Loudwire's Best Rock + Metals Albums of 2021 (So Far)

In a genre that can be unkind towards too much change, Architects\' ninth album aims to challenge that mindset. \"We can do whatever we want,\" drummer and primary songwriter Dan Searle tells Apple Music. \"The ultimate question is, do we like it? And the answer is yes.\" *For Those That Wish to Exist* showcases the British quintet taking new risks, such as incorporating an orchestral approach into their abrasive sound (\"Dead Butterflies\" and \"An Ordinary Extinction\"), expanding vocalist Sam Carter\'s range beyond just screaming (\"Flight Without Feathers\" and \"Demi God\"), and focusing more on accountability and less on nihilism. \"I just realize that there might be a universe that prevents us from having control, taking the reins to see what\'s going on in the world,\" explains Searle. \"I wanted it to be something a little bit more responsible. I began to question why I was so passive in my role in making the world a better place.\" Below, Searle walks us through *For Those That Wish to Exist*\'s 15 tracks. **Do You Dream of Armageddon?** “It\'s lyrically alluding to a sense that we\'re all in the same boat, and we\'re heading in that direction. And it doesn\'t feature anyone in the band except Sam.” **Black Lungs** “I really felt like it was the only way to open the record. I love the chorus. It really is like a showcase of every style. It\'s easing you into the record, because we stray from the usual path a number of times.” **Giving Blood** “When the song originally came together, it was just drums and synth. The guitars came later. Obviously, a lot of it is still a heavy rock song. But this is sort of your first taste of the band moving into new water, so to speak.” **Discourse Is Dead** “This is a good song to make enemies with because it\'s kind of a critique of just not speaking to each other and trying to move forward. But I know that compromise is not popular at the moment. People are more polarized than ever. And it\'s leading us further away from creating a better world.” **Dead Butterflies** “It starts just with the strings and the bass. We planned around those ideas and developed it into something that worked for the band. It sat around for ages on the shelf, and eventually we sat down with it and worked it out. I think it\'s one of the best songs on the record.” **An Ordinary Extinction** “Probably the heaviest part of the record despite the trippy nature of this song. It\'s still very Architects, but then you get tossed into the verse straight away and it\'s something completely different again. It\'s super heavy and it\'s in a key that fits Sam\'s voice.” **Impermanence** “It just felt like a stompy end-of-the-world song. And kind of thematically leading on from where we left off in \[2018\'s\] *Holy Hell*, a little bit more concentration about mortality and the nature of our existence.” **Flight Without Feathers** “This is like the pit stop on the record almost. I wanted to write a song that was just basslines, so I wrote all the vocals and built the rest of the song around it. It’s one of three songs on the record without any drums—without me actually performing on it at all. So it\'s really got to shine just on the quality of the basic parts in it.” **Little Wonder** “We all see what is wrong with the world, but at the same time we avoid wanting to see it because we all want an easy life. I think the lyrics are a little bit of a cheeky nod to the fact that this song is so stylistically different for us.” **Animals** “This song went from text message to done in about 48 hours, and it was just one of those magical moments. And if we tried to make an 11-track record, we would have never gotten to this song. I\'m so glad that we did, because I think it is probably the best Architects song.” **Libertine** “We thought the record needed something like this—something big and aggressive, something with a little bit of space in it. And in the end, it\'s an absolutely cool album track.” **Goliath** “I thought this sounded just like a metal Biffy Clyro song and we\'ve got to try to get Simon \[Neil\] on it. We just thought it\'d be cool to have the singer of one of UK\'s biggest rock bands singing over one of the heaviest parts of the record. It\'s kind of all over the place.” **Demi God** “It\'s really dark and it\'s a bit of a late jam on the record that I\'m really proud of. I felt like I didn\'t want to create a long record that just fizzles out, I wanted it to stay stronger and still be providing interesting surprises throughout.” **Meteor** “There\'s no point in pretending that this song isn\'t an arena rock song, because it is an arena rock song. We typically play in a genre where arena rock is forbidden and taboo. So this song is probably the boldest track on the record. And yes, this song is very much about us knowing that we\'re heading for disaster.” **Dying Is Absolutely Safe** “I decided that it should be an acoustic track because it felt like something that the record hadn\'t stepped into. But I think fans will get it. I think there\'s something in there that\'s pretty special.”

"This album represents the very best and worst of ourselves. Our sadness, our vengeance but in balance also our happiness and self discovery. We cannot always be the best version of ourselves, we must travel through the pain and anguish to develop our best self, a you that has learned. This album focuses on the concept that which is above, also is the same of what is below, balance the pain and happiness, centre yourself and learn from it." Charlie Rolfe

