Loudwire's 70 Best Rock + Metal Albums of 2020

With their 15th studio album, Brazilian metal monarchs Sepultura deliver *Quadra*, a collection of 12 new songs divided evenly into four distinct musical themes. “The first part is influenced by the old school, like \[our albums\] *Beneath the Remains* and *Arise*—and all the bands we used to listen to from the thrash scenes of Germany and the Bay Area,” guitarist Andreas Kisser tells Apple Music. “Part two was more influenced by the *Roots* and *Against* era, where we incorporated more percussion and the tribal elements. Part three is from the instrumental world, like when we did ‘Inquisition Symphony’ on *Schizophrenia* in ’87 or ‘Iceberg Dances’ on *Machine Messiah*. And then the last part is all about melody, especially in the vocals, with a female singer as a guest on the last song. So it’s a little bit of everything that Sepultura did, but with the energy and attitude of today.” Below, Kisser takes us track by track through *Quadra*’s four movements. **Isolation** “This is the first song that was written for the album. It’s got that thrash element with the energy of today, and then \[producer\] Jens \[Bogren\] brought in a lot of the orchestra and choir elements. At first I wanted to keep it a little more raw like the old days, but we experimented a lot and it really worked out. So ‘Isolation’ is a very strong opener with a very traditional heavy metal intro into a very fast song.” **Means to an End** “‘Means to an End’ started when \[drummer\] Eloy \[Casagrande\] sent me this crazy drum loop and I wrote the riff over it. It’s a very powerful, very aggressive and difficult rhythm track. It was a big challenge to record and even write that song, because it’s a really crazy tempo, but it has a great atmosphere. I think it was exciting to start writing the song that way—with the drums and guitars making something really crazy together. We wrote ‘Territory’ like that \[in 1993\] and ‘Sepulnation’ started like that \[in 2001\]. I really encourage drummers to do that for me, because it’s a great way to find different ways of playing guitar.” **Last Time** “This was a very difficult song to finish, because throughout the whole process I did so many different edits and threw away things and brought back riffs and changed parts around. It was a very intense but necessary process, because as you hear in the song, it’s very chaotic, with vocals all over the place and really sharp structural changes, but still very powerful, very aggressive. The intention was really to close this first part of the album with a more *Schizophrenia* atmosphere, and the song talks about addiction to drugs or video games or sex—or anything. It’s not a pretty situation for anyone who goes through something like that.” **Capital Enslavement** “This is the first song of the second part. These three songs, as I said, have the groovier and more percussive stuff, and ‘Capital Enslavement’ was the first song that we wrote with that intention. The intro is very Brazilian, very tribal—a ritualistic kind of vibe—but the song is very heavy and groovy, with a kind of rock ’n’ roll feeling that is very rare for us to bring to Sepultura music. It’s a great opener for this part of the record because it really represents what this part is all about.” **Ali** “This song was inspired by Muhammad Ali. I think he was probably one of the best human beings around. He had such an amazing, clear mind and could express facing the challenges of his time. The song is kind of divided into three: The first part represents Cassius Clay, the Olympic champion. The second part has a musical bridge that changes the whole atmosphere of the song, which represents when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and he said no to the Vietnam War and changed his religion and everything—as a black guy in the ’60s in America. But he was right, and so ahead of his time. And then for the last part, we have Paulo Cyrino from Babylons P—he does dub music, which kind of represents Ali’s Parkinson’s disease, which did not stop him, because he was at the Olympic Games holding the torch, even with his illness.” **Raging Void** “‘Raging Void’ is another one of those challenges between me and Eloy, because the tempo of the drums is completely different from the guitar, but somehow they fit together and it creates this really weird sensation. It was another situation where Eloy wrote a loop and I wrote the riff around it to create the atmosphere. We also put some melody on the vocals—the chorus is very melodic—so it gives a hint of what’s coming next as well.” **Guardians of