Metal Hammer's Top 50 Best Albums of 2022

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

In blending black metal with African American spirituals on Zeal & Ardor’s 2016 debut *Devil Is Fine*, Swiss American artist Manuel Gagneux broke new musical ground. On his third album, he takes an industrial detour with lead single “Run,” which channels Ministry and early Nine Inch Nails, and “Götterdämmerung,” which he sings in German. Elsewhere, “Bow” plunges gospel chants into an electronic dirge, while “Golden Liar” sets soulful melodies and spoken word to a dark country twang. “It’s fun messing around with sounds and seeing what sticks to the wall,” he tells Apple Music. “That’s how I approach music—I’m just playing with different elements for the gits and shiggles of it. And then sometimes it turns out sounding good.” Below, he discusses each track on his self-titled album. **“Zeal & Ardor”** “We decided early on that our sound is basically just our atmosphere, and within that realm we can do whatever we want genre-wise. So it was pretty important to set the tone, to establish that atmosphere thoroughly. I think this summarizes the intent. It starts with a broody synthesizer and then one element after the other comes in. By the end, you should be in the Zeal & Ardor world.” **“Run”** “We wanted the have the first proper song on the record be kind of relentless. That’s also why we put it out as the first single. This is a nonstop aggressive song, and we’ve never really done anything in this manner. It felt like a good way to be off to the races.” **“Death to the Holy”** “I really like this track because it kind of summarizes what we’re all about in just three minutes. You have the bluesy stuff, some piano in there, and then that groove goes directly into this almost metalcore-type breakdown part with evil synthesizers. It’s the most Zeal & Ardor song on the record. It has the elements people kind of expect from us, so we wanted to get that out of the way early on so the record can get weird later.” **“Emersion”** “This starts off with a really relaxed kind of hip-hop beat. We always play with contrast, so to have the heavy part sound heavy, you have to precede it with a really mellow soft part. And I think this is the most extreme in that regard, because it starts super low-key and kind of dreamy—and then out of nowhere, this wall of black metal comes in. We also put some flavors of post-rock in there, some hopeful melodies, just to offset the abrasive contrast.” **“Golden Liar”** “I was looking into ways to make the atmosphere a bit thicker, and of course a master of atmosphere is Ennio Morricone. So I liberated some elements of his music—I stole them. I did it to have this kind of slow-burn song, and I think it’s one of the longer ones. I really like this track because it conveys heaviness without being really heavy in the instrument department.” **“Erase”** “This is one of the more proggy ones. I only noticed this after the fact, but all of the songs are rather simple when it comes to how many parts they have. But this one is an outlier in that regard, and there’s also a lot of modal changes. I think we started in D, and it goes to a different key in a way that you don’t really notice. But if you skip from the beginning to the end of the song, we have the same guitar lick in a different key. It’s like a teleportation for the listener without them noticing, like a little magic trick.” **“Bow”** “My influences are really showing here, because I listen to a lot of industrial and electronic stuff like Woodkid. I just wanted to explore different kinds of heaviness, which is not just double-bass drums and guitars but sounds that are awe-inspiring. So there’s a distorted horn section in there which I came up with, and not Woodkid or Hans Zimmer. That was totally me by myself. I just wanted the most grandiose sound.” **“Feed the Machine”** “Funny story about this one. I do demos on my computer, and I program the drums for those. When I showed it to our drummer Marco, he was like, ‘That’s too fast, man. I can’t play that.’ So this song would’ve been even faster were it not for that. But the whole gag of this song is that there’s a really harsh, Ministry-esque part which sounds like a machine pumping away—which is where the title came from, I’m afraid.” **“I Caught You”** “We’re kind of the outliers in this whole black metal thing, because people think we’re phonies or whatever because we do different stuff. And the biggest sin you could commit in black metal is to have nu-metal influences. So that’s what we did with this song. We even slowed down the speed of the song just for those sequences so they would sound as Deftones-y as possible. So that’s a fun one. I can’t wait to play it live.” **“Church Burns”** “The intent with this was to have the most potentially controversial lyrics of the album be in the most poppy or pop-adjacent song we have. And seeing how this was on the front page of Apple Music recently, I think we kinda made that happen. I’m actually in disbelief that it worked that way, because in itself it’s just a pop verse, and then the breakdown, if you wanna call it that, is kinda ZZ Top-ish honky-tonk. I was kind of worried about that, because it’s so un-metal, so I was relieved that people ended up liking it.” **“Götterdämmerung”** “This is the title of a movement in a Wagner opera, and Wagner was heavily used by not-so-great people in the ’30s and ’40s in Germany. So I wanted to reappropriate and reclaim Wagner, even though he himself was a huge dick, too—but dude wrote brilliant music. And here’s how idiotic I am: I was really worried about the German lyrics, like can people even emote to this? I was totally blanking on the fact that Rammstein is a huge thing at this point. So, duh. But German just sounds metal, and it’s a fun language to scream in.” **“Hold Your Head Low”** “This is an older song that wasn’t written for this album specifically, but it kind of fit in. I think this is us at our bluesiest, and it’s also kind of a slow burner. Here’s where my Opeth influences show in guitar writing. When we were on tour with them last December, I elected not to play it because I was afraid Mikael \[Åkerfeldt\] would say, ‘You fucking ripoff!’ But we put it on the album because it feels like a little breather after all that harsh abrasiveness.” **“J-M-B”** “I tried to put some jazz chords to metal, which I thought was kind of an idiotic endeavor at first, but when I presented the songs in the studio, we felt we should put it on the record. It almost became like a secret hidden track, which is impossible to do these days. But since I write all these demos alone, I give them all these little project names. This one was ‘Jazz Metal Blues,’ but you can’t put that on the record sleeve, so: ‘J-M-B.’” **“A-H-I-L”** “This is more somber. The title stands for ‘All Hope Is Lost.’ In black metal, the atmosphere is basically everything, and it’s like that hopeless, drab rainy day in Norway, like ‘my father just got killed by a pack of wolves’ kind of vibe. I just wanted to try and emulate that with synthesizers, as far removed from actual black metal as possible. It felt like an appropriate outro after ‘J-M-B.’ This is back to serious business and it’s time to go to bed.”

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

The sophmore album from Conjurer

The year 2022 marks a new beginning for Machine Head. Not only is *ØF KINGDØM AND CRØWN* the Bay Area metal band’s first LP with new guitarist Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka (also of Polish tech-death blasters Decapitated), but it’s also their first concept album. “The story is set in a futuristic, crime-ridden wasteland where the sky is stained crimson,” Machine Head vocalist, guitarist, and main songwriter Robb Flynn tells Apple Music. “It revolves around two characters, Ares and Eros. Ares loses the love of his life, Amethyst, and goes on a murderous rampage to avenge her death. Eros loses his mother to a drug overdose, spirals into a depression, and becomes radicalized by a charismatic leader. He goes on his own murderous rampage, which ends up killing Amethyst. The lyrics detail how their lives intertwine.” Inspired by sprawling concept albums like Pink Floyd’s *The Wall* and My Chemical Romance’s *The Black Parade*, along with the manga comics favored by his kids, Flynn decided to fuse his story with the type of songwriting he did back on Machine Head’s 1994 debut, *Burn My Eyes*. “One of the things I really focused on was simplifying vocal cadences,” he says. “We did the *Burn My Eyes* 25th anniversary tour in the lead-up to the writing of this record, and one of the things I realized was that I used a lot less words back then, and it worked really well. So, I took the same approach with this one.” Below, he details each track. **“SLAUGHTER THE MARTYR”** “This was the only song that could open the album. It’s the impetus of everything. I was trying to imagine it like a movie. My kids were really into manga, so I was reading manga and kind of storyboarding things in my mind like a manga—top to bottom. And this was such an epic opening. It’s so lonely and cinematic that it just seemed that the beginning was the only place it could go. And then, it goes into a classic Machine Head riff, double-bass groove, and sick fucking breakdown.” **“CHØKE ØN THE ASHES ØF YØUR HATE”** “Lyrically, this continues in a vengeful, violent mood. Exodus’ *Bonded by Blood* is such a part of my DNA at this point. Gary Holt’s solo in ‘Bonded by Blood’ is the first guitar solo I ever learned to play all the way through, so whenever I’m channeling thrash, it’s always through the eye of, ‘What would Gary Holt do?’ So, this is just a full-on Bay Area thrash metal song—and probably the second-fastest song on the record.” **“BECØME THE FIRESTØRM”** “Another absolute face-melter. We wanted to have the first three songs be just a murderer’s row punching you in the face. I think this might be the fastest song we’ve ever written. There’s kind of like a black metal-style riff going on in there, but with classic Machine Head grooves in it as well. Lyrically, it’s just about conquering all and fucking smashing through obstacles, but it’s told in this violent, futuristic, crime-ridden landscape.” **“ØVERDØSE”** “The first three songs are about character number one, and now we’re switching over to character number two. ‘Overdose’ is an interlude that captures his mother overdosing and him freaking out.” **“MY HANDS ARE EMPTY”** “After his mother overdoses, he starts down this path trying to heal, trying to find redemption. This song is his tipping point in the story. We had already written a lot of songs when we came up with this one, but I remember thinking this was really something different and special—that we could build the whole album around this one song. It became an anchor for the record and became this wild turning point for us in writing the storyline.” **“UNHALLØWED”** “Character two is in the darkest depression of his life. He’s wandering through this crime-ridden wasteland trying to figure out his lot in life and what he’s going to do. He’s lost, he’s suicidal, and he’s feeling guilt. He’s just trying to process all of it and get through this moment. Musically, it’s a very midtempo song, and our guitar player, Vogg, wrote a bunch of sick riffs for this. I felt like we’ve got a bunch of fucking ragers at the beginning, but I wanted to have more of a head-banger.” **“ASSIMILATE”/”KILL THY ENEMIES”** “‘ASSIMILATE’ is an interlude that’s basically the intro to ‘KILL THY ENEMIES.’ We’re still going down character number two’s path. Here, he meets this charismatic leader and becomes radicalized by this person. And this is kind of the beginning of his dark path. Musically, my bass player, Jared \[MacEachern\], wrote the main riff. He’s really the unsung hero of the record—he wrote a lot of awesome riffs, cool vocal melodies, and some great lyrics. This one has that pounding, tribal, ’90s Machine Head kind of groove, for sure.” **“NØ GØDS, NØ MASTERS”** “This is the two characters coming together. I think it’s one of the most melodic tracks on the record—it’s got a really haunting melody. This one was the result of these Electric Happy Hours we did during the pandemic, where we did 130 live streams just playing cover songs, and a lot of them were way outside of our box—like Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, and Bob Marley. That process opened up these new avenues for what we could do and got our harmonizing really locked in, and I feel like we really brought that to the forefront on this song.” **“BLØØDSHØT”** “This is another full-on rager. There’s no clean singing, and it’s just a killer uptempo groove. This is another song that Vogg contributed to. He brought some awesome riffs to the table and some sick leads, so this was definitely a collab between him and I.” **“RØTTEN”** “This is a song that I feel really came out of the *Burn My Eyes* anniversary tour. When I was coming up with these riffs, I just wanted to have one of those fucking old-school, early-’90s chugs. In my mind, it’s got a kind of *Fabulous Disaster*-era Exodus feel. I don’t wanna say anything about this one lyrically—I’d rather let people figure that out for themselves.” **“TERMINUS”** “I wanted the storyline to kind of go into an area where the listener is like, ‘Wait, what happened?’ I wanted this last interlude to put the listener in a place where, if they hadn’t been engaged in the story up ’til now, they’ve really gotta listen to the words and engage.” **“ARRØWS IN WØRDS FRØM THE SKY”** “This is arguably the most melodic song we’ve ever written. It’s all harmonies, nearly all clean singing, and maybe one of the most epic songs we’ve ever done. I also think it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written—I’m really proud of this song. I feel like it ends the record on a little bit of a hopeful note. It’s weird because I’ve never wanted to do that in my life. I always want to end records on fury and anger or depression and death and sadness because that’s where our lyrical topics kind of hang. But I’ve never written about love and how it makes you do crazy things.”