On their second album, Toronto deathcore squad Brand of Sacrifice delves deeper into the world of *Berserk*, the manga series from which they take their name. This time, frontman Kyle Anderson puts lyrical focus on the character of Guts, a conflicted wanderer and mercenary. “I think Guts is a struggler and a survivor,” Anderson tells Apple Music. “Even though he\'s constantly haunted by literal demons, he\'s able to push forward and find his lifeblood.” Musically, *Lifeblood* sees the band incorporating more electronics and synth-generated choirs into their futuristic deathcore palette. “We took what worked best from our previous album, *God Hand*,” Anderson explains. “So we doubled down on the electronics and insane dynamics, but we also tried to streamline the songs and go for mostly traditional song structures with repeating choruses.” Below, Anderson walks us through the *Lifeblood* storyline. **Dawn** “This track is pretty unrelenting. I wanted to introduce the listener to the general theme of the record, which is the negative emotions that Guts struggles with. There\'s a whispered voice clip that says, ‘Hatred is where you turn when you can\'t face your grief,’ and that\'s actually voiced by our guitarist\'s fiancée. We woke her up from a nap with a mic in her face and asked her to speak that line. She wasn\'t too pleased.” **Demon King** “This one\'s a tale of a great yet cocky emperor’s rise and fall. The character\'s called Ganishka. He got power-hungry and greedy, and we personified that in the breakdown of the song. So the buildup sort of takes and takes and takes, before lashing out with an intense rage that builds on itself—like the emperor no doubt felt when he was losing everything to his successor. It’s probably one of the more intense songs on the record.” **Animal** “This song is about a battle with an inner beast or demon. The beast in this case is the manifestation of Guts\' wrath and bloodlust, which constantly torments him and wants to take over. In this instance, our hero prevails and suppresses the furious emotions. From an instrumental standpoint, we wanted to write this song to be grand and epic with the use of choirs and synths while maintaining precision and speed during the verse sections. I think the chorus hook is quite a shock, but it’s a hint of what’s to come on the album.” **Altered Eyes** “This tune takes us back to the day when Guts\' life changed forever. It discusses tremendous loss and sadness while painting a hellish picture of what occurred. I think the video kind of does that, too. From this day forward, his life was constantly in jeopardy as otherworldly forces pursued him to collect a life debt he owed for being branded for sacrifice. Add to that the anguish from seeing a horrible atrocity committed to his lover that would render her mind broken, and it becomes one of the darker songs on the record.” **Prophecy of the Falcon (feat. Frankie Palmeri)** “This song discusses the dream of Griffith, the antagonist, of having a kingdom and power. He was born a common man, and he would do anything to achieve that—even if it means sacrificing those who are closest to him. Instrumentally, the song ramps up with a little bit of black metal influence, and there’s heavy use of choirs and other electronics as well. We included Frankie on this song because I grew up listening to his music when I was a teenager, and I was always a fan of his sound. His voice has an inhuman wetness to it, like he’s gargling blood.” **Perfect World** “It\'s pretty brief, but this instrumental passage takes you on a journey led by a powerful female lead vocal. It\'s similar to ‘Prophecy of the Falcon’ in that sense, but we wanted this song to have a feeling of triumph and victory, almost like our antagonist Griffith was looking over a conquered and prestigious kingdom.” **Mortal Vessel (feat. Ben Duerr)** “This song is one of the more technical and difficult songs to play. Lyrically, it’s actually the part two of ‘Animal,’ except this time, Guts is losing his fight to his rage and bloodlust. The beast of darkness is taking over, and who better to express that than Ben Duerr of Shadow of Intent? As a death metal superfan, we knew he would absolutely crush this part. He\'s got one of the most powerful voices in the metal scene, but it\'s so clear and his enunciation is exceptional.” **Foe of the Inhuman (feat. Eric Vanlerberghe)** “This one is from the standpoint of the Skull Knight, and he\'s sort of an enigma. He\'s an undead character who wages war against the Demon King, but he\'s ironically inhuman himself. He’s helped Guts out of a few dire situations, but we\'re not sure of his true motives. Musically, we wanted to create a song that had an anthem of a chorus and utilize some clean vocals behind the typical guttural screams. Then we’ve got Eric from I Prevail during the breakdown section, which makes a great addition to the song.” **Vengeance (feat. Jamie Graham)** “This song examines Guts\' feelings towards Griffith, due to what Griffith did to his love interest. As is often the case with vengeance, the feeling is only causing him to break down more and more. And here he\'s starting to understand this. So, from an instrumental standpoint, we wanted to create something straightforward and bouncy that would let Jamie Graham\'s singing abilities shine through in the chorus section through the use of powerful chugging grooves and rhythm work.” **Ruin (feat. Tyler Shelton)** “This song is a dialogue between Guts and his love interest, Casca. He\'s explaining his views on the new kingdom that Griffith has built, which he thinks is far from what the real world should reflect. Instrumentally, it’s more open than the other songs on the record, not utilizing as many electronic elements because we wanted to give it more of a raw feel. Tyler Shelton perfectly illustrates that raw sound in the ending section of the breakdown. We specifically built that section for his vocal style, and I think he absolutely nailed it.” **Corridor of Dreams** “This is inspired by the video game series Halo. We wanted to take the listener on an angelic, ethereal voyage, and what I picture when I hear this is that it\'s sort of like an aha moment for Guts. It\'s the soundtrack to his remembrance. He\'s in a dreamlike state and he\'s remembering the good times that he had with his love interest, and he completely understands now who or what his lifeblood is. And then the dream comes to a crashing end and reality begins to set in, which transitions into the title track.” **Lifeblood** “Our protagonist understands what he\'s learned from the Corridor of Dreams: He wants to carry on, and his love interest is the reason for that. One day, he will ultimately have to choose between love and vengeance, but for now his main focus is restoring the mind of his lover. Instrumentally, I think this song utilizes almost every tool from the Brand of Sacrifice toolbox—the choirs, electronics, and there\'s also a classic sort of deathcore feel, and we really wanted to include a chant in the song. Lyrically, I approached it from a more uplifting and inspiring perspective, with the words ‘rise up’ repeated a few times. In the end, there’s a children’s choir breakdown that’s almost like the spiritual successor to the closing of our song ‘Eclipse’ from our EP.”

As of 2021, Cannibal Corpse is 15 albums deep into a career that has made them the biggest death-metal band in the world. With *Violence Unimagined*, the Floridian masters somehow muster new levels of brutality and technicality—due in part to new guitarist (and longtime producer) Erik Rutan, also of veteran death-metal trio Hate Eternal. Given that Cannibal Corpse’s lyrics are almost exclusively about violence, it’s stunning that they haven’t actually used the word formally before. “I thought *Violence Unimagined* just had a great ring to it,” drummer and co-lyricist Paul Mazurkiewicz tells Apple Music. “I think it also sums up what the band is about.” With four of the band’s five members contributing lyrics, Mazurkiewicz, Rutan, bassist Alex Webster, and guitarist Rob Barrett give a rundown on the tracks they wrote. **“Murderous Rampage”** Mazurkiewicz: “This is a song Rob wrote, and he also came up with the title. I just wrote the lyrics about someone who does just that—goes on a murderous rampage while collecting body parts from the killing spree and putting them on display in his house.” **“Necrogenic Resurrection”** Webster: “This song is about a cult that worships a notorious deceased murderer and seeks to resurrect him through human sacrifice. Even though I don’t believe in the supernatural, I’ve always enjoyed supernatural horror movies and novels, so the inspiration for lyrics like these probably comes from being a fan of that sort of stuff. I can’t think of a specific source, though—it’s just an idea for a story that I had.” **“Inhumane Harvest”** Barrett: “‘Inhumane Harvest’ takes a look inside one of organized crime\'s more sinister activities: the human organ trade. Desperate buyers will pay a high price for a much-needed organ transplant to either save themselves or a loved one from certain death, which makes for a lucrative business in underground crime rings.” **“Condemnation Contagion”** Rutan: “As the pandemic began in early 2020, I was watching a lot of movies like *28 Days Later*, *Dawn of the Dead*, *It Comes at Night*, *I Am Legend*, and *Contagion*. I also had the news on in the background for hours on end. I became obsessed with the chaos of it all. That combination inspired the fictional writing of the lyrics and the depth and heaviness of the music.” **“Surround, Kill, Devour”** Webster: “This song is about a situation where society has completely collapsed and people are starving to death. The desperation drives some people to form cannibalistic hunting groups, preying on other survivors who are weak or alone. I had recently read an article about wolves and it talked about the teamwork they use while hunting. I thought that it would be interesting to have the human antagonists in this song hunt in a similar way.” **“Ritual Annihilation”** Rutan: “With ‘Ritual Annihilation,’ I really wanted to create a complex song that was aggressive, attacking and pummeling. Then, as I was writing, it took a different turn onto a heavy and dark path. There is a lot of two-guitar-part harmony and counterpoint going on that definitely represents some of the insanity of when I was writing it in the first quarter of 2020.” **“Follow the Blood”** Barrett: “This was the last song that I wrote the music for on this record, and I intentionally wanted to make it a slower, more mid-paced song compared to the other three that I had already written. The lyrics are about a wartime scenario.” **“Bound and Burned”** Barrett: “This is the first song that I wrote the music for on this record. I basically built all of the riffs around the middle section where the vocals and solos keep going back and forth. When it comes to the lyrics, I prefer not to explain them, as I\'d rather have the individual determine what they\'re about or what they mean to them.” **“Slowly Sawn”** Webster: “This song is told from the point of view of the victim, a man who has been captured and is being tortured to death by methodical dismemberment. We usually write the music for our songs first and the lyrics second, and sometimes the former can help inspire the latter. That was the case for this song. It’s hard to explain, but the song’s slow, grinding riffs made me think of something bad happening to someone in a protracted way. In particular the bridge section of the song, which shifts into an even lower gear, evokes a torturous vibe.” **“Overtorture”** Rutan: “The origins of this song started one morning in February 2020. Leading up to recording the album, I was on a strict regimen where I would wake up, drink water and coffee, have breakfast, check emails, ride the bike, and then play guitar and work on songs all day, every day. That morning, I just had this maniacal melody floating around in my head and it would not leave. This ended up being the first riff of the song, and it all took off from there.” **“Cerements of the Flayed”** Mazurkiewicz: “This is a song that Alex wrote and also came up with the title for. I wrote about someone who gets buried alive wearing the skin of another human that is also still alive. The person survives the ordeal only to succumb to this horrific act in the end.”

