. It’s very atmospheric, and it’s one of my favorite performances for myself as a singer.” **Rein** “This is one of my favorite songs on the record. It’s kind of a heavier track, and it also has a special style or feeling to it that was inspired by the band 16 Horsepower. They’ve been one of my favorite bands for a very long time, and I wanted to do something just a little bit in that style, but of course in a more metal way for Katatonia. So it has this bottleneck guitar that’s going on in the verses, and with a little bit of a country twang to it, I think. We called it the ‘cowboy track’ when we worked on it.” **The Winter of Our Passing** “It’s one of the earlier songs I wrote for the album. It’s kind of like older Katatonia—not way back, but maybe 10 or 15 years back—mixed up with some electronic stuff. I think it portrays a lot of emotion, and it has a chorus that you could sing along to, probably. This is also one of the songs we really want to try onstage. It’s very short and compact, and I think it would do very well live. It’s going to be the third single off the album. It’s a bit of a ‘hit’ song, I would say.” **Vanishers** “This song is very electronic, and it’s kind of a calm song, very atmospheric. I was playing the music for \[guitarist\] Anders \[Nyström\] and he said it sounds like there’s a lot of space for something different to happen here, so he came up with the idea that we should ask Anni \[Bernhard\] from Full of Keys to be on it. She’s been a favorite singer of me and Anders for some years now. So we sent her my demo and she was straight into the idea of doing it. She totally got the vibe of the song instantly, and I think the final result is perfect.” **City Glaciers** “This song is probably the first song I started writing after the release of the previous album, so it has a little bit of that style. It’s a little bit more progressive, maybe. Like the opening track, it’s kind of an adventurous song with a lot of layers of guitars and keyboards and vocals. Lyrically, it’s about being in a relationship or friendship for a long time and maybe you don’t see a reason to go on—you’re fed up with someone, basically. But you also know subconsciously that things will eventually change for the better. And the song is just about that wait, I would say.” **Flicker** “Another one that’s a bit more uptempo, especially in the choruses. They’re very classic Katatonia, I think. There’s some electronic elements as well. Lyrically, it’s about trying to break free from something. And it has a few moments of magic guitar playing by Roger \[Öjersson\].” **Lachesis** “On our previous album we have a song called ‘Decima,’ which is about one of the Fates from Roman mythology—a woman that is measuring the thread of life. There were three sisters in the mythology that were basically deciding when people were going to die. It turns out that in Greek mythology there is an equivalent, and that is Lachesis. I wanted to have a connection between the two albums, so once again we have the theme of life and death. We all have a measured thread of life. We don’t know exactly when it’s going to be cut off.” **Neon Epitaph** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for the album. I think it was actually finished just before entering the studio. It’s not the easiest song to play on drums, I think, so the drummer had a lot of stuff to learn for this—but he definitely nailed it. Lyrically it deals with becoming a parent, which makes you also reflect on your own personality when you have someone that’s going to walk in your footsteps pretty much through their whole life. It was written because I had my third son a year and a half ago, and it’s kind of a beautiful little theme to write about, I think.” **Untrodden** “As with ‘Neon Epitaph,’ this song has these light and shade moments. Lyrically, it’s a little bit about wondering what’s in the afterlife—the people we might have known that are already there…will they wait for us? Is there something that still connects us when we go there? That kind of stuff. There’s also a guitar solo by Roger which I think is one of the best guitar solos I’ve ever heard—and I would say that even if it was not in Katatonia. It’s a great closing song for an album like *City Burials*.” **Fighters** “This is a digital bonus song that’s not on the album. It’s a cover track by a short-lived Swedish metal band that was active in the beginning of the 2000s called Enter the Hunt. Their singer is Krister Linder, who was doing some guest vocals for us on our album *Night Is the New Day*—on the song ‘Departer.’ Enter the Hunt only did one album and an EP, I think. The song ‘Fighters’ was only released digitally, so it’s not very well-known. But me and Anders thought that song was so good and we felt a bit sorry for them because they split up before anything could happen with it. So we decided to cover it to try and get it further up into the world.”