When Cave In released their 2019 album, *Final Transmission*, many thought it might be just that. The band’s beloved friend and bassist, Caleb Scofield, had passed suddenly during the recording’s early stages, and it seemed—understandably—that heartbreak might prevent them from carrying on. Instead, vocalist/guitarist Steve Brodsky, drummer J.R. Conners, and guitarist/vocalist Adam McGrath enlisted their old friend and Converge/Old Man Gloom/Doomriders member Nate Newton to help them play benefit shows for Scofield’s family. In doing so, they breathed new life into Cave In and soon wrote an album that combines the band’s killer metallic hardcore and breathtaking space-rock eras with new and exciting musical forays. The result is *Heavy Pendulum*, Cave In’s first album recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou since their 1998 classic, *Until Your Heart Stops*. Below, Brodsky discusses each track. **“New Reality”** “A song about the new reality of Cave In without Caleb on this earthly plane. The verse riff was something he wrote years ago during the *White Silence* days. I always remembered it, and ‘New Reality’ seemed like a good opportunity to give it a home. There’s mention of the Old Man of the Mountain, the face of New Hampshire, \[where Caleb is from\]. Even after its collapse, it’s still part of the state imagery. I thought this was a beautiful way to illustrate how we keep Caleb in our memory.” **“Blood Spiller”** “We’re all fans of Nate‘s band Channel from his pre-Converge days. This one goes there musically—channeling Channel with a member of the band. Lyrically, this relates to the heated political nature of 2020, but it’s not as direct as, for instance, the song ‘Searchers of Hell.’ This song is also a call to action against anyone in your life who throws around their weight in a way that’s disruptive or destructive to your well-being—basically, bullies and assholes who need to be confronted on their bullshit.” **“Floating Skulls”** “Musically, this one had a pretty wild trajectory. It was originally in a different key, different tuning, different time signature, with wildly different lyrics. It took several trial runs before we got into Deep Purple’s *Burn* territory and it finally started to click. Lyrically, this is probably one of the more lighthearted songs on the record. I had a whole concept for a music video using helium balloons printed with skulls attached to headless mannequins...could be a cool stage prop, actually.” **“Heavy Pendulum”** “This is the first song that materialized as a full band demo when writing the album. We demoed it remotely at a time during lockdown when people still didn’t feel comfortable getting together in a room. If AC/DC had jumped on the ’90s grunge bandwagon, they may have pulled this one out of the ether before we got it. Kurt thinks it sounds kinda like ‘Fever Dog,’ which is fine with me because who doesn’t like *Almost Famous*?” **“Pendulambient”** “J.R. took to the song ‘Heavy Pendulum’ so much, he insisted that we make it the title of the record. This Interlude takes the five dominant notes from that song and spins them into a kaleidoscopic foundation created by J.R. in his German synth lab man cave. Most of the overdubs are from the original remote demo recording, either flipped backwards or made into some audio mutation. I think it’s a nice return to the vibe of having segues between songs like we did on the *Until Your Heart Stops* album.” **“Careless Offering”** “I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, which I guess officially makes it a protest song. During the George Floyd protests, I was seeing people with significant reach on social media use these platforms to encourage excess violence, and I felt this was the last thing we needed. Their words were like careless offerings to an already fucked-up situation, just being thrown like raw meat to people for the sole purpose of creating destruction. On a lighter note, one of the bands that Cave In fully embraced as an influence on this album is Into Another, and here it really shows in the whole spacey midsection of the song—that’s totally us worshiping the *Ignaurus* album.” **“Blinded by a Blaze”** “Out of the five or six songs from my initial burst of writing, ‘Blinded by a Blaze’ was the one that got everyone in the band equally hyped. Later on, Nate wrote the heavy, chugging bridge part and Adam came up with the artificial harmonic guitar line that sounds kind of like the music you might hear coming from an ice cream truck on Mars. In just eight lines, I did my best to capture a picture of driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at golden hour several years ago, and what it felt like to share that moment with someone I was in love with at the time.” **“Amaranthine”** “One night at rehearsal, Nate turned on his bass amp and the main parts for this song seemed to just fly out of him. At some point, Caleb’s wife, Jen, gifted us a notebook that belonged to Caleb. It contained lyrics, writings, and drawings that she felt could be of some use to us. Lyrics to a song called ‘Amaranthine’ really stood out, and we didn’t recognize them to be associated with any music that Caleb had written. Combining his lyrics with the first bit of music that Nate ever wrote for the band made a really cool concoction.” **“Searchers of Hell”** “The main riff was inspired by a song from the first *Between or Beyond the Black Forest* compilation, which is a bunch of European off-the-grid jazz-fusion shit recorded in the ’70s. Aside from ‘Amaranthine,’ I think this is the only other song conceived entirely in the full-band stage of making demos for the album. Lyrically, I was inspired by some of the coded language being used by people with power in the world of politics addressing others through the media. The lines ‘You’re dropping a bombshell/You wish each other well’ is a specific example of this. I guess the takeaway here is that we should always question what the media is telling us, but also what the media is selling us.” **“Nightmare Eyes”** “Leading up to the summer of 2019, I was, like most Tool fans, anxious for the release of *Fear Inoculum*. I was so excited for a new album that I literally dreamed I was hearing it one night. I rarely dream about music, so when I woke up, the feeling of this really struck me. I grabbed an acoustic guitar and made a quick recording of the song I heard in my dream, transposed to the best of my ability. It took 10,000 days, but I finally combed through every song on every Tool album, trying to find some likeness to my recording from the night before. Thankfully, I came up empty-handed and realized it was fair game. So, thank you, Tool, for gifting me—in serotonin form—the best song you never wrote.” **“Days of Nothing”** “I think Adam was inspired to create this shortly after the Cave In/Old Man Gloom tour in 2020, which ended about a month before the pandemic hit. He came up with a bunch of cool segues for the band to use. When it came to sequencing the record, I felt that we needed a good palate cleanser after the sonic rubble left by the ending of ‘Nightmare Eyes,’ and this did the trick. It’s also the only track on the album recorded entirely outside of God City \[Studios\] and mixed by someone other than Kurt. If I remember correctly, the song title references the fact that our calendars were essentially wiped clean at the height of the pandemic.” **“Waiting for Love”** “The sound at the beginning of this track spawns from one of my favorite effects pedals ever—the DOD Envelope Filter. The use of this pedal dates back to bands that me and J.R. were in even before the formation of Cave In, so hearing it on a Cave In album is a nice little nostalgic trip for us. Maybe if Van Halen had successfully gone grunge in the ’90s, they would’ve done something like this. The song is meant to be comforting for anyone searching for love and coming up short. Remember that you’re not alone, and it might just be a matter of time.” **“Reckoning”** “I believe this to be one of Adam’s finest moments as both a songwriter and a vocalist. He and I have been doing acoustic/electric duo shows for a number of years, and it’s pretty thoughtful of him to construct a song that works especially well in that setting. The way we recorded the lead guitar part was inspired by ‘Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon,’ a song from what is easily my favorite Earth album. Overall, the production on this song was necessitated by the fact that J.R. was dealing with an issue with one of his wrists, so we had to make do with a drummer functioning at less than 100 percent. In hindsight, I think it’s pretty unique because of it. Lyrically, I think Adam really hit the nail on the head when it comes to accepting grief after losing someone close to you and doing our best to manage it.” **“Wavering Angel”** “We knew this would be the closing track on the record, so we made no bones about song length or pulling any punches when it came to throwing everything into the pot from all songs previous to it in the sequence. Led Zeppelin has ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ so this one’s our ‘Stairway to Methuen,’ the town in Massachusetts where me, J.R., and Adam grew up. I tried my best to be honest about wading through trenches of heartbreak while reaching for a song to guide me along. Sometimes that song has wings, and if you just hold on tightly enough, you can let yourself fly. I hope that feeling inspires others in a time of need.”