Brothers Pete and Sam Loeffler were putting the finishing touches on the ninth Chevelle album when COVID-19 descended in early 2020. “The last four years have been very tumultuous for us and our friends and family,” Pete tells Apple Music. “And then on top of it, this pandemic and the election. We were trying to come up with an album title right when COVID was hitting, and the situation just didn’t seem real.” The title they settled on is an acronym for “Nothing Is Real and This Is a Simulation”—a fitting description for Chevelle’s sci-fi take on driving hard rock—and a cover painting by the great Peruvian fantasy artist Boris Vallejo seals the deal. “This album talks about simulation theory, space travel, and all this wild technology,” Pete says. “But the title is also a reference to basically losing your job overnight because the music industry stopped.” Below, he comments on the album’s songs. **Verruckt** “This opening song harkens us back to our first album in that it’s an instrumental. It\'s a bit heavy and a bit crazy, as the title says \[in German\]. I love how it weaves heaviness around before ending on the double kick pattern constantly telling the listener to turn it up louder. It also allows me to get lost in the music without being tied to a microphone for a chance to roam around.” **So Long, Mother Earth** “The first of a few songs speaking about interstellar travel. I’m trying some new techniques for writing on the guitar these days. A few less power chords and more moving/walking single-string riffs. It seemed to help us end up at new places within our music. Lyrically, it deals with the loss of leaving Earth and its relationships, searching for courage for the future, and wondering if technology can help us advance to the point of being an interplanetary species.” **Mars Simula** “This song is a banger of excitement for me. Heavy and always pushing forward toward a release, it’s a track designed for chaos in the live setting. It’s inspired by Elon Musk and SpaceX and all the risks involved with the harrowing trip to get to Mars.” **Sleep the Deep** “This was written and recorded in my closet when I was alone. I started dabbling in alternative sounds on keyboards, using random effects and a kalimba. It was exciting to write outside of the guitar world for a minute to see what I can do with other sounds. There is more of this to come in my future.” **Self Destructor** “I didn’t see this one coming as a first radio single but was pleasantly surprised at the response. It’s not a short song and it never really lets up. To me, it’s upbeat and moves around a lot, with lots of finger work on the fretboard, which is a challenge. Lyrically, I needed to confront a few hard conversations I’ve had, one of them being science denial, which to me is risking forward progress.” **Piistol Star (Gravity Heals)** “A trippy rock track inspired by the movie *Sunshine*. The characters are hurtling through space and possibly sacrificing themselves to reignite the sun. It’s got a lot going on and we threw a ton at it. I love how the higher guitar lines carry it later in the song and make it feel like it\'s constantly growing.” **Peach** “I believe we are surrounded by cults in our societies, vying for our money, our attention, and our worship. A simple explanation for this song is ‘Keep your hands to yourself.’ Also, be especially wary of people who say that they have all the answers.” **Test Test...Enough** “Dealing with the end of something held so closely for so long, we all \[struggle\] with this in different capacities. But in this song, it’s me giving in—gladly—and fully letting go.” **Endlessly** “It’s the sad song on the album, although ultimately positive in the hope that when we leave this earth, in some way we are all reconnected—whether that’s through energy or possibly somewhere inside the simulation.” **Remember When** “The musical equivalent of the image of an astronaut disconnected and floating off into space. The thoughts that would flood the mind are truly terrifying. I use a sort of single-string chugging approach to the guitar line here—it’s different for us and super exciting. It’s very important for us to try new things at this point. We always need a new challenge.” **Ghost and Razor** “A rather dark brooder of a song. Lyrically, I can’t seem to shake the feeling of being used throughout my career. It\'s a realization that one can change and refuse to play the victim. Most times, to truly move on, one has to search it out for themselves and choose to apply it.” **Lost in Digital Woods** “I recorded this alone late at night, wanting to add piano to my spoken-word poem. I love the simplicity. Taking a break from writing, I heard a pack of coyotes running down the street. I quickly ran out of the house and recorded them on my phone. I thought it was a perfect way to end the album.”

Since their formation in 2004, British thrash-revivalists EVILE have been turning heads and taking names, delivering four pure thrash offerings blended with an uncompromising death metal assault. Their upcoming fifth studio album, Hell Unleashed, out April 30, 2021 via Napalm Records, is the long-awaited successor to their 2013 release, Skull, and features the new exciting line-up formation of the talented Ol Drake on vocals/guitars and new member Adam Smith of RipTide as rhythm guitarist. The newly staffed four-piece strikes again on nine explosive tracks, leaving nothing but a hammering world of sound taken apart by thrash. Album opener “Paralysed” catches with endangering guitar lines, quickly building up to a furious thrash manifesto and attacking the eardrum at breakneck speed. “Gore” delivers with merciless velocity and explosive backing vocals from American actor, musician and comedian Brian Posehn, and highlights the band’s irrepressible, speeding energy. With double the amount of power, twice the speed, untamed brute and blazing riffs, the title track “Hell Unleashed” propels old and new fans to the status of eternal mayhem and huge thrash euphoria. “The Thing (1982)” marks another high point of the upcoming full-length: The track strongly represents one of the album’s most influential leverages, the cinematic impact on their songwriting in symbiosis with their outstanding competences of kicking in doors with thundering drums. In 41 minutes, Hell Unleashed unchains the unbridled forces of hell, catches some rousing demons of the past and provides classical thrash metal with a contemporary yet hard-edged touch. EVILE are back – straight from the abyss! © NAPALM RECORDS