Earth** “This song opens the instrumental part of the album, and I think it’s one of the most complex and crazy songs that we ever did. Musically, I think it’s one of our greatest achievements, because it brings together all the elements that Sepultura use in a very special way. I’m really proud of the guitar lead in this one—it’s my humble tribute to Ritchie Blackmore and all the Deep Purple music I love so much. I also put in a lot of acoustic and classical guitar, which was inspired by ‘Iceberg Dances,’ because we had a great time playing that song live. Lyrically, the song talks about the Amazon forest and the Indians losing their territories, especially in Brazil with this government we have. It’s a subject we always have to bring attention to, or at least try to.” **The Pentagram** “‘The Pentagram’ was born and conceived to be an instrumental song, and the idea was to do something in 5/4—hence the ‘pentagram’ name. Of course the upside-down pentagram is so common and popular in metal music and black metal, but we used the title because of the time signature. Again, it was a challenge, but I think \[bassist\] Paulo \[Jr.\] did his best work ever in Sepultura on this track. I think it’s an achievement really as a trio to present a song like this.” **Autem** “This song started also with an instrumental attitude, because it has kind of a long intro which is very percussive but also very heavy. When the song comes in, it’s very death-metal-oriented with very simple raw riffs that relate to Brazilian rhythm. I think the idea was to try to bring those two worlds together, and ‘Autem’ is what we came up with to capture that feeling.” **Quadra** “This was inspired by the quadrivium, the four liberal arts—geometry, numbers, music, and cosmology—which is the source of how we divided the album. It’s a classical guitar quartet in 47 seconds. I wanted to make it 44, to express this number four, the source of everything that’s happening on the album, but the music was great the way it was.” **Agony of Defeat** “This song has a little bit of the concept of ‘Boléro’ from \[Maurice\] Ravel, where you have a kind of structure that happens over and over, but when it repeats, a new element comes in. So that was the source of inspiration, and of course trying to write something in the ‘Machine Messiah’ vibe or Massive Attack vibe, with a slow pace and moods and melodic vocals. I’m very happy with the solo on this one as well. The lead guitar is something I really took my time with to make sure to put the right notes in the right place—not really improvising or anything like that.” **Fear, Pain, Chaos, Suffering** “On this song we have Emmily Barreto, from a Brazilian band called Far From Alaska. They’re not metal at all, but last year while we were finishing the pre-production here in São Paulo, I was invited to be part of a TV show where they put together Far From Alaska and myself to play together. We did two songs—a Bob Marley cover and ‘Ratamahatta’ by Sepultura. It was fantastic. They’re very creative and use a lot of weird instruments, and Emmily is a fantastic singer. So I invited her to do this song with us, and once she did her part, we really found the direction for the song. We actually threw away a few riffs and built the song around her voice. It was really different for us to work with a female singer, but I think it was a great way to end the album—to open new possibilities for the future.”

Veterans from countless successful releases including a seminal split album (“Sol”, 2013) that cemented their friendship and earned them unconditioned esteem and love from the atmospheric black metal aficionados, SPECTRAL LORE's sole member Ayloss and Jacob Buczarski from MARE COGNITUM join forces once again for another mystical trip through the stars. Monumental and daring in its length and scope, "Wanderers: Astrology Of The Nine" is a thematic journey through our solar system, illustrating and anthropomorphizing it into mythology which parallels our own humanity with the science of these mysterious formations. “Inspired by Gustav Holst's Planets suite, we continue the exploration we began many years ago with 'Sol',” explain the artists; “we traverse outwards from the sun to each planet, weaving fables through a synthesis of their distinct physical features and a mythical personhood representing these features.” Graced with a wondrous cover painting by the inimitable Elijah Tamu, “Wanderers: Astrology Of The Nine” is nothing but a never ending quest for mankind's cosmic origins, a celestial and philosophical observation on the notes of MARE COGNITUM and SPECTRAL LORE's music, perfectly in the balance between progressive yet furious black metal, and moments of ecstatic, melodic beauty. “While we wish to capture the awe of the raw, natural beauty of our cosmic surroundings, we have also created our own cosmically inspired lore with each planet as our muse,” say Ayloss and Buczarski; ”therefore, each track is a narrative which represents our admiration for each cosmic entity: the psychic manifestations that were conjured through our own wonder of the majestic planetary system we call home.” --- Love Metal // Hate Fascism