“I deal a lot with finality and finitude and mortality in my work as a musician and as a writer,” Watain ringleader Erik Danielsson tells Apple Music. “I think it’s invigorating to contemplate. I find that life gets a bit more vivid and intense when you are aware of the mortality of things.” You can feel that intensity on the Swedish black metal band’s seventh album, *The Agony & Ecstasy of Watain*, which explores death on a personal and global level, often through the invocation of female archetypes both real and imagined. “It’s a bit unusual to have an album title that refers to the band,” Danielsson acknowledges. “But I would love to hear an album called *The Agony & Ecstasy of Morbid Angel*, for example. And I wanted something with some friction in it. You get a little bit curious, I think.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Ecstasies in night infinite”** “The title is a paradox in that I see ecstasy in this context as a brief, singular spark in an eternal night. There\'s something with that idea that pertains to how I look upon our existence in general. What I’m talking about here is really some kind of blazing hellfire or ecstatic revelation, like a radiant force—so strong that it may leave stars and worlds ablaze. It might be the force that we are absorbed into when we die. I’m not sure. But the song is a reflection on the briefness of life.” **“The howling”** “I had quite a lot of material that I felt leaned towards traditional Swedish black metal from the ’90s—not really Dissection, but more like underground bands from that time. That was a really inspiring starting point for me because that’s the scene I grew up in. So, it was cool to combine that with this lyric I had, which is a meditation on liminal spaces, the in-between. Like rites of passage, the witching hour, the equinoxes, the twilight—these moments when light collides with darkness and the sacred collides with the profane.” **“Serimosa”** “It was cool to release this as a single because I had no idea how people would react. I knew people would like ‘The howling,’ if I can be so cocky. But I was not sure about ‘Serimosa.’ I think you can hear a lot of my admiration for goth music in the opening riff and the verse. The name ‘Serimosa’ doesn’t have any origin in history or anything. It’s a word that was communicated to me in a magical context. It was a vision of a female godform, or archetype, that held in her hands the gift of the final transformation. It’s a sort of doomsday song.” **“Black cunt”** “This is a love song to the archetypal witch mother, and the title refers to the gates of spiritual rebirth. Once again, I’m talking about a liminal point of ingress through which magic currents pass. But the title also obviously opens up a potentially interesting debate around the use of words. To me, both words are positive. They are powerful and strong, and combined, I think they paint a beautiful picture of a dark, diabolical wellspring. But from a more conservative or normative viewpoint, they may be viewed as negative, degrading, or problematic.” **“Leper’s grace”** “That’s the last song we finished for the album. A lot of it was written in the studio. I had this lyric that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use or not, and those lyrics are always the ones that I’m very happy that I did use in the end. It’s a bit of a continuation of the ‘Black Cunt’ concept—it deals with my experience of doing what we do in a world that is, at some level, the enemy. It’s a very anti-authoritarian song about my views on conformity and submission and a lot of the things that I really resent in the human race.” **“Not sun nor man nor god”** “The title of this instrumental is a Cormac McCarthy tribute. It’s borrowed straight from a very long sentence in the middle of a very long book. In the context of the album, this is the part of the journey when it’s time to sit down, take off your backpack, put your wandering stick aside, and think about where you have been. And maybe try to picture a bit where you’re going. It’s like the resting place for the pilgrim in the middle of his journey.” **“Before the cataclysm”** “This is the heart of the album, in a way. It’s a very big and grandiose song, and it’s about things that are always somehow present in my thoughts—like mortality and the hereafter, and the equal finitude of things both small and great. I have always loved songs like ‘Dark Are the Veils of Death’ by Candlemass and ‘Enter the Eternal Fire’ by Bathory. These songs are quite bluntly about approaching death but doing it beautifully, without fear or anxiety and a kind of anticipation of the great adventure that awaits us all when our time here has passed.” **“We remain”** “I began writing this in 2012, when we were on tour with The Devil’s Blood and In Solitude. We had one of the strongest triangular connections I’ve experienced between three separate entities. So, having Farida \[Lemouchi\] from The Devil’s Blood and Gottfrid \[Åhman\] from In Solitude on this song was kind of a tribute to that community and that time and the magical things that happened back then. Lyrically, it’s a kind of mythopoeia about the story of Watain and how it has been shaped throughout the years. It’s definitely the deepest and most profound song on the album.” **“Funeral winter”** “The material for this song is from the *Lawless* era. It was created very close to when we were going into the studio for that album, and we didn’t want to rush this. It didn’t really fit on *The Wild Hunt* and it didn’t really fit on *Trident Wolf Eclipse*, but now it was time to take it out again. Thematically, it’s a different approach to death than ‘Before the cataclysm.’ When we lose someone close to us, we must carry the weight of grief so that they, in turn, may fly light and free of their woes. Regardless of whether it’s true, I’ve always found comfort in this idea.” **“Septentrion”** “The title struck me when I saw it because it was during the real intense part of the writing process for this album. It contains both the word ‘septen,’ which is ‘seven’ in Latin, and also ‘trio,’ which is the triangle of Watain—the original triad of members. And ‘septentrion,’ it turns out, is an old word for the Northern regions of the world. It was used on ship logs but also in poetry. And the roots of it are even older, going back to the seven stars that constitute the Big Dipper, which is always visible. Lyrically, it’s me just trying to sum up everything that’s been on my mind for nearly 25 years of Watain. It’s about what has been, what is, and what is to come.”

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

Contemplation and self-awareness run throughout Celebrity Therapist. “The whole album is about history repeating itself and how we kind of move in circles. It’s two steps forward and three steps back with a bunch of people in my life. The album is me reflecting on these people but realizing I’m guilty of the same at the end of the record. There are a lot of ‘fuck you’ songs because every heavy band likes writing those. But overall, the lyrics are more introspective and quite loving.” The Callous Daoboys come from the school of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die, and The Chariot, with a heightened degree of theatricality as one of the methods to their madness. Think Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy getting slapped around good-naturedly by Glassjaw. Celebrity Therapist even indulges in a bit of drone and avant-garde post-rock a la Sigor Rós and Radiohead.

With the second installment of their *Vaxis* story arc, emo-prog wizards Coheed and Cambria continue the highly ambitious *Amory Wars* sci-fi epic that has defined their musical career. *Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind* is an intricate cinematic narrative following a couple on the run from tyrannical forces while trying to find a cure for their young son’s mysterious condition. For Coheed vocalist, guitarist, and conceptual mastermind Claudio Sanchez, the story is a highly personal one cloaked in futuristic fantasy. “That’s kind of why I created the concept 20 years ago,” he tells Apple Music. “As the singer, it’s really hard for me to be the center of attention, the one where the messages are coming from. So, it was easier for me to construct this thing to hide behind. That’s why Coheed has been primarily shrouded in a story called *The Amory Wars*.” Below, he discusses each song on the album. **“The Embers of Fire”** “This is the intro to the record, and it hearkens back to a theme that came on the record before it, which was a track called ‘Old Flames.’ The thing that I really enjoy about this piece is that my son got to sing on it—he was five at the time. The idea of the character of Vaxis is that he’s this omnipresent sort of being that lives in all states of his life. So, I thought it would be interesting to have the child voice as well as the adult singing on the same track, singing the same lines, kind of stretching across time in a way. I really love that piece.” **“Beautiful Losers”** “A lot of these songs are directly inspired by my life, but I utilize them to inform the fiction. ‘Beautiful Losers’ came from the idea that Coheed was coming into its 20th year, and for a long time, there’s been this sense of and feeling within the band of being the underdog, and I find that there’s kind of a beauty in that. Being able to put 20 years of history behind us, I made ‘Beautiful Losers’ as sort of an anthem and tribute to that. Of course, it has its place within the fiction, but truly I think the roots of the song are that.” **“Comatose”** “Some of these songs were written pre-pandemic and were then sort of given their identity during the pandemic. ‘Comatose’ is one of them. The music has been around for a moment, but when I started to pen the lyrics to it, we had been trapped in isolation. My wife and I may have gotten into an argument, and I think that fueled the identity of that song. The line about being comatose comes from something my mother would jokingly say about my father when he was relaxing on the couch after work—she’d say he was comatose.” **“Shoulders”** “‘Shoulders’ is kind of in the same department as ‘Beautiful Losers,’ where it’s feeling the pride of history behind us, but also the sense of feeling the weight of things that I might not have accomplished during that time. But it’s also about coming out of that tunnel and feeling empowered by it. It’s also a little bit of a play on my son’s name being Atlas. So, again, there are these very personal themes that I’m utilizing to inform the story of Vaxis.” **“A Disappearing Act”** “When I started to actually solidify what this song was about, I started thinking about losing all that time during the pandemic. I was living inside my own head during the lockdown period, and then came out at the other end realizing that all this time had disappeared. People have disappeared. I lost my grandfather at the top of the pandemic without the chance to say goodbye. My wife had the same thing with her grandmother. It felt strange to come out of this period where it felt like nothing changed, but a shit ton really has.” **“Love Murder One”** “This one falls into the department of ‘Comatose.’ My wife and I have been together now almost 20 years but not married the entire time. I think we’re pretty rock-solid, but when you get imprisoned in your own confines, like during lockdown, things happen and you can struggle. ‘Love Murder One’ was an opportunity for me to exercise an emotion that I was having and just leave it in the song and not take it into reality. I got to experiment on this one, too. I explored synths on this song and also played an eight-string guitar.” **“Blood”** “For me, this has a lot to do with feeling misunderstood most of my life—and seeing that maybe that might be the same for my son. So, it’s a message to my son, Atlas, really. I’ve written a lot of songs for him. Going back a couple of years, I wrote the song ‘Atlas’ in anticipation of his birth. But with ‘Blood,’ I just want him to understand that if you experience the things I have, you’re not alone in those experiences.” **“The Liars Club”** “Right after we finished the first *Vaxis* album, *The Unheavenly Creatures*, I wrote ‘The Liars Club.’ But like a lot of songs on this record, the lyrics took form during the pandemic. Life just felt a little uncertain and a little scary. It came from the idea that maybe a false reality would be better. Who doesn’t want to live the better side of everything we experienced, even if ignoring the rest is like living a lie? That was the loose theme when I wrote this one.” **“Bad Man”** “This is a funny one because I was high as shit when I wrote it. I’m a very paranoid, introverted person, so aside from having a few drinks, I don’t really participate in that kind of thing a whole lot. But when we were in lockdown, I figured, ‘Why not? It’s been a long time.’ I think the last time I wrote music and got high like that was probably for \[2003’s\] *In Keeping Secrets*. My wife had some stuff, so I got into a certain headspace and attacked the vocals in a way that I haven’t in a long time. That whole verse section, I’m under the influence and doing my best to imitate Michael Jackson.” **“Our Love”** “At the top of lockdown, I got a Korg ARP 2600 \[synth\] and started fooling around with it. ‘Our Love’ came out of one of those ideas, but I didn’t really do much with it at first. When I came back to it a few months later, I thought it would be a good segue piece because it’s this moment where our characters have decided to sort of enter the lion’s den to acquire the thing that they feel could help their son. In that moment, they have this sentimental moment of, ‘Our love will persevere. We will get through this.’ I felt the same way with my wife during lockdown.” **“Ladders of Supremacy”** “This song was originally going to open *The Unheavenly Creatures* album, so it’s been around for a while. I held onto it because, lyrically, it wasn’t there yet. But at this point on the album, our characters are entering the lion’s den. It’s maximum security. It’s fear. It’s chaos. That was the visual I had in my head when I started writing the lyrics. Then all the stuff happened around George Floyd, and it started giving me this perspective that I’ve never had before, so I started to explore that in the song as well.” **“Rise, Naianasha (Cut the Cord)”** “That’s another one in the ‘Blood’ sort of world, geared towards my son. It’s saying that I’ll always be there for him, regardless of if I’m here or not. I’m saying, ‘You’re going to have me forever, and I’ll do whatever I can to protect you.’” **“Window of the Waking Mind”** “Before I started working on the concept of the *Vaxis* records, I read a little bit of this book called *NeuroTribes*, which is about neurodiversity. When you have a child and they’re developing, there are all these milestones in place for what is the typical mind. I just found it fascinating because I saw so many connections to myself and my son. This idea of strict normality really helped create the character of Vaxis. In the album’s story, these two people are trying to find something that they think could help cure their child, but in actuality, their child is a higher consciousness—a being far beyond their comprehension. In later stories, that will be important for *The Amory Wars*.”