“I guarantee that most musicians have that groove or that vibe somewhere within them,” Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl tells Apple Music of the funk and disco rhythms that course through his band’s 10th LP. “They just may have never found the right time or place to let it out.” Recorded before the global pandemic took hold in early 2020, *Medicine At Midnight* is very much the sound of Grohl letting it out—a round of fleet-footed party rock inspired, in part, by ABBA, Prince, and David Bowie’s *Let’s Dance*, the 1983 Nile Rodgers-produced classic whose drummer, Omar Hakim, contributes percussion on several tracks here. Without breaking entirely from their highly reliable brand of stadium-ready slow burns (“Waiting on a War”) and riffy joyrides (“Love Dies Young”), the Foos make space for cowbell (“Cloudspotter”) and calls from the dance floor (the soulful title cut), handclaps and *na-na-na*s (“Making a Fire”). It’s a change that should probably come as no surprise. “I’m a drummer,” Grohl says. “I explained one time to Pharrell: ‘If you listen to *Nevermind*, those are disco beats, dude.’ If you’ve been in a band for a long time, you get comfortable in that place that people are familiar with. In some sort of attempt at longevity, you just have to be able to reach out and try things you’ve never done before.”

On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”

On their second LP, Greta Van Fleet continues to bow at the altar of classic rock with a heavy dose of blues-soaked riffs and transcendent imagery. “Life’s the story of ascending to the stars as one,” vocalist Josh Kiszka sings with his gravelly tenor on “Heat Above,” an optimistic call-to-arms that soars high with flourishes of acoustic guitar and Hammond organ. But when they’re not pleading for divine unity, the Kiszka brothers—alongside drummer Danny Wagner—embrace stomping, self-empowering anthems (“My Way, Soon”), majestic hard rock with medieval motifs (“Age of Machine”), and pompous power ballads (“Tears of Rain”). Less urgent and more ambitious than 2018’s *Anthem of the Peaceful Army*, it’s an album that pushes ahead with technical prowess and lots of attitude. On the epic nine-minute closer “The Weight of Dreams,” the band ascends to the pearly gates as they proudly worship the almighty Zep: “Heaven sent us here to meet the hallowed shore/To claim the wealth that we had sold.”

On 2016’s *A / B*, Mosfellsbær, Iceland’s KALEO delivered a slab of raw, big-sound rockers that was heavily indebted to American blues and soul. With their second LP’s euphoric lead single, “Break My Baby,” the four-piece once again demonstrates their skill with foot-stomping grooves, underlined by singer-songwriter JJ Julius Son’s breathy, smoky vocals. Even if Son intended for the songs on *Surface Sounds* to be open to interpretation, there’s depth behind the sleazy swagger—whether he cries for spiritual healing (“Free the Slave”) or reflects on the impact of beauty standards put on women (“Skinny”). The album’s final stretch features some of the band’s most tender songs yet, like the rootsy ballad “I Want More,” on which Son yearns to rekindle a flame against a backdrop of twinkling guitars and soaring strings.

In the eight years since Korn guitarist Brian “Head” Welch dropped an album from his side project Love and Death, he’s enlisted two new band members—Breaking Benjamin guitarist Jasen Rauch (on bass) and Phinehas drummer Isaiah Perez—to join him and guitarist/vocalist JR Bareis on the follow-up. Co-produced by Rauch and Joe Rickard, *Perfectly Preserved* takes its title from a line in opening track “Infamy,” the lyrics of which could be viewed as a reflection of our times. “That song makes me think about where we’re at in life and society and the world during this crazy season we’re walking through,” Welch tells Apple Music. “It makes me feel like everything is going to be okay.” Below, he takes us through each of the tracks on *Perfectly Preserved*. **Infamy** “I love piano, and with heavy music you don’t get a lot of piano work. I’m a spiritual person and I like to meditate, so I pretty much listen to all atmospheric and instrumental music because I feel like sometimes words get in the way. But the lyrics that Keith Wallen \[of Breaking Benjamin\] wrote are just incredible. They make me have the feeling during all this craziness that we’re going to be okay.” **Tragedy** “Keith and our co-producer Joe Rickard took some pieces of songs I wrote that didn’t get used and turned them into this song. I feel like it’s about a person that’s stuck in a past trauma that they haven’t gotten healing for or haven’t processed in a healthy way. You see that a lot, where people get wounded early on in life and it affects their whole lives—whether it’s addiction or destroyed relationships or whatever.” **Down** “I think Keith came up with that lyric—‘Buried beneath, I feel like I’m running out of time, show me I’m alive.’ I think people can get different meanings from it, because we all feel buried in life sometimes, especially in 2020 and coming into ’21. But for me, I was buried in addiction, just wanting to end it all. And I needed to be really alive, and it came for me. So this song makes me reflect on the person I was to where I am now.” **Let Me Love You (feat. Lacey Sturm)** “On our first record, we did a cover song from Devo, ‘Whip It,’ and the fans loved it. So for this new record I wanted to do a cover, but I really didn’t know which one. But JR, the other singer, sent me a demo and was like, ‘Don’t laugh. Just listen to the whole thing.’ And it was a cover of ‘Let Me Love You’ by DJ Snake featuring Justin Bieber. I was immediately like, ‘Yes—we’re doing it.’ And then I felt we needed a female guest on it, so I immediately thought of Lacey Sturm, formerly of Flyleaf. I just love her voice. She agreed to do it and just killed it.” **Death of Us** “I heard a lot of stories about people having issues with family because they\'re stuck inside the house during the pandemic. You’re really getting to know the people you live with because you’re not going to work and then coming home later on. So everyone’s getting on each other\'s nerves and whatnot. So this is a relationship-issues song, and it\'s pretty obvious that it\'s a relationship that’s ending. Everybody can relate to that.” **Slow Fire** “JR wrote this song with Jasen Rauch. I think it was first written around 2015 or ’16, if I remember right, but it had totally different lyrics. I actually think this song was rewritten twice—we just kept changing stuff. But this is another relationship song. There’s some kind of relationship chaos going on. I think people will be able to relate to it in different ways, but it feels like broken hearts and division.” **The Hunter (feat. Keith Wallen)** “Keith Wallen sings lead on this one, and he wrote most of the lyrics. Tom Hane wrote all the music—he played with In This Moment for many years, and now he’s getting into writing and producing. But Jasen Rauch came up with the hunter concept, and I feel like that could be related to a lot of the chaos that’s going on in American politics with conspiracy theories and everything.” **Lo Lamento** “This song came out a few years ago, but we rerecorded the drums for this version. It was written when Jasen was going through a divorce. I’ve had my heart shattered into pieces, and that kind of feeling comes out in a lot of songs about love, right? It’s such a great subject to write about—people have been doing it forever.” **Affliction** “The lyrics are just about being afflicted by different things in life—like addiction, which is written about in some of the other songs. I’ve had a lot of those issues, so this song really feels personal when I think about it.” **White Flag (feat. Ryan Hayes)** “I haven’t met Ryan—Jasen knows him—but he killed it. I think he recorded his parts in 2017. To me, it’s about knowing whatever enemy you’re facing in life, you’re not going to let it tear you down. You’re going to conquer it. It makes me think of when I became a Christ follower years ago and a lot of religious people didn’t welcome me. It was like, ‘Oh, he’s not one of us. Look at the music he plays.’ But the song is basically saying, ‘I’m coming after you. And when you put up the flag of surrender, I’m going to burn it.’”