Nearly four decades into their career, Bay Area thrash behemoths Testament remain as ripping as ever. Fronted by towering, sonorous vocalist Chuck Billy and boasting one of the most skilled musical lineups in metal’s history—drummer Gene Hoglan, guitarist Alex Skolnick, bassist Steve Di Giorgio, and guitarist Eric Peterson—the band shows off their virtuosic chops on their 13th album. *Titans of Creation* sees Testament taking inspiration from a visit to Jerusalem, cult-related atrocities, and the healers who helped Billy beat cancer in the early aughts. “The title came after the artwork was finished,” Billy tells Apple Music. “We couldn’t figure out who the guys on the cover were—were they demons, aliens, humans? But we knew they were creating life, so we thought they could be titans as well.” Below, Billy gives us a look behind each of the songs. **Children of the Next Level** “This was actually the first song we wrote for the new record, so it took right off from \[2016’s\] *Brotherhood of the Snake*. The song was inspired by Heaven\'s Gate, a cult out of San Diego, where they committed suicide and thought they were going to actually board a meteor to the next level of existence.” **WWIII** “There were a handful of songs where some of the vocal melodies didn’t happen right away, and this was one of them. So we got in there and just started mumbling our way through it. Somewhere in there, the idea of nuclear warfare hit, so we built off of that and started writing about World War III. We used to write songs about stuff like this in the ’80s, and a lot of it has happened. They end up being weird kind of Nostradamus predictions.” **Dream Deceiver** “This one reminds me of early Scorpions stuff, like *In Trance* or *Tokyo Tapes*. When I dropped the vocal, it just felt like it should have a more old-school melodic feel to it. Eric really liked the hook, so we built on that. A dream deceiver is basically just something that’s haunting your dreams, where you can’t get any rest and you’re living in this dream state.” **Night of the Witch** “This was the first song we put out from the album. It’s definitely a different song from us, just because this is where Eric Peterson gets his vocal debut in the chorus. The part that he sings needed the witch voice, which is more like what he does in \[his side project\] Dragonlord, so we gave him a shot and he nailed it. It really just gave the song a different dynamic to what we’ve done in the past.” **City of Angels** “‘City of Angels’ is really a survivor song on this record, because I thought it was maybe too long and repetitive at first. But then I was working on some lyrics in LA with my friend Del James, who I’ve been writing with for about 20 years, and he handed me these lyrics for a song he had called ‘City of Angels.’ So I went through the music we had, and they fit perfectly. Then I took it home and found myself trying new tones of voice. In the bridge I even doubled it and did a little three-part-harmony thing. I never do that kind of shit, but it ended up really coming to life. By the end of the session, it turned out to be one of the better songs.” **Ishtars Gate** “This song sat on the back burner for a bit because, to me, the mood of the song was real different than your typical metal riff. The year before, we played in Israel, so we went to Jerusalem to see the gates and just walk around. I know Eric got inspired by it and had been referencing this song as ‘Gates of Ishtar’ since he came up with the riff. That was another one where Del and I came up with the lyrics, so we wanted to make Eric happy and write it about the gate.” **Symptoms** “Alex wrote the music and lyrics for this one, and I think you can tell. It really stands out from the rest of the album and has a different vibe from the other songs. Lyrically, he’s talking about the social awareness of mental health, and different things that have been going on with that over the last few years. But it’s taken on a different meaning now with the coronavirus, and our band getting sick. It feels like it’s