Behind black shrouds of obscurity and desolation, the men of GAEREA deliver their odes in cascading maelstroms of aggression and beauty with full-length number three, ‘Mirage.’ Emerging from the age of pandemic to whatever awaits humanity next, the Portuguese horde remains on the frontlines of the next generation of extreme metal. The beauty of GAEREA lies in the directness and simplicity found within their florid tapestry of extremity and aggression. With talons dipped in the inky blood of black metal and scraped across the flesh of human suffering, GAEREA is leading a charge into the future of darkness, and all those who find beauty and power in the dark side of existence would do well to take heed.

In keeping with the theme of their last two records, Imperial Triumphant have focused their fifth album on their hometown of New York City. “It’s about different perspectives of New York, and different lenses that people can live life through in a major city,” vocalist and guitarist Zachary Ezrin tells Apple Music. “New York has such an extreme duality to it, where there’s such highs and lows within a few blocks, and I thought that was inspiring.” The neo-classical black-metal trio welcome a diverse array of guest musicians on *Spirit of Ecstasy*, including string quartet Seven)Suns, Japanese vocalist Yoshiko Ohara, Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick, Voivod vocalist Snake, Mr. Bungle guitarist Trey Spruance, and—perhaps most remarkably—smooth-jazz saxophonist Kenny G. “We always like to collaborate,” Ezrin says. “And I think that’s becoming a huge part of who we are as a band. I think that stems from the jazz backgrounds that some of us have, where it’s all about playing with new people. It’s exciting to work with musicians who come up with things that I would never come up with.” Below, he comments on each song. **“Chump Change”** “I think this might have been the first tune we started working on after *Alphaville* came out in 2020. We wrote this one together, and I enjoy those the most—when it’s all three of us in the studio jamming, coming up with ideas and then developing them. As far as an opener goes, it’s just sprinting out of the gate. The opening riff is one of my favorites because we’re all playing in different rhythms. It’s disjointed, but sort of like a rusty clockwork, the gears still turn. That one minor-chord stab in the middle is played by Seven)Suns, a string quartet here in New York City.” **“Metrovertigo”** “This is a very different piece written entirely by our drummer, Kenny Grohowski. We have Trey Spruance from Mr. Bungle providing some choir inputs and sonic textures, which really fill out the piece. I love all those dissonant choir parts—they’re so perfectly buried in the mix, like musical Easter eggs. I know that Mr. Bungle has a song called ‘Retrovertigo,’ but that’s just a coincidence. I didn’t make the connection until someone pointed it out afterwards. The idea came from our bass player actually suffering a bout of vertigo, which was an intense situation.” **“Tower of Glory, City of Shame”** “This is another one we all wrote together, and it stems from a simple concept—we wanted to do a waltz. Again, there’s a lot of polyrhythms. And then, in typical Imperial Triumphant fashion, there’s a gigantic climax. The orchestral intro is performed by Seven)Suns again, and the voiceover is by Jonas Rolef. We also have Yoshiko Ohara, this very talented Japanese vocalist who used to live in New York and work with the band Bloody Panda, on this one. She’s been on Imperial Triumphant records for almost a decade now. She has a unique style of layering vocals with loops and screams, and it’s always perfect for the song.” **“Merkurius Gilded”** “This is primarily my composition—our bassist, Steve, did the last part—and it was me doing my best Bernard Herrmann impression. If you’ve heard the music he did for *Taxi Driver*, you’ve heard ‘Merkurius Gilded.’ I was really leaning into those dystopian, vintage chord progressions. We have Sarah Woods and Andromeda Anarchia providing choirs, and then we have Max Gorelick, who used to be in Imperial Triumphant and now plays in an amazing band called The Mantle, doing a solo duel with his father, Kenny G. Max really pushed his dad out of his comfort zone into dissonance, and they turned in a masterpiece.” **“Death on a Highway”** “This was written by Kenny Grohowski, and it’s kind of funny because I don’t think he wrote it for the band. He wrote it almost as an exercise, like, ‘What would it be like if I wrote a Suffocation or Cannibal Corpse track?’ So, it has these moments of classic barbarity but filtered through the lens of Kenny, who, as a composer, will often stray from simple ideas. I wrote a lick in there that’s sort of my impression of Adam Jones from Tool. And then we’ve got Trey Spruance on the santur, which is an Eastern stringed instrument kind of like a hammered dulcimer. I feel like this track is almost like a palate cleanser for your next course.” **“In the Pleasure of Their Company”** “This is basically just a 12-bar blues—at least the first part is. Then we came up with the idea of getting people to come play over it, like a late-night jam session at a downtown jazz bar. We\'ve got J. Walter Hawkes on trombone and Ben Hankle on trumpet, who are part of the horn quintet that played on ‘Swarming Opulence.’ Then we have Alex Skolnick from Testament, who plays in a free-improv jazz group with Kenny Grohowski. We also have Percy Jones from Brand X, which is another band Kenny was in, on bass. And that’s just in the first section of the piece. In the second half, we have an incredible guitar solo from Trey Spruance.” **“Bezumnaya”** “‘Bezumnaya’ translates to ‘crazy’ or ‘insanity.’ This is the third sort of Russian doom song we’ve done, and this one is about the Dyatlov Pass incident. It’s a true story from 1959 about missing explorers in the arctic of Russia, but it has this sort of Lovecraftian atmosphere. I wanted to write it in the style that Lovecraft would; there’s so much mystery and intentionally leaving bits of information out that make you want to keep turning the page. So, we tried to approach the song structure that way, leaving the listener little breadcrumbs of information before showering them with so much information that it becomes too much.” **“Maximalist Scream”** “This piece was written by Steve Blanco, our bass player. It’s very heavily inspired by mid-century American automotive mentality and everything that stems from that sort of culture. You can pretty much tell that, on this record, we definitely got into cars. The album title, *Spirit of Ecstasy*—that’s the name of the hood ornament on the Rolls-Royce. As everyone’s playing started becoming more enginelike, more machinelike—it became about one degree of separation from Voivod. We did a Voivod cover on our last record, and we heard they liked it, so we asked Snake if he would do some vocals. He was gracious enough to do so, and I was really happy with what he did. If I had sung those lyrics, it wouldn’t have been the same.”

With their first album in seven years, Bay Area death-metal titans Autopsy continue the gore-splattered comeback run they began with 2011’s *Macabre Eternal*. This time, the classic lineup of vocalist/drummer Chris Reifert and guitarists Danny Coralles and Eric Cutler are joined by new bassist Greg Wilkinson (also of Brainoil), who signed on in 2021. “What’s Greg bringing to the table?” Reifert asks, repeating Apple Music’s question. “A lot of liquor, so there’s that. But he’s also adding some cool dimensions to the songs and coming up with some really creative basslines. He’s just a cool person to have around, too.” On *Morbidity Triumphant*, Reifert returns to the fertile lyrical ground of early Autopsy staples like 1989’s *Severed Survival*, writing songs inspired by ’80s horror movies, serial killers, and bizarre cults of his own creation. Below, he comments on each track. **“Stab the Brain”** “We wanted to start off with something right out of the gate that just laid into things. We wanted to immediately stab your brain musically. Lyrically, it’s about a cult ritual where a woman is standing over a coffin spread-legged and squirts a baby out into the coffin and then stabs it in the brain. So, that part’s pretty literal. Things get nonsensical from there—all of a sudden, she’s like a dead queen that everyone needs to worship.” **“Final Frost”** “The end of the world is a popular theme in metal because the apocalypse is always fun to talk about. But rather than the Earth going up in a scorching ball of flame or something like that, it slowly freezes, and everyone gradually turns into frozen statues. I tried to pick interesting words that fit together well, that aren’t just like, ‘You’ve been hacked in half’ or whatever. Everything’s been done, so you’ve got to do better these days. Greg wrote the riff to that song. That was his contribution to the album, and he did a hell of a job.” **“The Voracious One”** “There’s two songs on this album that harken back to my favorite scenes from horror movies or horror stories from the olden days. I just had a rare moment of horror reflection, I guess. For some reason, I thought about that story from the first *Creepshow*, whether it’s from the movie or the book—‘The Crate.’ We used to write about horror stuff more back in the old days, on *Severed Survival* and stuff, but now we hardly ever do it anymore. But fuck, there’s no rules here. Musically, it’s a slower kind of shambling, stoner-y thing.” **“Born in Blood”** “Lyrically, this doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot. It’s just blood and guts and gruesomeness and all things slimy and squishy and nasty. It\'s not a cohesive story, but I did steal the title from a line in the new *Dexter* season, so that kind of stood out. Musically, this is pretty old-school death metal, to use that tired old chestnut of a term. It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s a lot of fun.” **“Flesh Strewn Temple”** “This is a Danny song—he wrote most of the riffs for the record. Lyrically, it’s another cult reference, this time about a modern-day human sacrifice cult. I imagine it exists in some remote place in the world that no one goes to and that has no access to technology or anything like that. One of those places that’s frozen in time but still exists in 2022. And there’s flesh strewn everywhere, pretty much.” **“Tapestry of Scars”** “That one is about someone who’s super into self-harm—cutting and scarring and all that—but in an artistic way. Not even because they’re trying to make up for something wrong with their life or whatever—or maybe that’s completely what it’s about. Either way, they’re obsessed with turning their entire body into one giant scab or cut or sore or scar or whatever. The object is to have nothing unscarred, from head to toe—not even a millimeter. So, you’re a walking tapestry or scars, basically.” **“Knife Slice, Axe Chop”** “This is another rare moment of reflection. I’m usually not a looking-back person. But I thought it’d be cool to do a song about watching horror movies back when we were obsessed with finding the goriest, splatter-iest, bloodiest movies. Just go to the video store, rent a pile of movies, and watch them over and over. You’re rewinding your favorite scenes, like, ‘Did you see that head fly across the street?’ I think the video we did for this one perfectly captured that essence.” **“Skin by Skin”** “That one is about someone that preys on people who are vulnerable. They meet people in the street and say, ‘Hey, I’ll take you home and make you safe and give you food and shelter.’ And then, when it’s too late to get out, they notice everything in the entire house is made of human skin sewn together: faces, legs, hands, feet, torsos—you name it. I’m talking the ceiling, the floor, the walls, everything. And guess what? This person that just got suckered into the house is the next piece.” **“Maggots in the Mirror”** “Here’s another one where I was thinking about a scene from an old horror movie. I don’t know why I thought of it, but I had a flashback to the scene in *Poltergeist* where the dude is looking in the mirror and, next thing you know, he’s ripping his face off and shit. Kind of a classic scene. So, that was the inspiration for that one. One of my favorite lines in the song is, ‘Your face is a worm farm.’ I prefer not to reference old movies anymore, but once in a while, you’ve just got to fucking go for it.” **“Slaughterer of Souls”** “This is another one that’s not really about anything in particular. It’s just a matter of putting cool words together in cool structures. There’s no storyline. Looking back at the lyrics, it just seems like a kind of weird psychosis that I can’t explain. I was alerted to the At The Gates album *Slaughter of the Soul*, but this is just different enough to not worry about it. Plus, we’re not calling our album that. Plus, At The Gates is cool, so it’s not a terrible thing to be mentioned with.” **“Your Eyes Will Turn to Dust”** “Again, there’s no storyline on this one. It’s just a title that sounded cool and kind of scary. It’s just words strung together in a way that I thought was cool. And it’s fun to read. Even if it wasn’t set to music, it’s something I can trip out on reading.”