As a band with dozens and dozens of strange, catchy, and experimental releases under their collective belt—and an ever-shifting lineup beyond the core duo of guitarist/vocalist Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover—the Melvins can always be relied upon to keep it interesting. *Working With God* is the second album from their “Melvins 1983” lineup—Osborne, Crover (on bass), and original drummer Mike Dillard—which recalls the band’s 1983 origins in rural Washington. In that sense, it’s very much a follow-up to 2013’s *Tres Cabrones*, which featured the same power trio. “I knew I wanted a title that had something ‘with God’ in it,” Osborne tells Apple Music. “Cursing With God, Killing With God, Joking With God—*Working With God* seemed to fit best.” Below, Osborne details the songs on this decidedly non-religious album. **I F\*\*k Around** “This came out of soundcheck. They’d go, ‘Can you do your vocal check?’ and I’d start in with ‘Round, round, fuck around, I fuck around,’ to the tune of the Beach Boys song. It always got a laugh out of people. And then we eventually thought we gotta record it. So I sat down and wrote lyrics for it. Melvins 1983 is where that kind of stuff really comes to light, because we all have the same kind of sense of humor, which my wife says is perpetually stuck in eighth grade. Which is true.” **Negative No No** “I wrote these lyrics while driving around in the car, listening to the demo. What I\'ll do is I have my notebook with me and when I come upon something, I\'ll pull over and just write it out, right there on the side of the road. I do that all the time. You couldn’t work that way on public transpo. Sitting on the bus singing out loud is not really going to work. You’d be beaten up or considered insane, which is probably not far from the truth.” **Bouncing Rick** “This was the nickname we had for our high school biology teacher. Me and Dillard had all kinds of names for people at the high school. This guy bounced around when he talked—I think it was out of nervousness—so we called him Bouncing Rick. But we’re the only ones who called him that. So as soon as I said, ‘Bouncing Rick,’ Dillard knew who I was talking about. I don’t know that the song is really about him, though. I think it would be more about the challenges of a second date.” **Caddy Daddy** “People think this is a golf reference, but it’s actually not. It’s Cadillacs. I wouldn\'t write a song about a golf caddy—I\'ve never had one. But I\'ve never had a Cadillac, either. When I lived in San Francisco, I saw a guy walking through the Fillmore District with a baseball hat on that said ‘Caddy Daddy’ on it, and I wrote it down. That was probably 30 years ago, and I\'ve had it ever since. But the song isn’t about that. It’s more about thinking you’re smarter than you really are.” **Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon** “The first part is a song that we came up with a long time ago. We used to sing it exactly like that—‘Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon,’ trying to imitate Ethel Merman. So we’ve had that version for years and years. And then the second one is about a Florida kid shooting dope in a hurricane. Dale wrote the music for that one, which is the new song. The hardest part was figuring out how I was going to fit the phrase ‘Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon’ into the lyrics, which I did.” **Boy Mike** “This might be one of my favorites. The way it started out and the way it ended up was tremendously different. And I really like the ending on that song—I think it\'s really fucking cool. I think it sounds really weird and creepy. I couldn\'t say exactly what that one\'s about, but Boy Mike is not a real person. At first I was thinking it could be about a microphone, but I don’t think it is. It’s one of those songs that ends up far surpassing your expectations. I love when that happens.” **F\*\*k You** “This is our Harry Nilsson cover, which was a no-brainer. His song was called ‘You’re Breakin’ My Heart.’ According to the documentary about him, he wrote it about his ex-wife. Nilsson was a strange cat—he never played live. This was a song that I\'ve wanted to cover for a long time, and I changed the lyrics to be as offensive as possible. We really liked the beginning with us screaming, ‘Fuck you!’ so we decided to isolate that for the second song. If you take the two ‘Brian’ tracks, ‘Boy Mike,’ and the two ‘F\*\*k Yous,’ it’s like a nice little EP in the middle of the album.” **The Great Good Place** “I think this is Dale\'s favorite song on the record. I might be wrong, but I think the title is a reference to the freaks at Andy Warhol’s Factory who thought that they’d found a place where they could do whatever they wanted, but then Warhol ends up getting blasted. I might have had that in mind, but it’s not directly about that. And then there’s that saying along the lines of ‘If you let everyone in, you let in madness, too.’ So you’ve got to be more specific about your guest list.” **Hot Fish** “The music for this one was written by Trevor Dunn, and I wrote the lyrics. We actually wrote this song for Flipper. We did a limited-edition EP with those guys playing on it, but we decided to redo the song and put it on this record. I can’t think of a band that has had a bigger impact on us than Flipper. The title comes from seeing them at a club in San Francisco in the ’80s called the Covered Wagon. In the back, there was a kitchen with a deep fryer. Those guys had this fish made out of metal that was about the size of a bowling ball. They’d drop it in the fryer until it was red hot and then throw water on it and carry it onstage screaming, ‘Hot fish! Hot fish!’ I never forgot that. The funny thing is, when I brought it up to those guys, they didn’t remember it.” **Hund** “This is a song that I wrote for \[Buzz and Dale’s side project\] Crystal Fairy, but we never got to record it. So we revamped it and did it with Melvins 1983. It has some pretty hard guitar-playing on it, as far as the soloing goes—that\'s about as hard a guitar solo as I\'ll ever do. But the song is kind of a multifaceted nightmare—it\'s got a lot of parts to it. Mike and Dale did a really good job working this out.” **Goodnight Sweet Heart** “We’ve been wanting to do this on an album forever. We used to do this song with the Big Business guys—we’d do it as the last song of the night. Then I met one of the guys from Sha Na Na when I was golfing at one of the little par-three courses I play. He was there all the time, so I got to be friends with him. He told me the reason they loved doing that song last is because it was the shortest song they did in their whole set. So we open the record with a Beach Boys song and close it with a ’50s doo-wop song. It just seems right.”

Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.

When it came time to title his second solo album, Myles Kennedy looked to Shakespeare’s *Julius Caesar* for inspiration—specifically the part in which the soothsayer warns the Roman ruler of the date of his death. “The line ‘Beware the ides of March’ is a cautionary phrase,” the Alter Bridge and Slash and Conspirators vocalist tells Apple Music. “I started writing most of these songs after the pandemic started, when there was a lot of uncertainty, so it felt appropriate.” Unable to tour during lockdown, Kennedy had no shortage of downtime to work on the album. “For years, I’ve been juggling three projects,” he points out. “I’d write when I could—on the road, in a hotel room, or if I was at home for two weeks before going on tour again. With this record, I could totally hunker down and stay focused, which was really beneficial.” Below, Kennedy discusses each track on *The Ides of March*. **“Get Along”** “Oftentimes when you initially sing a melody, a phrase will pop out and you don\'t know where it comes from. That’s how the line ‘Why can\'t we all just get along?’ happened. That was written probably in March 2020, before things got pretty tumultuous here in the States. I think a lot of people hear that lyric and think it was written about the protests, but I actually looked back to the ’92 riots in Los Angeles. Those really affected me when I was younger, so I think that was the genesis of the lyric in a way.” **“A Thousand Words”** “The lyric was inspired by a friend of ours who had recently lost her father. She\'d gone to the funeral and someone had snapped a picture of her mother standing over her husband\'s grave. They\'d been married for decades—I want to say 50 years. When I saw the picture, it just pulled on my heartstrings and really spoke a thousand words. It was such a vivid image that manifested life and our impermanence.” **“In Stride”** “I didn\'t even know if this was going to make the record, let alone be the first single. I just thought the album needed an uptempo track. When it came time to put the lyric together, everything shut down and everyone was freaking out and stocking up toilet paper, which became the new gold. So this was just stepping back and realizing it might be wise to chill out and gain some perspective. We don’t need that much toilet paper.” **“The Ides of March”** “This was a hard song to write. I found myself really falling deep into the lyrical narrative, to the point where even my wife was noticing that it was starting to affect me. I was definitely living the record. Musically, I chased this song down for about six months. My favorite line lyrically on the whole record is here, and it’s become my mantra in the times we\'re living in: ‘Cool heads prevail in times of change.’ It\'s been very, very important for me.” **“Wake Me When It\'s Over”** “This track was written really quickly one night. Like a lot of us during lockdown, we were starting to get a little bored. I found myself watching a lot of *Impractical Jokers* because it made me happy. I needed that comic relief. I had a guitar in hand, and I’d had a couple of gin and tonics—just trying to self-medicate to avoid going stir-crazy. The song pushes the idea that if everything is going to hell, at least try to have fun. If this is truly an impending apocalypse, I’m just going to party and have a good time.” **“Love Rain Down”** “This song was actually written in 2009—it’s just been sitting on the back burner. I made a demo of it for a record I never put out, but I’d always really liked the song. I felt like the lyric was fitting for the times we’re living in, because it\'s a plea born out of longing. A lot of us were longing for answers and unity and solace from what was going on in the current times. It felt appropriate. And musically, it’s real fun. I love playing this one because it was inspired by Big Bill Broonzy.” **“Tell It Like It Is”** “This was really inspired by the swagger of The Rolling Stones. I wanted the track to have that reckless abandon to it. It’s a pocket that I haven\'t explored a lot in anything that I\'ve done with other bands. It’s become one of my favorite tracks because it’s different from a lot of the music I\'ve been a part of. There\'s a certain tongue-in-cheek element to it, and the chorus says it best: ‘Don’t sugarcoat.’ It’s the idea of just speaking your mind and telling it like it is.” **“Moonshot”** “When it came time to put the lyric together for this, the first thing that came out was ‘I remember when we were suiting up again before the end of time.’ It made me think about standing backstage at my wardrobe case with my bandmates, shooting the shit and getting ready to go onstage—just the idea that I took a lot of that for granted. I didn\'t know when I was going to be able to do that again. And then the chorus manifests this optimism that things will return to normal—even though it seems like a moonshot, something completely out of reach.” **“Wanderlust Begins”** “This was written years ago, around the time I wrote ‘Love Rain Down.’ I was going through a major acoustic phase, working on a lot of fingerstyle stuff and a lot of weird alternate tunings. I stumbled onto this tuning that was just completely crazy and started coming up with some chord progressions and melodies. That\'s how that song was born. And obviously it’s about wanting to get out and go somewhere. I felt like it was very appropriate for how a lot of us were feeling.” **“Sifting Through the Fire”** “This track is definitely inspired by Southern rock like Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, with the harmonized guitar thing at the beginning. Lyrically, it was inspired by realizing that so many of us—myself included—can fall prey to living in echo chambers. There’s a movie I saw after the song was written which summed up exactly what it’s about. It’s called *The Social Dilemma*, and it’s great. It really sheds light on how algorithms are basically driving where we’re getting our information from.” **“Worried Mind”** “This is an important track to me, and a nice way to end the record. I think it can have a dual meaning. Some people will hear it and think it’s about a relationship and the idea that you need to compromise. There’s a line that says, ‘A little give and take could light the way and bring this back to life,’ which could apply to a relationship, but also to society and how people deal with each other in general. I would love it, personally, if people stepped away from their corner and talked to one another and found common ground.”

Iconic frontman and instrumentalist MYLES KENNEDY (Alter Bridge, Slash ft. Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators) proves that tumultuous downtime can spark creative genius with The Ides Of March – the long-anticipated full-length follow up to his 2018 solo debut, Year Of The Tiger. The Ides Of March once again showcases the organic side of Kennedy’s musical spectrum and one-of-a-kind voice, but while bright inclusions of lap steel and mandolin have replaced some of the pummeling kick drum and downtuned electric riffage his other renowned projects are known for, each of its offerings maintain the same steadfast energy that never relents. Fluxing between heritage rock outcries featuring Jimmy Page-worthy solos, and stripped-down, bluesy beckonings, the album manifests as an uplifting refresher arriving when society needs it most. Lyrically, the album’s 11 unique offerings embrace all listeners, championing themes of unity and solidarity over separation and spite, allowing the sonic warmth of each track to stand out. Opening stunner “Get Along” proves itself as an anthem for the times, giving listeners a hard-rocking first dose of MYLES KENNEDY’s iconic vocal attack and guitar prowess, ushered along by an addictive hook: “Why can’t we all just get along?” The album rocks and twangs with timeless spine-tinglers like “A Thousand Words” and slide guitar-laden lead single/future classic “In Stride”. Kennedy slows it down with triumphant, smooth vocal knockout “The Ides Of March”, topped with a jazzy guitar solo and poetic lyricism crooning for camaraderie in our darkest times. Raucous blues-rocker “Wake Me When It’s Over” and passionate, ethereal “Love Rain Down” astound, while earworm lead-ignited “Tell It Like It Is” and swaying sing-a-long standout “Moonshot” successfully mark Kennedy’s “dual-citizenship” in the realms of rock and country inspiration. Acoustics, mandolin and slide guitar pepper the soft benevolence of “Wanderlust Begins” and classic rock-inspired wakeup call “Sifting Through The Fire”, before bluesy success “Worried Mind” provides the listener with one last slab of verification that MYLES KENNEDY is an undeniable talent for the ages. The Ides Of March doubles down on the charging roots rock vibes of its predecessor while exuding an aura of tenderness and inner peace – radiating the sorely needed, uplifting spirit of Americana rock.