City Burials - Katatonia’s new studio opus of absorbing, soaring progressive rock & meticulously crafted doses of melancholy on CD Formed in 1991 by Jonas Renkse & Anders Nyström, and transitioning from early pioneers of the rising black/death/doom movement, to powerhouses of the progressive metallic rock genre, the Swedish connoisseurs of melancholy return with their stellar new opus, City Burials - the band’s eleventh studio album, & first since 2016’s haunting The Fall of Hearts was brought before the world. With the winds of a new direction steering the band on their latest journey, City Burials stands as Katatonia’s new triumph of deep & enigmatic progressive rock – the fruits of a rejuvenating and profound chapter in the band’s legacy; a catalyst for its creators, with a collection of moments constructed out of the fragments of an ever-evolving life. Compiled into one of their most important modern works and statements to date, the finely-honed instrumentation provides a multi-textured backdrop with the voice of Jonas Renkse guiding us through these latest trials of loss and ruin. Beyond their core creative duo, Katatonia are very much a full-blown band, and the chemistry between Jonas, Anders and their band mates – bassist Niklas Sandin, drummer Daniel Moilanen and most recent recruit, guitarist Roger Öjersson – has never sounded more potent, with City Burials being the first album Katatonia have made since Öjersson became a full-time member. Inspired by an injection of fresh blood into Katatonia’s creative brew, City Burials is an album that sees the band reclaim part of their heavy metal roots, via several moments of exuberant, old school classicism, deftly woven into these new songs’ kaleidoscopic fabric. City Burials was produced by Nyström/Renkse and recorded at Soundtrade Studios, Tri-Lamb Studios & The City Of Glass, throughout October & November 2019, with engineering work handled by Karl Daniel Lidén. The album also features a guest appearance by Anni Bernhard, the voice behind Stockholm based act Full of Keys. Artwork appears courtesy of Lasse Hoile, the image itself representing the ongoing era of the Dead End King.

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

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

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

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

There’s nothing quite like a global pandemic to make a Marilyn Manson album feel, well, nice. Released during a year where practically everything feels upsetting and uncomfortable, it’s oddly cathartic to listen to an artist who once reveled in exactly those things. While the soaring title track sing-along may have been written in 2018, it feels like something of a 2020 anthem: “We are sick, fucked up and complicated/We are chaos, we can’t be cured.” *WE ARE CHAOS* was produced in collaboration with outlaw country artist Shooter Jennings, his influence immediate, obvious, and exciting. The album carries all the musical hallmarks of Manson’s twisted persona, forged over 25-plus years—huge riffs, heavily distorted vocals, industrial sound effects—and the controversial rocker’s long-favored themes of death, discord, Satan, etc. However, it’s all balanced out by tender acoustic guitars (“BROKEN NEEDLE”), glammy melodies (“DON’T CHASE THE DEAD”), and even the odd positive affirmation (“Don’t try changing someone else, you’ll just end up changing yourself,” he sings on the Brian Jonestown Massacre-goes-darkwave highlight “KEEP MY HEAD TOGETHER”). The album’s not without pounding drums and epic howls (particularly the one towards the end of “PAINT YOU WITH MY LOVE”) that’d give *Mechanical Animals*-era Manson a run for his money, but it’s the other, more surprising moments that stand out the most. It’s that perfect storm of old meets new, and diabolical meets rather lovely, that makes *WE ARE CHAOS* such an enjoyable ride amidst a definitively unenjoyable year.