THE LONG-AWAITED FULL-LENGTH RETURN OF THE US DEATH METAL PIONEERS FOR A NEW BOUT OF SUPREME SICKNESS. “Absolutely brilliant. "Morbidity Triumphant" is definitely one of the year's best death metal albums” - Blabbermouth Since first bursting onto the death metal scene with the now genre classic ‘Severed Survival’ back in 1989, and following up with the equally revered ‘Mental Funeral’ album, the influential US quartet has carved an unwavering legacy over three decades as masters and purveyors of the vile sides of the extreme metal spectrum. And now, Autopsy marks its reinvigorated return, presenting the first new full-length studio opus since 2014’s ‘Tourniquets, Hacksaws and Graves’ with ‘Morbidity Triumphant’; a savage offering of brutal death, showing the US legends still have an unbridled hunger for the sadistic, never reluctant to step beyond the threshold of decency. ‘Morbidity Triumphant’, the band’s eighth album, is truly a dark delight for seasoned and new listeners alike, with a raw organic sound perfectly encapsulating what makes Autopsy so distinguishable among its peers, for what could easily be considered one of its strongest offerings to date. The driving force of Autopsy as ever is the virtuoso guitar pairing of Eric Cutler and Danny Coralles, effortlessly trading off their schizophrenic leads and switching from all-out death metal madness to groove-laden heavy doom, with unmistakable drum/vocal legend Chris Reifert being master of proceedings, spewing his own infinitely creative maniacal musings. ‘Morbidity Triumphant’ also notably marks the first album to feature new bassist Greg Wilkinson, currently also seen in Static Abyss along with Chris. ‘Morbidity Triumphant’ was recorded at Opus Studios, with long-associated engineer Adam Munoz at the helm. Mastering was completed by Ken Lee. The cover artwork appears courtesy of Wes Benscoter (Slayer, Bloodbath), with a new work of twisted and sinister genius. Autopsy will be supporting ‘Morbidity Triumphant’ with a series of dates throughout the remainder of 2022.

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

With members hailing from Germany, Norway, and Denmark, international folk band Heilung explored the prehistoric civilizations of Northern Europe on their first two albums. Their third sees them taking their explorations further afield to Mesopotamia, Rome, and beyond. “We’re looking outside the Northern world because the Northern world, in itself, is nothing,” Heilung throat singer and co-composer Kai Uwe Faust tells Apple Music. “We’re widening the perspective.” Featuring ancient instrumentation and the thrilling vocal acrobatics of Faust and singer Maria Franz set to a lush production by keyboardist Christopher Juul, *Drif* is a rich and compelling collection of songs in what will hopefully become a long musical tradition. “The translation of *Drif* is ‘throng’ or ‘gathering,’” Faust explains. “We chose it because that is what we missed the most the last two years—big gatherings. But like many things in Heilung, it has several layers.” Below, he details each song. **“Asja”** “This is about love, recovery, and prosperity—and about chasing away evil and welcoming love. It contains a quotation of the *Hávamál*, which is an old Icelandic poem. It also contains a lot of blessing words that are meant to provide and help the listener through troubled times. The beginning of the song is something that I received in a retreat where I didn’t eat very much and where I was all alone, where I didn’t speak for a couple of weeks. I personally believe—and I’m not alone—that we find the best solutions for our challenges when we are retreating, when we go all alone and listen into ourselves.” **“Anoana”** “Here in the North, we find a lot of coin-shaped amulets. They come from the fourth up to the seventh century after Christ, and they contain inscriptions of runes. Some of them are, to the rune scientists, quite logical. We can say, ‘OK, it means this.’ But there are a few where no one—not even the most trained runologist—dares to say what it means. When I was writing the lyrics, I consciously picked these out and combined them with an old-fashioned way of rhyming. And then, Maria contributed nicely with the jouhikko, a very simple, very old-style string instrument.” **“Tenet”** “‘Tenet’ is a palindrome, so it is the same song even when you reverse it. It is based on the so-called Sator Square, which was found the first time approximately 50 BC in a place called Herculaneum, which is close to Pompeii. The problem with this palindrome is that it is very difficult to say what it actually means because it has words in Latin that kind of make sense, but why is it combined in that way? But it is a masterpiece, so we took this masterpiece and coded it with the help of numbers and runes and made notes from this. The melody follows the notes. If you reverse it, it will be exactly the same melody.” **“Urbani”** “This is based on a Roman song where we have the lyrics completely preserved, but there’s no melody or much more information about it. And that song, we know, was sung by the Roman Legionnaires during the triumph parade of Julius Caesar, after he won the war against the Gauls. It’s in Latin, and the funny thing is that it is a really rough mockery of Caesar himself. It hints to unspeakable sexual behavior and political failure and everything. I don’t fully understand how the Legionnaires were getting away with it, but we took the words and put them to the highest marching speed that we know from armies throughout that century.” **“Keltentrauer”** “We have here the Romans facing the Celtic armies. In Heilung’s publications, we always have these long poems that deal with historical events or interpretations of them. But this time, we upgraded it a lot. We recorded 15 people with a lot of swords and shields, and they started beating each other up in the studio. That’s why you hear people preparing weapons and, later, the clash of armies and the screaming of people that are dying parallel to the narration. Even if people don’t understand German, they have the chance to see this event with their inner eye.” **“Nesso”** “‘Nesso’ is an old High German word that means ‘worm.’ It goes back to the ancient belief that pain is a worm that crawls through your body or is stuck in some place in your body—and that worm could be pulled out by the medicine people of the ancient Germanic age. Luckily, we have that spell preserved in the original language. In this case, it is for the healing of the hoof or leg of a horse. Maria sings the worm out of the body there. We always try to put ourselves in the emotional state of the actual events that we’re dealing with, so we told her she should imagine that an animal she loves very much was about to die. When you listen to the song, you can hear that she’s fighting the tears.” **“Buslas Bann”** “This is a tough one. It’s also quite complex. It is based on something called the *Bósa saga* that was written in Iceland around the 13th century. It also contains really rough language. In the story, a woman—a witch, let’s call her—threatens to sing something to a king that would destroy him, basically. She threatens to sing a song that has six staffs. I was reading a lot about it, and there\'s runologists that say, ‘These six staffs must have been something everyone knew at the time, or at least knew that they exist, because the king is actually quite afraid of that threat.’ In the song, we describe these staffs. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.” **“Nikkal”** “This is the oldest known song of mankind. It is 3500 years old, and we have the lyrics and how to adjust the string instrument to play the song. It comes from a city called Ugarit, which is in what is now called Syria. It is the oldest surviving work of annotated music, but there’s still a lot of discussions going on about how to translate the lyrics. At the moment, I think there’s six different versions because no one can agree. But they all go in one direction—it’s about the goddess Nikkal, the daughter of the summer king and the wife of the moon god. It’s a very special song.” **“Marduk”** “Marduk is the king of the gods of the Mesopotamians. He receives a lot of worship and sacrifices, and there’s a song for him—a very, very long song. The text origin goes back to the first Babylonian dynasty—we’re talking about 1894 until 1559 BC. It contains 50 names and the explanation of these names. It is said that the moment the people of the region stop singing the song, the region will fall into total turmoil and chaos. I extracted the names, and we transformed it into what we call ‘Marduk.’”