Ask Rob Zombie what inspired the characteristically lengthy title of his seventh solo album, and he’ll tell you this: “I’m never really sure what inspires anything, to be honest. I’m always just taking things in all the time, and little pieces of phrases stick in my head. So I say it as a joke, but I also mean it: The title means the sounds coming off the record.” Propelled by Zombie’s signature blend of metallic grooves, trashy movie samples, and horror-inspired lyrics, The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy is an apt description of this delirious and often danceable collection of songs and sample-driven interludes. “When I’m recording, there is no plan—ever,” Zombie tells Apple Music. “I never go in thinking, ‘I want it to be catchy. I want it to be heavy.’ We just start, and the weirdness creates itself.” Below, Zombie discusses each of the album’s non-interlude tracks. **The Triumph of King Freak (A Crypt of Preservation and Superstition)** “This song was written toward the end of the album. And the songs are always being created as we record. We don’t jam. We don’t rehearse. So I record everything as we’re writing. And usually when I do vocals on a song, the first couple of times doesn’t sound right. But when I did this song, the first pass fit so perfectly that in my headphones it felt like I was lip-syncing to my own voice. So it just had a spark to it right out of the gate. I remember thinking, ‘Shit, man—I wish they all came this easy.’” **The Ballad of Sleazy Rider** “That was the first song written for the record, so it was real fresh and fun. We put the backwards guitars on there, and that really gave it its own life. That’s one of the reasons I like to record over a long period of time—you always have a certain amount of energy. I never want to go into the studio and hammer out 18 songs in a row, because by the time you get to the end, you’re just beating a dead horse.” **Shadow of the Cemetery Man** “*Cemetery Man* is a good movie, and it was really funny. This song isn’t based on the movie or anything—I kind of realized afterwards that the movie title was in the song title. This song started with a drumbeat. A lot of times, all I need is a beat. I’ll lay the vocals down over the beat and then we’ll build everything else around the vocals—instead of conventionally, where you lay down the guitars and sing to those.” **18th Century Cannibals, Excitable Morlocks and a One-Way Ticket on the Ghost Train** “This is another one that was very much done to just a drumbeat, because I wanted to do something that was sort of like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ one of those Dylan songs where it\'s just kind of going and going. So I freestyled the wacky vocals over the beat, and then John 5 came in and laid down some really good chicken pickin’ and banjo playing and it sort of morphed into a country tune. And then I got really into cutting and pasting dynamically opposing parts, like with the chorus here—it just slams in. You wouldn’t logically write a song like that. You have to experiment to write that song.” **The Eternal Struggles of the Howling Man** “To me, this feels like a throwback metal song—almost like Deep Purple at times. I’ll always write parts separately from themselves and then force them to go together, because you can make it work. And it’s amazing how people can wrap their minds around it. That\'s why I like putting in a lot of weird changes, and I like doing it in a short amount of time. Some of these songs aren\'t that long, but the arrangements are complicated for two and a half minutes. It almost became like a science experiment in the studio.” **The Satanic Rites of Blacula** “I remember we wrote this around Halloween. I always have a TV going in the studio with movies playing, and sometimes I’ll even play other music in the studio while we’re recording—not to inspire us, but just so that there’s noise in the air all the time. There have been times if you could isolate my vocal track, you’d probably hear the TV playing in the background. And at the time, I was watching *Blacula* or *Scream Blacula Scream*—so that’s how the song started morphing into this.” **Shake Your Ass-Smoke Your Grass** “We were listening to a bunch of English glam rock, like Slade, The Sweet, and especially T. Rex, where they always have that particular drumbeat. So, again, we found that beat and built the whole song around it. It’s infectious. With the title, I can picture the font on that bumper sticker, ‘Gas, Grass, or Ass—No One Rides for Free,’ just because of the age that I am. As a kid, I was just surrounded by that stuff, and it’s still burned in my brain.” **Boom-Boom-Boom** “Sometimes you come up with a piece of music that has kind of a cool groove and then you figure out what to do with it. It sounds like it would be in a horrible strip club at a truck stop somewhere. It’s a very simple song, but it goes along with everything else on the record in the sense that I try my best not to make songs sound like each other.” **Get Loose** “We got ahold of a sitar guitar, which just sounds so amazing, and then it’s a pretty straight-ahead kind of metal chunk song. This was one of those situations where I knew the riff was cool but I wasn’t sure what to do with it at first. Sometimes we’ll take a riff and slow it down or speed it up or play it backwards, because you’re just struggling for a way to connect with it. In this case, we slowed it way down and now it makes sense.” **Crow Killer Blues** “This song starts as this big, heavy thing, and by the time it ends, it’s like ‘Riders on the Storm.’ We’re always trying to find some new instrumentation to give each song its own signature. One’s got a sitar. One’s got turntables and a scratch. And this one has some cool-sounding keyboards. I never want to have just guitar, bass, and drums. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as a kid, growing up with later Beatles stuff like the White Album or *Magical Mystery Tour*, where the music is crazy and all over the place and experimental, that’s what we like to do.”