referring to us.” **False Prophet** “Me and Zet—Steve Souza from Exodus—wrote the lyrics for this one, and Zet came up with the idea. It’s about the Kirtland massacre, where the guy thought he was God and he was killing people execution-style. It’s probably the fastest thrasher on the record, so it seemed to fit.” **The Healers** “This is more of a personal song. It’s about the healers that helped me when I was sick with cancer. I really wanted to pay homage to them. One of them is now in a VA hospital and has Alzheimer’s, so he didn’t really remember me. Another one, Charlie, passed away about two years ago. The third one moved off the mountain where he did sweat lodges and stuff. So I just wanted to tell the story of those three healers and what they did for me when I was ill. The song has kind of an odd vocal melody to it, but the way it turned out as far as the meaning, it’s pretty powerful.” **Code of Hammurabi** “This is another song that Alex wrote, and it fits more with the groove of the rest of the songs, but it has a different flavor—it’s not your typical riding-on-E metal riff. Me and him worked on the lyrics together, and he came up with the idea of the Code of Hammurabi, which is basically the first code of law. It was as simple as ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ If you get caught stealing, you lose your hand.” **Curse of Osiris** “This is one is pretty blistering—Gene is just tearing it up on this one. I think this was probably one of the last ones me and Del wrote. As you can tell, the theme stayed more in the Eastern kind of vibe, and it’s just about \[the Egyptian god of the underworld\] Osiris avenging his father’s death.” **Catacombs** “We’ve been using this piece of music as an intro tape for our show, but I think it wasn’t quite complete. So Eric took it upon himself to finish it and make it as big as he could. We haven’t used it for an intro since we finished the record, but we’ll see what happens. I think maybe it was just something Eric wanted to get done.”

On their ninth album, melodic death metal vets The Black Dahlia Murder descend to new lyrical depths, using the sewer as a metaphor for the metal underground. “With *Verminous*, I’m saying that this sacred knowledge that we have of our beloved underground is a kind of plague,” vocalist Trevor Strnad tells Apple Music. “We’re the rats and the creepy-crawly creatures that the white-picket-fence world doesn’t want to acknowledge, and we’re spreading this plague.” Given the album’s release during the global coronavirus lockdown, Strnad’s chosen theme has proven oddly prescient. “It’s very timely, unfortunately,” he acknowledges. “But I think if anything, it’ll make people remember this record. They’ll have nothing to do but sit there and listen to it.” Below, Strnad plunges us into the band’s *Verminous* underworld. **Verminous** “I think this is the most traditional Black Dahlia song of the record. It\'s high-energy death-thrashing madness. Lyrically, that\'s where we really bring home the theme of being underground, where the slime live—and *we\'re* the slime. We are the nightmares of the normal world and the antithesis of religion. I’m basically saying that death metal is the music of freedom. The idea is that when you dive into this world of metal, there\'s no going back.” **Godlessly** “‘Godlessly’ is about a post-apocalyptic, zombie-ridden world that has turned man against each other—and man is more deadly than the dead. It’s also a world without God. You can\'t dispute it at this point, because the whole world is ruined and wrecked and covered with zombies. It’s a very fast song, with definite At the Gates vibes in the verse riffs and some great blasting by \[drummer\] Alan Cassidy. I tried to do a little bit of a new voice for the song, which is also kind of At the Gates-y, a little bit Tompa \[Lindberg\]-styled.” **Removal of the Oaken Stake** “This is probably my personal favorite from the record. It\'s a very different song for us. It\'s a little bit more mid-paced, a little bit more rocking, a little bit more groove than we\'d normally do. We closed the hi-hat, which is wild for us. It reveals the entire verse and the entire chorus of the song without any vocals, first thing. I’ll be onstage mixing a cocktail or something during that. It’s very different for us to have so much breathing room. That’s something I’ve tried to give this album—more space and less crammed-in vocals, in hopes that it would up the catchiness factor. Lyrically, I was influenced by this role-playing game, Rifts, that I used to play in school. There was a comic strip in the