Since its inception in 2017, enigmatic world music collective HEILUNG has been paving melodic paths to the past with their unique and mystifying sound. Evading all conventional genre tags and the confines of any specific labels, the group aptly self-describes their sound as “amplified history,” emphasizing their ability to connect modern society with the rudiments of humanity’s beginnings through music. HEILUNG once again journeys back in time with its new chapter, ‘Drif’ however, unlike previous offerings that centered around medieval northern Europe, album number three will explore all great ancient civilizations. “All the songs on ‘Drif’ have their own stories,” adds HEILUNG throat singer and one of the band’s three composers, Kai Uwe Faust. Each has its place and sense of belonging, with inspiration not only from Northern Europe, but from the ancient great civilizations,” explains the band. “We took the ancient surrounding advanced civilizations in account, because our ancestral Nordic civilizations did not just pop up, exist and disappear in isolation. Already in the Bronze Age, we found silk on German land that was imported already from the far, far East 3000 years ago. From the Viking age, we found beads that were brought there from present-day Syria high up in the Northern mountains. “Centrally important concepts, still in extensive use today, like the number Zero and all the mathematical universes deriving from it, the use of iron and the general concept of settling all originate from traditional high civilizations outside the north and still fundamentally changing our ancestor's world. “With singing these primordial songs we want to give tribute to these cultures, reconnect to the beginnings and remember that we all, from East to West, from past to present, are connected through the exchange of ideas and inspiring each other.” Meaning “gathering,” ‘Drif’ serves as more than merely a gateway that bridges history with modern day society, but is also a statement of the strength in unity and togetherness, which will come as no surprise to those who have experienced HEILUNG’s live ritual, in which every ceremony starts with a reminder that “we are all brothers.” “‘Drif’ means ‘gathering,’' explains HEILUNG. “A throng of people, a horde, a crowd, a pack. In symbiosis with the album title, ‘Drif’ consists of a flock, a collection, a gathering, a collage of songs, that much like little flames were seeking towards each other, to join, to bond, to create, and be greater together.” While HEILUNG features authentic and archaic instrumentation that ranges from rattles and ritual bells to human bones and throat singing, their captivating brand of music is far from primitive. Producer and founding member Christopher Juul implements subtle electronic elements that elevates the musical atmosphere and provides a more in-depth and layered soundscape. “This album has very clearly dictated its own path. Our attempts to tame it were repeatedly fruitless, and once we came to this realization, the creative flow surged forward with immense force. So much so that sometimes it felt like the songs wrote themselves,” the band adds. According to Greek philosopher Pythagoras, three is a divine number, signifying harmony, wisdom, and understanding. He also believed it to be the number of time – past, present, future; birth, life, death; beginning, middle, end. Purposefully or not, ‘Drif’ embodies this philosophy, putting forth a divine work of art that ties together the beginning of civilization with the modern world today. Make no mistake, HEILUNG still does not represent any modern political or religious ideology, but rather delivers a humbling reminder of where we came from. “Remember, we are all brothers. All people, beasts, tree and stone and wind, we all descend from the one great being that was always there, before people lived and named it, before the first seed sprouted.”

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

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

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

SUMERLANDS have returned from the astral plane with their hotly anticipated new album, Dreamkiller. The Ultimate Sin inspired haze of the first album has been turbocharged with bigger hooks, Jan Hammer worthy synths, and forays into Badlands gone doom! But although doom crackles at the edges of Dreamkiller, this is metal forged with the melodrama of the Scorpions, the emotional heft of Foreigner, and Dokken with an extra dose of depression. In the driver’s seat is critically acclaimed producer, engineer and guitarist Arthur Rizk, who polished these 8 metallic gems at Philadelphia’s Redwood Studios. Coming off of recent production credits with Kreator, Soulfly, and Show Me The Body, Rizk needs no introduction. His past work behind the boards with Power Trip, Sacred Reich, Ghostemane and many others have blown minds for over a decade, while SUMERLANDS fulfills his dream of melancholic chug. The band’s alchemy is on full display as bassist Brad Raub (Eternal Champion, Leather) smirks behind his P-Bass while drummer Justion DeTore (Innumerable Forms, Dream Unending) stares you dead in the face, swinging. New vocalist Brendan Radigan (Magic Circle, Stone Dagger) sings of lost souls in a world gone mad in his confident Graham Bonnet meets Ray Gillen wail. Rizk and guitarist John Powers keep their “Strats only” policy intact while wheeling in the full Marshall stacks to douse the record in glorious solos (witness the album closing duel of “Death to Mercy”). Galloping lead single “Dreamkiller” is an uptempo tour de force with an instrumental break to make Brian May blush and that festival worthy chorus. Make no mistake, Dreamkiller is a triumph of traditional heavy metal fuel!

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

“The album represents a journey through the darkness,” Parkway Drive lead vocalist Winston McCall tells Apple Music about the Aussie metalcore band’s seventh record. “It was never designed to be a concept album, but the way we make music is always album-based. We’re not a singles band. We write a cohesive piece of art, and this one happened to be centralized around the concept of the dark night of the soul.” Considering that the pandemic lockdown in which the album was written was essentially a global dark night of the soul, McCall’s lyrics on *Darker Still* will likely resonate far and wide. From Parkway Drive’s perspective, it’s also their pinnacle achievement. “This is the album where our ability and experience finally caught up to the imagination that we’ve had for 20 years of being a band,” he says. “This is the kind of music that always inspired us, but we’ve never had the ability—or the time—to actually create it until this record.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Ground Zero”** “We wanted to write an album opener that was anthemic and had those big riffs that you’ve come to expect from Parkway, and really captured that live energy and that bombastic feel. The choruses are lifted up in a way that we’ve probably never even hit before, in terms of it being accessible and something that will get stuck in people’s heads. The idea for this was to give people something that they would feel is a safe, expected Parkway sound—but improved. This is the safe space before the twist around the corner.” **“Like Napalm”** “This is where the rage begins. It’s the beginning of the spiraling process of this album. We wanted something that just smashed from start to finish. This is when the groove and the rhythms of this album really start to kick in. It just goes the entire time—bang, bang, bang—and then you get about four bars of bass reprieve before it smashes you in the outro as well. But the choruses still have that melody which really lifts it through the roof with Jeff \[Ling\]’s signature lead guitar accents, which are a real staple of the entire album.” **“Glitch”** “This was one of the first songs we started working on. For such an accessible chorus and an accessible song, the layering that we put under it is quite creepy and unnerving. When you put headphones on, you pick out different chants and whispers and strange stuff going on, because essentially the song is about dealing with sleep paralysis and nightmares and insomnia. That\'s a very strange, dark, creepy concept, so weaving all of that stuff into something which was so palatable—and which was going to be a single—was another step down the spiral.” **“The Greatest Fear”** “The song is about death, plain and simple. It’s about redefining the greatest fear that we all share. It\'s the element of every person\'s life on this planet which unites us. Every single person that you know and love will one day die. And the fear of losing someone we care about was omnipresent through all our lives during COVID. But the idea of this song, lyrically, was to frame death as not a bad or evil force in itself—it simply marks a time of transition into a point of unknowing.” **“Darker Still”** “This is possibly the most different song we\'ve ever written. It took us three albums to be able to execute this song. We wanted to do a ballad for quite a long time, and we couldn\'t figure out how to actually do it. But Jeff came to us with an acoustic version of the main refrain, the main riff in the song, with a whistle attached to the front of it. And we knew immediately that it was too epic to just be a rock song. It had to be this massive ballad, which we\'ve never done before. For us, this is really the marker of how far we’ve come as a band, because I think it’s one of our biggest achievements to be able to execute a large, intricate composition like this.” **“Imperial Heretic”** “This one is an anthem for the times we live in. It was written mid-COVID, when it became quite apparent that we were going through something that was uniting everyone worldwide in fear and desperation. We watched the wheels come off our perceptions of the world we live in, in terms of equality and democracy and civil rights and everything going up in flames. We were realizing how fragile everything is, and how powerful the people in power actually are. So, this is an anthem written for the billions of people around the world who had the blinders lifted off them for probably the first time.” **“If a God Can Bleed”** “You’re definitely very far down the dark rabbit hole by the time this track comes along. If ‘unnerving’ has been the word to set the tone so far, you can couple the word ‘menacing’ along with it on this song. The idea for this one is based around the concept of complacency and becoming soft. It\'s kind of a rallying cry to us as artists to continue pushing. At this point, you can’t look away from the dark place where the album is trying to take you, but this song has these jagged little edges that will hook in your brain, and a narrative that will set your skin crawling a little bit.” **“Soul Bleach”** “This one is unrelenting, unbridled rage based around the concept of trust broken and positioning of a person as the embodiment of a villain in someone else’s eyes. This is taking all of the misunderstanding and the hurt and the reality that sometimes you are the villain to someone, no matter how good you are. Sometimes you have to embody that just to be the person that you are. And this song is spat out as hard and viciously as possible. This is the point in the album where everything goes to 11. There’s nothing subtle about this one, and that’s the entire point.” **“Stranger”** “This is one of the most peculiar little pieces that we\'ve ever put on a record. It\'s as minuscule and isolating as possible. It’s another one of those moments where we wanted to wrong-foot people, especially after something like ‘Soul Bleach.’ We wanted to give a moment to breathe and reflect. And it is a real reflection because the lyrics represent where we were at that point in time and where everyone was—which was completely isolated from every point in society and reduced to communicating on screens. All of a sudden, we all became strangers and the world became a strange place to live in.” **“Land of the Lost”** “The first riff we had for this has an industrial edge to it, so we chose to lean into that. The song plays off between the engine of that industrialized riff running at 100% capacity in the choruses with that chain-gang chant of ‘keep digging’ over the top of it. And the verses are played off with a triple layer of a computerized voice, which we programmed to sing the verse lines with a distorted human voice and then a real human voice. The concept is that you go from being a computer representation of a human to a real human full of emotion by the time you get to the last chorus.” **“From the Heart of the Darkness”** “This song represents the closest thing that there is to light at the end of the journey. It’s basically built around one powerful riff, one powerful refrain, which drives that rhythm so hard. It builds from a place of subtlety to a place of incredible complexity based around that one riff. Lyrically, it represents the acknowledgment of what the journey through the darkness provides—the reemergence of self and the repositioning of self within a world that was confused and destroyed.”