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

No strangers to concept albums, elaborate arrangements, or lush orchestral accompaniment, Finnish symphonic metal magicians Nightwish bolster their ever-expanding ambitions with the double album *HUMAN. :II: NATURE.* The band’s ninth studio record sees bandleader and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen’s dizzying compositions realized by virtuosic performances from guitarist Emppu Vuorinen, bassist Marco Hietala, Uilleann pipes wizard Troy Donockley, new drummer Kai Hahto, and operatic vocalist Floor Jansen—not to mention the London Session Orchestra. “The complexity of this album is quite something,” the Dutch-born Jansen tells Apple Music. “Rehearsing for it was intense, because some of the vocal melodies are really complicated. They’re quite a mouthful. So I was properly challenged, which I enjoy.” Below, Jansen takes us through each track—including the 30-minute, eight-part classical suite that makes up *HUMAN. :II: NATURE.*’s second half. **Music** “This song is a love letter to music, and charts its history. So it starts with quite a bit of an intro from the most rudimentary sounds that maybe men and women in caves \[would have\] made—very tribal music, as we know it today. But it has a lovely buildup and it’s a very dynamic song. Musically, this was pretty challenging. The verses were really, really hard to sing. And we played a lot with the harmonies in the chorus. Quite a beginner to the album, I would say.” **Noise** “For us, the message of this song was not really about smartphones or the internet, but really about the human behavior behind it. We are so dependent on it, and it seems we need to hide into a world that doesn’t even really exist. But the real world is still out there. So if you look at the video for this song, the very last shot is an image of the real world—a beautiful sunrise going over a woods. All you need to do is look up from your phone and see it.” **Shoemaker** “The title might suggest that it’s about a person making shoes, but it’s not. It’s about a person called Eugene Shoemaker, and I would invite everybody to Google him. He had the dream to become an astronaut—he never did, but in the end he still went up in the sky. His story is beautiful and romantic, but musically it’s a bit of a weird song. It doesn’t have a verse/chorus/verse structure. And again, the verses were a huge challenge to sing. Not to mention the last part, which is sung in opera, and maybe the most challenging thing to sing on the record. It’s also nice to know that Tuomas’ wife, Johanna \[Kurkela\], is doing the spoken word just before this operatic part.” **Harvest** “Troy is doing the lead vocal on this one—the first time for him—and it’s a real feel-good song. But if you really read the lyrics, it isn’t. It’s a complete cheating-death run throughout the whole song, which is really funny because it gives you the ‘Yeah, life is good and you can drink a beer in the sun’ vibe. But the actual message behind it is so much darker. Musically, we played around with the harmonies quite a lot, and obviously this one needed a bit more of the Celtic or folky style. And both Troy and Marco were really great with getting different kind of atmospheres in the harmonic voices here.” **Pan** “This is a really complex song. It tickles your imagination. It’s almost a love letter to fantasy, where you can just dive into your imagination. It’s very challenging to play, especially for Emppu. He called it ‘the torture song for old men,’ even though later he called it ‘Pancake.’ That’s one of the songs I would just love to play live and see how far we get.” **How’s the Heart?** “There have been quite a few people that said for some reason that ‘this song really touched me and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but it made me stop everything I was doing and I just really felt it.’ And I can imagine that, because I had the same feeling. In general the lyrics are about the power of empathy. In these times, it’s valuable beyond anything else to care for other people and actually show interest. ‘How are you doing?’ That simple question can save lives, and it reconnects you with people. It’s a huge gesture that’s so easy to do and so easily forgotten as well.” **Procession** “This is an extremely repetitive song, which I at first did not understand personally: ‘What are we doing here?’ But the repetition with the melodies is intentional and the emotion is vital. We’re telling the story of ourselves. This is a species that evolved after us that does not live on Earth anymore and they’ve left a message back in time for us, for humankind, to tell our story. And if you know that and you start at the beginning, you will come towards the end where you realize that we actually went extinct. With Tuomas’ poetic style of writing, I couldn’t keep my eyes dry. In a way it became one of the most loved songs for me. It’s not a song that you can play on the highway, in your car. It’s a song you play at home with your eyes shut.” **Tribal** “This is the heaviest track on the album, and the heavy song on our previous album also kind of went into our not-so-big love for organized religion—and this song is also a shout-out to all the cruelty there. It kicks the sore leg of organized religion a bit—very, very pointy lyrics. But the music itself is very danceable. It just makes you work out. It was a huge challenge for our drummer, but I can’t wait to do this one live.” **Endlessness** “This song was written for Marco to sing, and his vocals just fit so beautifully. And I sing the harmonies in the chorus. They’re so weird that I remember them instantly—and I’m not great with harmonies that are weird, usually. It takes me a while to actually feel them. But it’s a super sad song—very doomy. It’s about the endlessness of time, and Marco is singing as if he’s time. It’s super dramatic and heavy. One of my favorite tracks on the album.” **All the Works of Nature Which Adorn the World** “This is Tuomas’ love letter to nature. If somebody had told me 10 years ago that I’m going to be in a band where somebody that does all the songwriting decides to write a classical suite of eight parts that lasts for 30 minutes and you’re not going to be on it, I would say \[sarcastically\], ‘Well, that’s cool. Thank you.’ But when it happened in Nightwish, everybody was just like, ‘I can’t wait to hear this, because we know it’ll be amazing.’ And this piece really takes you through different scenery—you might feel like you’re out on the ocean or in the middle of the woods or out in the fields. Then in the end it gets a little more dramatic, where you see the Earth while we’re leaving it. It’s very beautiful and apocalyptic. We even connected the song to a video we made together with the World Land Trust, which is a big organization that helps to preserve our planet. So at least it feels like we’re making a small effort to help protect the dot we’re on.”