book—four panels of this vampire that was a skeleton, with a stake in his chest, just sitting there, collecting dust. In the second panel, the stake was pulled out. The third panel showed him with sinew and muscle growing back over the bones. And then the fourth panel was him as a full-blown vampire. So the lyric is about being in that purgatory where you\'re a staked vampire in a coffin as human history is going by. And you’re just sitting there for centuries, in hopes that someone\'s going to foolishly pull that stake out for you.” **Child of Night** “This is one of \[guitarist\] Brian \[Eschbach\]’s songs, and musically it’s very Morbid Angel. We’ve definitely mined some Morbid Angel in the past, but it\'s traditionally the more slimy slow stuff. So this is our fast *Covenant* jam right here. I had just seen Morbid Angel the night before I wrote the lyrics and tracked the demo, so I was just feeling that vibe so hard. I tried to write a Lovecraftian sort of stream-of-consciousness lyric to match that old David Vincent style. For the voice, I was thinking of a kind of bridge between Dave and Steve Tucker. It just felt like it demanded a low vocal. There’s also a really nice melodic instrumental section before the solo, which—again—circles back to me shutting up every once in a while on this record.” **Sunless Empire** “This has got a lot of musical parts that would elicit an emotional response, I think. There’s some gripping melancholy there. The lyric goes back to the whole underground thing, talking about us being the rats and the roaches down in the deep, shunning the normal world. It’s just a thinly veiled take on the underground scene and championing our underdog status in the world.” **The Leather Apron’s Scorn** “This is about Jack the Ripper. It’s very tried-and-true, clichéd metal stuff, but that’s where my heart is, honestly. I’m never going to stop singing about vampires, man. I’m never going to stop singing about zombies, no matter how cliché. It’s just what metal is to me. There’s a lot of great Jack the Ripper songs out there, and Judas Priest’s ‘The Ripper’ was a big influence for this. I was just trying to embody how fearful people were at that time, hiding behind locked doors in London while Jack the Ripper ruled the night.” **How Very Dead** “Musically, this is a Carcass tribute. It definitely has a sort of bridge between the *Necroticism* and *Heartwork* eras of Carcass. We\'ve got some molten vibrato on the guitars there. I tried to sound as English as I could with the vocals and do my best Bill Steer impression for the lows. The lyrics have a sort of forensic slant, honoring Carcass. It’s a story I heard about someone in Russia who was embalmed alive. They thought she was dead and shot her full of formaldehyde. She woke up screaming and was killed very painfully on the spot by it. Sometimes the real world is creepier than anything you can dig up in a horror movie.” **The Wereworm\'s Feast** “This is more of a classic heavy metal song, which has been a flavor that \[guitarist\] Brandon \[Ellis\] has been injecting into the band since he joined for \[2017’s\] *Nightbringers*. It\'s kind of got a bouncy King Diamond vibe and starts with that ripping-ass solo. Vocally, I tried to do something with an early Slayer attitude, but I tried to bedazzle it a bit. And the lyric is about turning into a worm at night—instead of a werewolf, it’s a wereworm. We came up with the idea on tour, when we were doing European accents and talking about that band Verbum.” **A Womb in Dark Chrysalis (Interlude)** “It’s a classic trope of melodic death metal records to have that little acoustic passage. A lot of At the Gates and Dark Tranquillity records have it; this one has a bit of a Dissection flair to the melodies. It’s a sad little piece that sets up the last song, which is very neoclassical. In the background, there’s a return of the sewer sounds you hear before the album starts. This guy Michael Ghelfi makes these soundtracks for role-playing games, and he was cool enough to let us use this sample in return for promoting him a little bit.” **Dawn of Rats** “This has an intensely epic feel. It\'s definitely got that fugue-y thing going on where both guitars are doing something different and the bass is doing something different, in a very neoclassical approach. It\'s kind of steeped in Swedish black metal, sound-wise. The lyric is about these rats that live in an old church. They’ve been observing molestation there for a long time, and after a while they organize and attack the preacher and devour him in a big frenzy. It’s the big climax of the record.”