Swedish power-metal champions Sabaton are known for writing many songs—and concept albums—about war. Their 10th full-length, *The War to End All Wars*, is a sequel to their 2019 album, *The Great War*, which focused on World War I. “We felt there were several stories we were leaving behind on the last album, like the Christmas Truce and The Harlem Hellfighters,” vocalist and keyboardist Joakim Brodén tells Apple Music. “We wanted to cover them, but we didn’t have the right music at that time. When we started touring the album, so many people got in touch, telling us about even more World War I stories we did not know about. Then, of course, the pandemic hit in the middle of the tour, when we’d only covered half the world. So, we thought, ‘Hmm…maybe we should do another one.” Below, he tells the often incredible stories behind each song. **“Stormtroopers”** “Many people have written us, ‘You should make a song about *Star Wars*,’ but in this case we are talking about German shock troops, or stormtroopers, and these smaller elite groups of soldiers that developed a faster form of warfare. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had the Jägers, and the Italians were experimenting with the Arditi soldiers, but the stormtroopers are the classic example. This is the first proper song on the album, with a faster double kick drum start to get things going.” **“Dreadnought”** “This is one of my favorites on the album, both musically and the topic itself. The song sounds like it could have been done by Sabaton in 2005 or 2008 or now, but it’s not like a copy of anything else we’ve done, so it’s weird how it feels very Sabaton but very timeless at the same time. We usually write about the human side of warfare, but sometimes a piece of technology is such a game-changer, so we did a song about the Dreadnought battleship and the Battle of Jutland. The name of the ship says it all: fear nothing.” **“The Unkillable Soldier”** “Adrian Carton de Wiart was Belgian-born and fighting for the British in World War I but had also fought earlier in the Boer War and further back. He was almost like a comic book character, this over-the-top super-soldier who just wouldn’t die no matter what the enemy threw at him. He’s one of the craziest people I’ve ever read about, so we decided to do something different for him. It’s a playful song, somehow.” **“Soldier of Heaven”** “On *The Great War*, we felt we didn’t represent the Southern Fronts so well. We were sort of getting lost in the Red Baron and all the low-hanging fruit. So, we decided to dive into the events in the Alps on White Friday and how soldiers are still, to this day, frozen up there, not yet dug out because we don’t know where they are. I think, late last year, archaeologists found another site up there. So, this song is a tribute to the fallen that never came home.” **“Hellfighters”** “The 369th regiment were The Harlem Hellfighters, the African American and Puerto Rican unit. Back in those days, the Americans wouldn’t really want to fight with them, so they were sort of handed off to the French, who called them the Men of Bronze. They were the unit that served the longest at the frontline. Obviously, people were in World War I for a long time, but you’d rotate in and out of the front every week or two. But these guys were there for six months—that’s just brutal. And you want a heavy metal song title? It doesn’t get much better.” **“Race to the Sea”** “King Albert of Belgium refused to surrender, even when he only had about five percent of Belgium left to command. So, he decided to flood the area to prevent it from falling into German hands. Then, he fought shoulder to shoulder with his men, and even had his 12-year-old son at the front, delivering messages. For a sovereign to be actively involved in fighting at this time was unheard of.” **“Lady of the Dark”** “Milunka Savić is probably the most-decorated female soldier of all time. She took her brother’s place going into the war and was known as a badass with grenades. She dressed like a man in the beginning, but eventually she dropped this pretense after being wounded.” **“The Valley of Death”** “This is the Bulgarians and British fighting it out again and again at the Battle of Doiran. The British finally got through on their third or fourth attempt, and when they got there, the Bulgarians were gone. After the war, the British considered the Bulgarian commander, Vladimir Vazov, a true gentleman opponent. They actually invited him to do a guest lecture at a military college, and he went over to the UK several times after the war.” **“Christmas Truce”** “On Christmas Eve 1914, on several places along the Western Front, soldiers on both sides waved the white flag and played football and drank beer together. This was actually several unconnected events where they decided, ‘Let’s not kill each other today.’ They even sang Christmas carols and showed each other pictures of their loved ones. And then, they had to go back to killing each other only a few hours later. It makes it so much harder when you realize you have a lot more in common with your enemy than you supposed.” **“Versailles”** “This one sort of loops back on ‘Sarajevo.’ They’re brother and sister in a way, because this isn’t an outro and it’s not a song. It’s something in between. The treaty at Versailles ended World War I, which was seen as the war to end all wars. But this poses the question, ‘Can a war really end all war?’”

Since completing their farewell tour in 2012, Southern Ontario post-hardcore heroes Alexisonfire have done a pretty terrible job of staying apart. Even as its members committed themselves to other bands—singer/guitarist Dallas Green with City and Colour, resident screamer George Pettit with Dead Tired, guitarist/vocalist Wade MacNeil with Gallows, drummer Jordan Hastings with Billy Talent—the everlasting power of what they created as Alexisonfire kept pulling them back together. Festival reunion dates in 2015 had, by decade’s end, given way to a string of stand-alone singles. Still, the prospect of a new full-length Alexisonfire album—following 2009’s *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*—was never a sure thing. That is, until COVID shutdowns presented them with a rare opportunity to make music without deadline pressures or looming tour dates. “This was just a bunch of guys getting back together and just creating for the sake of it,” Pettit tells Apple Music. “We\'re all very different people than when we wrote *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*, but I think that benefited us in a lot of ways, because there\'s been 10 years of us consuming different music and being inspired by different things.” Arriving 20 years after their self-titled debut album, *Otherness* reintroduces a band that’s lost none of its intensity, and shortens the aesthetic distance between Alexisonfire’s circle-pit strikes and the graceful balladry of City and Colour. And that’s not just Green’s doing—for the first time, Pettit eases up on the throat-shredding to actually sing a handful of verses and harmonize with his bandmates. “This album came to us without a lot of struggles,” Pettit says proudly. “On *Otherness*, we\'re all pulling in the same direction.” Here, Pettit gives us the track-by-track rundown of Alexisonfire’s new beginning. **“Commited to the Con”** “The con is conservatism. It\'s this notion that if we dismantle government for the sake of giving tax breaks or funneling money into billionaires’ pockets without regulation, that\'s somehow going to deliver us to some new utopia of freedom. That\'s just horseshit, and a lot of people are buying it. There are people out there that are committed to this con, this thing with no working models in the world. But when we band together, our tax dollars can prop up the cornerstone of civilized society—they pay for hospitals and schools and emergency services and infrastructure. So when we ask, ‘Which side are you on?’ it\'s like: Are you on the side of working together as people to make things better for everyone, or are you on the side of every-man-for-himself libertarian hypothetical nonsense?” **“Sweet Dreams of Otherness”** “The idea of \'otherness\' can be interpreted in any sort of way. The way that it applies to Alexisonfire is that we were all kids who grew up trying to find the secret corners of culture. I grew up in Southern Ontario, a third-generation Canadian with no ties to any sort of real culture from my ancestry. So you have to make it yourself and figure out the things that you want to represent your generation. And the things that were being presented to us through major media didn\'t appeal to us—we had to go and find those weird spaces. It could have been a CAW \[Canadian Auto Workers\] union hall where there was a punk show happening, or an independent record store, or the indie cinema that was coming out at the time. So the song is kind of about that, but it also has all sorts of implications for people who are nonbinary, or people who are LGBTQ. It\'s about finding strength in the fact that you\'re very different.” **“Sans Soleil”** “I\'m kind of a key component to Alexisonfire with all my screaming, but there have been times where we\'ve shoehorned that into songs just to kind of keep me in the band. But this is a beautiful song, and there\'d be no point in trying to have me scream for the purposes of keeping that in. So I took a back seat—I was just doing backup vocals with Dallas on this one. It\'s the type of song that we might not have put on one of our earlier records, but we felt like it was an Alexis song, for sure.” **“Conditional Love”** “This is about love as a choice, as opposed to it being some uncontrollable thing. And in some ways, that, to me, is better: the idea of being an active participant in my love and not have it be something that I\'m being dragged around by. That\'s the sentiment of the lyrics—but they just kind of fell into this ripper kind of rock song.” **“Blue Spade”** “\[Bassist\] Chris Steele started contributing lyrics on this record. Chris is a very remarkable individual who has been through a considerable amount, so having his perspective on a song felt right. Dallas took a section of his lyrics and found a way to turn it into a chorus. We have demos of the song where I’m screaming the verses, but when we got into the studio, I thought, \'I\'m gonna attempt to sing this.\' I\'m not quite confident in my ability as a singer, so I was like, \'Is this good?\' And then Wade walked in the room and was like, \'That\'s it! That\'s what this song needs.\' We had a really intense moment where we were just like, \'Okay, well, now there\'s nothing that we can\'t do!\' It just felt like we had unlocked a new gear within the band and found a new way to inject me into a song.” **“Dark Night of the Soul”** “The lyrical content is about Wade having a psychedelic experience on DMT, and the song matches the lyrics. We were really expanding this song, and there\'s that moment in the bridge—where it goes to that shuffle beat—and I thought, \'Let\'s do something jazzy here.\' We found a way to really make that song unique—it goes full Goblin. There were grand designs at one point to approach the remaining members of Rush to do like a 15-minute bridge for the song.” **“Mistaken Information”** “Dallas is the best singer that I\'ve ever known, so it was nice to actually sing \[harmonies\] on a track with him. After I was done recording my vocals for this, I was almost sad, because I was enjoying it so much. I think this song was actually in play for City and Colour’s new record, but Dallas was discussing it with his wife, and she was like, \'I feel like this is an Alexisonfire song.\' It\'s about the war on the truth, and how it\'s hard to understand what the truth is now because there\'s so much misinformation out there. But when we were recording it, I remember Dallas saying, \'Are people just going to think this is a breakup song?\' And I said, \'If they interpret it that way, it\'s valid.’ I feel like it works that way as well.” **“Survivor’s Guilt”** “I work in emergency services, and this song is naming a phenomenon that I see, where you see something horrible and then you go about the rest of your day like nothing happened. You have the ability to kind of detach, and it\'s not a particularly heroic quality, but it is, in some ways, a very necessary quality. I\'m not sure that necessarily comes through in the lyrics—I purposely tried to make it a bit more open for interpretation, but that\'s where the ‘survivor’s guilt’ sentiment came from.” **“Reverse the Curse”** \"We had a version of this \[for *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*\] that was extremely Kyuss-heavy, and at the time, we were uncomfortable with that—we felt like we were doing something that wasn\'t us. As a group of people who have great respect for the stoner-rock world, we didn’t want to disrespect it. It\'s the same reason why I would never make a reggae album, even though I love Jamaican music. But now, in the \'Dark Night of the Soul\' era of Alexisonfire, things are a little more open and we can kind of do whatever we feel like now. \[City and Colour touring member\] Matt Kelly got to play Hammond on it, and that really leveled the song up in a way that we hadn\'t been anticipating.” **“World Stops Turning”** “This is a love song Dallas wrote about his band, Alexisonfire. We had the most beautiful moment where he brought us up to his cottage and we sat at his dining room table and for three hours, we just talked, and discussed the history of the band. He let us in on things that had been going on in his life, and it was just a very introspective moment for all of us. And at the end of it, he presented us with a demo he\'d been working on of this song, and we just knew that this is going to be the new set-closer. We’ve always ended our set with \[2004\'s\] \'Happiness by the Kilowatt,\' and we turn it into this 12-minute version. And this song felt like the new version of that—we\'re gonna have this big sprawling epic, and I could envision it just blowing everyone’s hair back. It\'s a perfect album-ender—we went full Floyd on this one.”