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

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

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

Polaris knew that writing their second album would be tough—and not only because their 2017 debut *The Mortal Coil* was far more successful than they’d expected. “It was the most challenging period we\'ve been through as a band in terms of testing ourselves, our relationships, our ability to cope with pressure,” says drummer and primary songwriter Daniel Furnari. “But we came out the other side of it.” The Sydney band has quickly risen in the ranks of Australia\'s metal scene, and they’re fully aware of the power—and stress—that accompanies such a position. Furnari describes *The Death of Me*, an album that stretches far beyond the typical scope of metalcore, to Apple Music as “an exploration of the self and the difficulty of surviving in this weird human experience that we\'re all going through. How do you maintain a sense of identity when the world is constantly trying to shape you into something?” Below, he delves into the stories behind each track on *The Death of Me*. **Pray for Rain** “The song establishes the idea that we all begin our lives with an innate sense of hope and a positive attitude. But the more we’re exposed to the world, we get drained. And the more we discover pain and hardship and loss and all the things that make up our human experience, it\'s really difficult to refill that source. The things we seek out to give us strength can actually damage us, and vice versa. We seek comfort in things to help us get through our days, but ultimately it\'s not enough.” **Hypermania** “It’s about the fear of losing your mind, almost like a paranoia about paranoia. Constantly questioning if you’re starting to lose control of your mental stability, constantly feeling like you\'re on the edge of some kind of emotional outburst. It reflects the state of mind we were in at that point \[of writing the album\] with the stress we\'d started to put ourselves under.” **Masochist** “I tend to put a lot of metaphor in my lyrics, and leave it open to interpretation. But these \[lyrics\] aren’t cryptic. Looking at the opening lines—‘Am I addicted to the misery/Is this how I\'ll always be?’—on paper kind of made me go, ‘Damn. That\'s a heavy question to ask.’ Although it made me feel uncomfortable when I wrote it, it felt honest. It’s an important question to ask. This is about reaching that low point, but it’s also an acknowledgment of the fact that you have to be aware of what you\'re doing to yourself emotionally. You have to be aware of how you talk to yourself. You have to be aware of the way you\'re treating yourself inside.” **Landmine** “It’s definitely one of the heaviest tracks we\'ve done. We seek out contrast in our music, and it was a deliberate move to put this straight after ‘Masochist’ to make sure people don\'t get too comfortable. It’s about getting to that point in life where you have to grow up and stop acting like a teenager. You realize you\'re not as special as you thought you were, you\'re not the main character in everybody’s book. And once you’re an adult, you\'re free to fuck up your own life if you want to. No one\'s going to pick you up, no one\'s going to point you in the right direction every time you fail, no one\'s going to reward you just for trying. It can be disheartening and illusion-shattering, but it forces you to make changes. You’re saying, ’The world doesn\'t give a fuck about us anymore. And that\'s okay. What do we do from here?’” **Vagabond** “It’s partly about touring, and how constantly being on the move can wear you down. It can feel lonely, despite the fact that we\'re all together. But you can learn to find comfort in new places, you can find solace in the people around you. It’s also about learning to be okay with being an outsider. It\'s a celebration of being different and of standing apart from other people. Being okay with who you are and your identity and what makes you unique.” **Creatures of Habit** “We had to acknowledge the conflict within our unit. When you\'re doing something creative and you\'re really passionate about it, it can push people to the edge and really test your relationships. I was trying to put myself in the minds of the other guys in my band, and imagine what they wanted to say to me. It was a bit weird and uncomfortable to write, but when I showed the other guys, they said, ‘Yeah, this is how we\'ve been feeling.’” **Above My Head** “We knew that in making this record, we were putting ourselves into a situation where we would all be tested emotionally. We know making a record pushes us, it can put us in a fragile state of mind. The opening line—‘I have these dreams where I\'m losing all my teeth/Where the walls begin to cave in and bury me beneath’—came from a conversation I had with Ryan \[Siew, guitarist\]. He was repeatedly having these dreams about losing teeth. I think it\'s quite a common dream that reflects a fear of losing people close to you, who care about you.” **Martyr (Waves)** “There’s two angles to \[the song\]. One is about this need to occupy different roles in your life for the people around you. To be a good family member. A good son to your parents. A good partner. In our case, trying to be good artists. It can be so exhausting. The other one is about how I view my role as a lyricist. When people start telling you that what you’ve expressed in your music means something to them on a personal level, or has affected them in some way, I’ve realized it comes with a weight. The beautiful thing about music is that people can interpret it however they want. But what if people take what I\'m saying completely the wrong way? What if it becomes negative? It\'s something I\'m constantly aware of—there\'s pressure to put into words what other people can\'t express, and it\'s no longer just about yourself. You create a connection that cannot be taken back. It can get a little scary when you realize the power that music has, and sometimes, honestly, it gets too much.” **All of This Is Fleeting** “The studio house \[where we recorded the album\] is on the edge of this huge cliff, looking over the ocean. It was really cold and gloomy; I was watching the rain hit the waves and just disappear. Suddenly it doesn\'t exist anymore. It was a weird, funny little metaphor about the insignificance of what we were doing. Art or music might stay around for years, but it will eventually fade and be forgotten. We feel like we have a little opportunity to create something permanent or immortal, but it\'s not really true. Nothing that we do really is permanent.” **The Descent** “It’s the end of the story. If you take the theme of ‘Pray for Rain’ through the whole album, we’re looking at the result of having that life force constantly stretched away from you. I feel like all the songs on the record draw from that well. What happens if you\'re not able to replenish it? Where do you end up? I drew from some stories we shared among ourselves in the band, and from friends, about traumatic events in their lives, and made a fictionalized version of these stories. The narrative begins with someone waking up in hospital from a kind of apocalyptic nightmare, in the aftermath of a traumatic event. The narrator goes through a mental journey, constantly being pushed and pulled by forces of light and dark within himself. It’s by no means a happy place to end it, but that wasn\'t the kind of record we ever set out to create.”