The third full-length from British rock band The Struts, Strange Days came to life over the course of a charmed and frenzied burst of creativity last spring. After getting tested for COVID-19, singer Luke Spiller, guitarist Adam Slack, bassist Jed Elliott, and drummer Gethin Davies all moved into the Los Angeles home of Jon Levine, a producer who worked extensively on their acclaimed sophomore effort YOUNG & DANGEROUS (including the album’s chart-climbing lead single “Body Talks”). Within just ten days of couch-crashing at Levine’s house, The Struts had laid down nine original tracks and one masterful cover of a KISS B-side: a lean, mean body of work that amounts to their most glorious output to date. “It was so much fun to make a record this way instead of getting everything done in between touring, working with multiple producers in multiple countries,” says Spiller. “We were all just burning to capture that excitement as much as we possibly could, and at times it felt like the songs were literally just falling from the sky.” In an organic turn of events for a band massively embraced by some of rock-and-roll history’s greatest icons—a feat that’s included opening for The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Guns N’ Roses—Strange Days finds The Struts joining forces with a formidable lineup of guest musicians: Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott and Phil Collen, Albert Hammond Jr. of The Strokes, Tom Morello, and Robbie Williams. Mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer (Panic! At the Disco, Arctic Monkeys, Johnny Marr), the result is a powerhouse album that lifts The Struts’ glammed-up breed of modern rock to entirely new and wildly thrilling heights. Kicking off with a magnificent bang, Strange Days opens on its title track, a sprawling and string-laced duet with Robbie Williams. “I was doing Quarantine Radio and Robbie hit me up out of the blue asking if we could talk,” notes Spiller, referring to the Instagram Live show launched by The Struts in the early days of lockdown. “We ended up Face-Timing for about two hours the first time we’d ever spoken, talking about life and music and UFOs and everything else you can think of. I asked if he’d like to work together at some point, and while we were making the album he graciously let us come over and record him singing on his front porch.” Despite its prescient title, “Strange Days” took shape from a voice memo Spiller recorded on the band’s tour bus way back in summer 2019. Fused with a cabaret-inspired interlude Spiller had recently dreamed up, the song ultimately evolved into the perfect vessel for the frontman’s force-of-nature voice: a tenderhearted epic that offers incredible solace in the most chaotic of times. Sparked from a Britpop-leaning riff brought in by Slack, the album’s potent lead single “Another Hit of Showmanship” feat. Albert Hammond Jr. centers on another poignant vocal performance from Spiller, who deftly channels the tension between giving in to temptation and rising above your demons. After laying down the initial version of the track, Spiller reached out to Hammond, for whom the band opened on a series of 2018 solo shows. “‘Another Hit of Showmanship’ reminds me of being at a club night called Ramshackle years ago at the O2 Academy in Bristol, where they’d play bands like The Libertines and Razorlight and Scissor Sisters, and of course The Strokes,” says Spiller. “I hit up Albert out of the blue and told him, ‘We’ve got this song, and I’m so excited to see what you would do with it.’ As soon as he got his hands on it, he took it to a whole different level—it really just shows why he’s so brilliant at what he does.” The most groovy-heavy work yet from The Struts, Strange Days also delivers hip-shaking standouts like “I Hate How Much I Want You”: a hot-and-bothered stomper graced with a scorching guitar solo from Phil Collen and Joe Elliott’s high-voltage vocals. Another explosive moment, “All Dressed Up (With Nowhere To Go)” unfolds in snarling power chords and exquisitely cheeky lyrics (its opening salvo: “You look like a movie star/On Sunday morning”). “That one’s based around the idea of being in love with your motorcycle—there’s a bit of innuendo to it,” says Spiller, whose own bike inspired the track. “The whole concept of being all dressed up with nowhere to go seems especially relevant the moment.” Meanwhile, “Wild Child” makes for a fierce and filthy anthem, infinitely supercharged by Tom Morello’s blistering guitar work. And on the beautifully weary “Burn It Down,” The Struts slip into a bittersweet mood, serving up a slow-burning ballad that sounds straight from the sessions for Exile on Main St. The sole cover song on Strange Days, “Do You Love Me” finds The Struts updating a fantastically sleazy track first recorded by KISS in 1976 and remade in 1980 by Girl (a late-’70s/early-’80s British glam-metal band that, incidentally, featured Phil Collen on guitar). “I was so in love with Girl’s version