In January 2019, Royal Blood traveled to LA to record with Josh Homme at the Queens of the Stone Age frontman’s Pink Duck studio. The sessions produced “Boilermaker,” a track from the Sussex rock duo’s third album *Typhoons*, but it was also a trip that generated two important changes for singer/bassist Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher. Firstly, Kerr stopped drinking. On a weekend break from recording, he headed to Vegas. “I was at a real crescendo,” he tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I was a nutter. I was like Ron Burgundy at the bar, washed up. And I could hear the same old monologue going on. I could see I was bored of my complaints about myself. I had a very clear moment of ‘Something’s got to change. I can’t expect things to get any better if I don’t really take responsibility for this.’” Secondly, Homme encouraged Kerr and Thatcher to worry less about perfection and explore the untapped possibilities for their music. “There’s a lot of wigs, a lot of fancy dress,” says Kerr about Pink Duck. “It’s a place to have fun. He is very good at creating an environment where you feel comfortable putting forward an idea no matter how crazy it might be. I think he says, ‘What if?’ more than anyone I’ve ever met. That mantra got drilled into us and we’ve carried that into the rest of this record.” Both developments resonate through *Typhoons*. Across two previous albums—double-platinum debut *Royal Blood* in 2014 and follow-up *How Did We Get So Dark?* in 2017— the duo minted ferocious, divergent rock from just drums, bass, and effects pedals. Even more free-spirited, *Typhoons* retools their sound for the dance floor, marshaling riffs to four-to-the-floor beats. It’s a limber, swaggering sound they’ve nicknamed “AC Disco”—but factor in the big pop melodies on “Million and One” and “Trouble’s Coming” and you could also call it Black ABBAth. And like all the best disco, *Typhoons* bears plenty of emotional weight, with the songs unflinchingly tracing Kerr’s turbulent path towards sobriety. “It was the only thing I had to write about,” he says. “I got to the point where I *really* understood who I was, and having that kind of genuine confidence is crucial for being creative. It allowed me to trust myself with it rather than second-guessing anything. I felt a little less exposed: It almost felt like the lyrics were a bit disguised because the music was so upbeat and euphoric. I felt amazing and so positive that I was in a much better place, yet the only thing I had to write about was incredibly dark. So it’s a strange duality on the album.” Only at the very end do the music’s rigor and strut drop, when Kerr swaps his bass for a piano on the airy, psychedelic ballad “All We Have Is Now.” “Perhaps it points towards the unknown of where we’re going next,” he says. “It ended up on the record because \[we thought\], ‘That’s really great.’ It doesn’t matter whether it aligns with what we’ve done before or what people say we’re allowed to do. As long as we’re not trying to fight for someone we used to be, or trying to jump too aggressively forwards to be a band we’re not yet, as long as we stay true to who we are in the moment, then we’ll be OK.”

"Los Angeles, CA, USA’s TETRARCH – metal’s hottest new rising stars – have turned heads with their ability to successfully blend the addictive stylings of favorite modern metal pillars while maintaining a fresh sound that breaks new ground. Since bursting onto the scene with their breakout independent debut Freak in 2017, the band has garnered remarkable early acclaim from notable press, radio, industry and fellow artists alike at an impressive rate unmatched by any other new band. In 2021, they will release their sophomore full-length, Unstable – a 10-track barnburner that confirms the band’s icon status. The album wastes no time igniting with the unforgettable, punching first single “I’m Not Right” (currently boasting over 1 million views on YouTube and counting, plus huge fan buzz) – a prime example of TETRARCH’s fresh sound. The anthem's straight earworm hook, boosted by frontman Josh Fore’s raw emotion and dynamic vocal style, pays homage to the genre’s greats while lifted by the eerie leads of trailblazing lead guitarist Diamond Rowe. Radio-ready, lyrically-relevant tracks like anti-bullying anthem for the ages, “Sick Of You”, and ode to relationships-gone-bad, “You Never Listen”, showcase TETRARCH’s hefty progressions and unforgettable choruses. Unstable’s heaviest offerings prove the band’s dynamic assault of varying heavy styles, most notedly on assertive breakneck burner “Negative Noise” – a track that could turn the heads of metal’s greatest riff writers with Rowe’s mighty axe attack – and on the melodically chilling “Take A Look Inside”, highlighting the powerful rhythm section of bassist Ryan Lerner and drummer Ruben Limas. The album even ventures to explore slower introspective sides of the band on the standout, melodic “Addicted” and closer track “Trust Me”, which trickles in supernatural atmosphere. Delivering heavy hit after hit, Unstable is 10 tracks of pure potency and undeniable talent. Look no further, TETRARCH is the band to watch." © NAPALM RECORDS

“This record is very much an homage to the loved ones that I\'ve lost,” The Pretty Reckless vocalist/guitarist Taylor Momsen tells Apple Music about their fourth studio LP. “But it\'s also very much a reflection of my life written from a very personal and intimate perspective of where I was at and what I was going through.” In May 2017, the New York City four-piece was left stunned by the untimely death of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell while supporting the grunge pioneers on tour in Detroit, Michigan. Shaken by this tragic incident, Momsen, who considered Cornell a mentor and a friend, came to the conclusion that she was not in a good place and needed to take a step back and grieve privately. As she was coming to terms with what had happened, Momsen suffered another blow when she learned that the band’s longtime producer Kato Khandwala had died tragically in a motorcycle accident. At her wit’s end, Momsen fell into a spiral of depression and substance abuse. Momsen’s love of music is what started to pull her out of that dark place—starting with The Beatles, the first band she ever heard, and coming back around to Soundgarden when it brought her joy to listen to them again. She picked up her guitar and started to play. “I think that was the start of where I started to see a spark come back into my eye, a little bit of light,” Momsen says. “Clichéd as it may sound, music very literally saved my life. I had been repressing so much of myself, and everything that I was going through, that by the time I even attempted to creep that door open, the floodgates just poured out in this uncontrollable way.” Read on as Momsen takes us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **Death by Rock and Roll** “I think that it was very important for me that ‘Death by Rock and Roll’ is the opening song on the record. The first thing you hear when you push play is actually a recording of Kato\'s footsteps walking down the hallway of the House of Loud, the studio where we recorded our first album *Light Me Up*. I don\'t want to compliment myself, but it does sound like a rock ’n’ roll anthem and this battle about your life.” **Only Love Can Save Me Now (feat. Matt Cameron & Kim Thayil)** “When I finished it and we had done a rough sketch of it in the studio, as it was coming together, it had this Soundgarden-esque overtone to it. I just thought that Matt and Kim, being the incredible and unique musicians that they are, would add such a dimension to it that we weren\'t able to create ourselves. We flew to Seattle and recorded it at London Bridge Studios, which is where Soundgarden recorded *Louder Than Love* and Pearl Jam recorded *Ten* back in the day. I don\'t want to speak for them, but for me, it was this very, very beautiful full-circle moment of creating something new after all the hell.” **25** “I wrote it before turning 25, and we recorded it shortly after my birthday. I think that I was at a very low point in my life. But I was also at a very reflective point, as probably a lot of people are around a birthday. It’s a very autobiographical one in a lot of ways. When I finished writing it, I took a step back from it for a second. There was no one else in the room. I just went, ‘I think I might\'ve gotten better. I think this might be really good.’ Certainly it was a turning point for myself as a songwriter and also for myself as a person. It was me saying to myself, \'Taylor, you need to get your shit together.\' It\'s the first indication on the record that there is light at the end of this very dark tunnel.”