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

Seeing a record called *Hate Über Alles* come out of Germany in 2022 says much about the world we’re living in. Of course, Kreator aren’t proclaiming their hatred for anything—except maybe our current state of political and social discourse. “It’s based on the current way people communicate with each other,” Kreator guitarist, vocalist, and mastermind Mille Petrozza tells Apple Music. “We never agree to disagree. It’s more like, ‘If you’re not on my side, you’re against me.’ That’s what inspired me to call the album *Hate Über Alles*.” In keeping with their nearly 40 years of metal excellence, the Teutonic thrashers deliver an album replete with old-school bangers, a spaghetti western-inspired intro, and a killer cameo from German pop queen Sofia Portanet. “A lot of bands nowadays focus on singles instead of albums,” Petrozza observes. “We want this record to feel like a musical journey from start to finish.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Sergio Corbucci Is Dead”** “I had this piece of music obviously very influenced by spaghetti westerns, and I decided it would become the intro for the record. Then it’s always a bit of a challenge to name an intro. The music sounds like it could have come from either a Sergio Leone or Sergio Corbucci movie, but I heard that all of Corbucci’s movies were a statement against fascism, tyranny, and oppression because he grew up in fascist Italy. So, it seemed to fit.” **“Hate Über Alles”** “A lot of this is about communication on social media—people saying really rude things they would never say to your face. Musically, this was there already in the beginning of 2018, when I started recording demos. But the chorus came to me when we were in England, preparing for the Bloodstock festival. I thought it was a cool combination of strong words that combined German with the English language. And it’s a cool title, perfect for a Kreator record.” **“Killer of Jesus”** “This is a brutal thrash-metal song, straight to the point. Lyrically, I’m talking about icons and ideas that are 2000 years old that are, for some people, still relevant—even though the world has changed so much. Human history is on a totally different spiritual level than it was when these religions were developed for people that couldn’t read. So, it’s not about killing the person Jesus. It’s more about killing icons and ideas from the past and moving on.” **“Crush the Tyrants”** “This is one of the first songs I wrote for the album, and it’s more like a midtempo track. Lyrically, it’s about oppressors—crushing the tyrants, very self-explanatory. I like the groove of it. I wanted to do something like ‘Holy Diver,’ for example—a real anthemic metal song with a midtempo riff. This is the modern Kreator style.” **“Strongest of the Strong”** “The song talks about believing in yourself and believing in change. It’s about a spiritual awakening and moving forward, believing in the individual rather than following. It’s got a very old-school metal vibe and a killer groove, like our songs ‘People of the Lie’ or ‘Renewal.’ That’s the kind of vibe I wanted to create with this song.” **“Become Immortal”** “I’m reflecting on the past. I’m talking about the very beginning of the band and the years 1984 and 1985. I was a teenager when I had my first record deal—my mother had to sign for me. As a band from Essen, an industrial town in a rural district, to go to West Berlin to record our first album we had to cross the border through East Berlin, to this city with a wall. It was a strange adventure, but we felt more freedom than ever.” **“Conquer and Destroy”** “It’s based on a dream that I had about this entity coming to me, telling me that everything I do is on the right path. I felt this energy of somebody talking to me—it was probably my subconscious. The song talks about how, even if there is something that is a challenge in your life, you should go forward and face it rather than ignoring it. Musically, it has a very strong riff, double kick, and a nice melody. It’s definitely one of my favorites off this record.” **“Midnight Sun”** “The song was inspired by the Ari Aster movie *Midsommar*. The main character is a very strong female who goes from not believing in the cult at all to becoming a part of it, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a female singer. I connected with Sofia Portanet, who I’m a real big fan of, via Instagram. She had this album in 2020 called *Freier Geist* that I was listening to most of the time during the pandemic. We’ve never had a female guest on an album, so I thought it was about time to do that. And she really fits the song.” **“Demonic Future”** “Musically, I’ve had this for a while. It’s very old-school thrash, like it could be from the early days or on the first Metallica. It’s our tribute to that time. Lyrically, it talks about racism. Just when you thought you’ve seen it all, suddenly there’s a new racist movement in Germany. Refugees that are coming in from war countries are getting attacked. We did a version with German lyrics also, which might be on a later release.” **“Pride Comes Before the Fall”** “This is a continuation of the ‘Hate Über Alles’ theme. People are so arrogant when they’re in their safe zone in front of the computer, putting down people’s creativity. They are not daring to tell you their opinion in your face. It’s almost a little bit like ‘Conquer and Destroy’ as well—it talks about facing a situation and going through it with a clear mind and clear vision. Stay strong and keep your focus, no matter what other people are saying.” **“Dying Planet”** “I wrote a song in 1990 called ‘When the Sun Burns Red,’ which talked about global warming already. Now we’re coming full circle and global warming is causing lots of catastrophes. A lot of things I talked about in ‘When the Sun Burns Red’ are now becoming a reality. With this song, I went a step further. It’s talking about the planet as a living organism fighting off the disease of humanity because we’re the ones destroying the planet. There’s a spoken word part where I’m explaining that we had it all, but we fucked it up.”

Nine albums in, Swedish tech maestros Meshuggah are still pushing metal’s boundaries forward. *Immutable* sees the band honing and expanding the djent style they’re credited with originating while offering a glimpse of an ominous future. “A lot of the lyrical content of the album is social commentary on what we see happening around us, and man’s inability to change and evolve,” drummer and lyricist Tomas Haake tells Apple Music. “The cover art tells the story—you have a man that’s burning, but he’s still going for a knife. The title also references the band itself—we’re doing the same thing we set out to do many years ago.” Below, he comments on each track. **“Broken Cog”** “This one is ‘third time’s the charm.’ We actually started recording this for *Koloss* back in 2012, but it just didn’t feel right. We tried it again for *The Violent Sleep of Reason*, but it didn’t happen again. This time, we finally got it to work. It was a deliberate choice to put this first, a song that builds and builds, and once the vocals kick in, it’s not even \[vocalist\] Jens \[Kidman\]—it’s just warped whispers and stuff. It’s definitely an esoteric choice of first track, but I think it’s cool because you have no idea what to expect of the next one.” **“The Abysmal Eye”** “This is a track that me and \[bassist\] Dick \[Lövgren\] worked on for a long time. We had two or three hours’ worth of different riffs that we honed down to this. Lyrics-wise, it’s the big AI scare. To a certain degree, it was inspired by an interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about AI. It’s daunting and scary if you allow yourself to get into that mode of thinking.” **“Light the Shortening Fuse”** “This is one of \[guitarist\] Mårten \[Hagström\]’s tracks, and he wrote the lyrics for it as well. It’s a commentary on how social media has changed everything and become such a tool for idiocy and disinformation. It’s become a political tool that people look to as some form of verified news outlet, \[whereas in\] reality it’s quite the opposite. No one should ever listen to it. And also, for kids, as far as body dysmorphia and all these filters that make you look a certain way—social media fucks with everything.” **“Phantoms”** “We’re one of those bands that can sometimes write music and rhythms completely based around drums. This was a song that I’d been messing around with for a while, and I put some weird, downtuned guitars on it, but then Dick came in and wrote real riffs for it. Lyrically, this is one of the few that’s a bit more personal. It’s about memories and regrets over things you’ve done or said in life that you really wish undone. As you get older and step out of your younger self, you get a better sense of how hurtful some of those things were.” **“Ligature Marks”** “This is another one of Mårten’s tracks, and to me it’s one of the strongest on the album. I heard him playing this thing about a week before we went into the studio and was like, ‘Dude, what is that?’ Apparently, he’d had it laying around for years, but it made it to the album with a week’s notice. The song is using S&M vocabulary as metaphors for how we act in life as masochists or sadists on a spiritual level—as a species, but also as individuals being the threat to our own existence.” **“God He Sees in Mirrors”** “Dick Lövgren wrote everything for this. It’s a very short, rhythmical phrase that never starts the same way, which makes it weird to listen to. Lyrically, this is about how the well-being of the individual and the collective is subdued under the policies of tyrants and dictators. Instead, the gaining of power and personality cult becomes way more important than policy-directing. See Trump, for example. Or Bolsonaro in Brazil. There’s plenty of them around the world. They see God in mirrors.” **“They Move Below”** “This is an instrumental, and it’s one of Mårten’s tracks. This is his go-to place. For each album, he always writes something in the style of this, where it’s a little sludgier, with almost one foot in stoner rock and one foot in metal. It also has a two- or three-minute intro that’s only clean guitar. It’s beautiful-sounding. We’re using this track as a tool on the album to take things down several notches and start over.” **“Kaleidoscope”** “To me, this one is a little bit like the *Koloss* track ‘Do Not Look Down,’ which was a little bit more rock and not quite as metal. This is another one me and Dick worked on together. We weren’t really sure about this one until we heard Jens’ vocals and started mixing it. Then we realized, ‘Oh, this thing is hopping.’ Lyrically, it’s imagining a drug you could take that lets you see things for what they truly are, whether that’s injustices or lies or even good things.” **“Black Cathedral”** “This is an intro for ‘I Am That Thirst,’ but it is its own track. The weird thing is, on the album there’s a long gap between them. I felt like they should have been more put together. But it really ties into ‘I Am That Thirst’ in the sense that you have the same tremolo-picking going on with something like 20 or 30 guitars stacked on top of each other. Sometimes you’re feeling like you just want to put something on there that’s not what people expect at all, and this is one of those things.” **“I Am That Thirst”** “That’s a track by Mårten, but I wrote the lyrics for it. He usually goes into sludge mode or thrash mode, and this is definitely his thrash mode. People might recognize this style from some of the earlier works we’ve done. Lyrically, it’s about man’s desire for wealth and immortality—and the thirst for more, regardless of the status or wealth that you already possess. A ‘grass is greener on the other side’ type of thing.” **“The Faultless”** “Another Mårten track with my lyrics. This is a first for us because it has Jens, Mårten, and me doing vocals for it. There’s a part that goes from left to right, where Mårten does a vocal and Jens does the answer. And then there’s a spoken vocal part that comes in—that’s my voice, and we just pitched it down a half a note or something. Lyrically, it’s about mental and psychological abuse through words and actions, and how some people go through life inflicting injury on others while being completely unable to see their own faults and flaws.” **“Armies of the Preposterous”** “This is one of me and Dick’s tracks. It’s a waltz, which is unusual. We’ve only done that once before, which was ‘The Demon’s Name is Surveillance’ off the *Koloss* album. It’s also one of the few songs on the album that has faster double bass for longer periods of time. Lyrically, it’s about the preposterous rise of neo-Nazism and far-right policies around the world. It’s scary to me how supposedly functioning individuals can stand there and say that the genocide of the Jews during World War II did not happen.” **“Past Tense”** “It’s been a few albums since we ended on something really calm like this, but it’s a tool we used to implement in the ’90s, especially on *Chaosphere* and *Destroy Erase Improve*. We just wanted to strengthen the sad note that ‘Armies of the Preposterous’ ends on by adding a final track that’s sad and melancholy.”