of ‘Do You Love Me’ and thought the simplicity of it was amazing,” says Spiller. “I wanted to give it an even bigger sound for our album—something way more aggressive, completely balls-to-the-wall.” In their supreme handling of “Do You Love Me,” The Struts again claim their rightful place in the lineage of rock-and-roll hellraisers. Formed in Derby, England, in 2012, the band quickly drew a major following with their outrageous live show, and later made their debut with Have You Heard (a 2015 EP whose lead single “Could Have Been Me” hit #1 on Spotify’s viral chart). Before they’d even put out their first album, the band opened for The Rolling Stones before a crowd of 80,000 in Paris and toured the U.S. on a string of sold-out shows. With their full-length debut Everybody Wants arriving in 2016, The Struts released YOUNG & DANGEROUS in 2018, soon after wrapping up a North American tour with Foo Fighters. Having toured incessantly since their formation, The Struts have also taken the stage at many the world’s biggest music festivals, including Lollapalooza, Governors Ball, Isle of Wight, and many more. As Spiller reveals, the making of Strange Days was a period of joyful productivity. “Every day I’d wake up at about 7 a.m., get three venti Americanos delivered to the house, go out to the backyard and smoke a couple of spliffs, and listen to the voice memos I’d recorded at the sessions the day before,” he recalls. “After the first four days or so we hit a bit of a wall, so we decided to get some beers in and just stay in the pool all day—and the day after that we knocked out three whole songs.” Throughout Strange Days, that kinetic energy manifests in the album’s unbridled spirit, an element that makes every track exhilarating. “I think because we’d wanted to make an album this way for years, all that excitement and hunger led to an immediate sort of magic once we started working on it,” says Spiller. “It was undoubtedly a magical ten days for us—and I hope when people hear the album, it gives them a taste of that magic too.”

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

The unmistakeable sound of ULCERATE finds its emotional apex on 6th album “Stare Into Death and Be Still”, as the band emerge from the claustrophobia and dissonance of their recent past to present a next-level exploration of melody, harmony and power. The band’s signature ultra-atmospheric blend of highest order unorthodox Death Metal with the texture of futurist Black Metal is here pared-down with the consummate hand of experience, giving stunning credence to the riff, the song and the meaning. Embracing production clarity, ULCERATE use these songs to fully showcase their otherworldly musicianship: a vocal performance from Paul Kelland of unadulterated authority, Michael Hoggard’s guitar and Jamie Saint Merat’s percussion working in tandem with startling skill and originality, simultaneously skewed and heart-rending, often addictively succinct and revelling in strident motifs that hook, haunt and transform the listener with their expressive honesty. Thematically the album explores the concept of “death reverence” – drawing on recent personal experience to confront the truism that death and tragedy aren't always sudden or violent, that people are often passive observers trapped “in the silent horror of observing death calmly and cleanly”. “Stare Into Death and Be Still” is the deepest, purest and most meticulous form of ULCERATE: a soul-searching conflagration of atypical melodicism, immaculate virtuosic dexterity and sublimated psychological upheaval. A breathtaking new beginning for one of the most uniquely talented bands in extreme music.

Less than a year after the release of their covers EP Explorers, Canadian melodic power metal quartet UNLEASH THE ARCHERS have sharpened their arrows and hit the bullseye once again with their fifth full-length album, Abyss. Featuring 10 new tracks, this adventure is a concept album and sequel to 2017’s Apex, and was once again recorded with legendary producer Jacob Hansen of Hansen Studios in Denmark. Abyss succeeds in showcasing the mind-blowing technical craftmanship of the young four-piece with the perfect mix of highly complex, catchy bangers and moody, synth-infused power ballads. Pairing traditional heavy sounds in the vein of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest with fast-paced power metal, the album is once again accented by frontwoman Brittney Slayes' raw four octave mezzo-soprano, shining both in powerful anthems like the outstanding title track “Abyss” as well as the fragile intro of the epic “The Wind That Shapes The Land”, and contrasted with guttural screams on the soaring “Return To Me” or the transcendent album closer “Afterlife". The quartet from Vancouver has forged their own niche in the world of metal and cemented it with memorable live shows all over the world, and now, a lucky 13 years after their inception, they've delivered their strongest album to date. © NAPALM RECORDS