Punktastic's Top 25 Albums of 2020

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

\"I think it might be a relief to listeners to be like, ‘Oh good, this song isn\'t sad,’\" Jeremy Bolm tells Apple Music about Touché Amoré\'s fifth record *Lament*. \"Or not even sad, like, \'Oh, this is a song that I don\'t have to be afraid to listen to or be concerned to listen to because it might make me feel a certain way.\'\" After tackling the death of his mother on 2016\'s *Stage Four*, Bolm felt it would be best for his mental health to simply write about what\'s been going on in his life since that moment. He expresses his vulnerabilities both good and bad throughout, ranging from an appreciation for his partner (\"Come Heroine\") to the panic of shouldering other people\'s grief (\"I\'ll Be Your Host\") and feeling abandoned by those closest to him (\"A Broadcast\"). The Los Angeles quintet linked up with producer Ross Robinson to push forward their boundaries, as the album implements pedal steel guitar (\"A Broadcast\"), pop structures (\"Reminders\"), and post-punk (\"Feign\") into the band\'s relentless blend of emo and hardcore. \"I\'m so proud of it, and I know that\'s not unique, but in my heart of hearts, I feel like this is our best record,\" Bolm says. Below, he takes us track by track through *Lament*. **Come Heroine** “This one immediately felt like an opening track. I think it also does a pretty good job of setting you up for some of the context of the record, just in terms of how it\'s, in a way, part appreciation. It’s about my partner\'s incredible ability to be supportive and there. And just how, even when things seem to be as bad as they could be or as crazy as could be after the loss of my mom and all that sort of stuff, just that sort of reassuring presence from someone who also hasn\'t exactly had the happiest life. I think that kind of a person deserves a million songs written about them.” **Lament** “I just sort of had to take a step back, and I looked at the track titles, and I was like, \'Honestly, I feel like even just the word *lament* sort of ties up a lot of what we\'re going for here.\' So it became the title track, and for me, this song is just about how, for lack of a better term, something that\'s triggering can just throw your day off completely. The big part toward the end of the song—\'So I lament, then I forget/So I lament, till I reset\'— I think that just feels like the cycle that a lot of us go through.” **Feign** “This song is completely about impostor syndrome. I think when anyone is struggling with their art form in general, the first thing they do is find themselves to be a fraud. I\'ve always done my best to not take all the accolades that people have been kind enough to give me since I started making music with this band. And I\'ve come to realize that the times where I\'m sort of feeling the most free, the most carefree about what I\'m writing, some of those lines that get written end up being the ones that I think people connect to the most, and I can\'t help it. I always feel like it was accidental.” **Reminders** “Arguably the poppiest song in our band\'s catalog. The song was pretty inspired by the early-2000s Bright Eyes records, between *LIFTED* and *I\'m Wide Awake, It\'s Morning*, where he has a few songs that have a really good juxtaposition between a verse that\'s hyper-political and then the next verse that\'s deeply personal. I always looked at that ability that Conor Oberst had in a very envious light. So this was me sort of trying my hand at that, and it was written the day that Trump was exonerated from being impeached. We can\'t rely on the system to make our days better, we have to rely on what\'s around us. To keep our heads up, to keep ourselves going.” **Limelight** “We’re all made to believe that a loving relationship is one where it\'s consistent PDA or you\'re consistently romantic, or you have a passionate kiss every single day, and things like that. Which, I think, once you\'re with someone long enough, I don\'t think that\'s true. I think passion for me is the ability to just be around each other and love each other\'s company. And then also having heavy, heavy experiences together. Like the people in her family that have passed since our relationship, people in my family that have passed since our relationship. We\'ve now had three, four pets die. And every one of those was a very devastating situation, but brought us even closer together. So a lot of that was sort of on my mind when writing this song. And sort of not letting any outsiders have any sort of idea of what my kind of love is.” **Exit Row** “We put this song as the first song on Side B because I feel like it\'s a good energy boost situation. I feel like, at this point, every one of our records has this kind of song on it. I love the half-time drop in it; I feel like it makes me want to fucking kick a bunch of boxes over.” **Savoring** “After the shutdown happened, we were getting the mixes of the songs, and the opening lyrics just cracked me up: ‘Savoring the days that we spent inside as if tomorrow will be different, whatever we decide.’ But the part that makes you realize that it wasn\'t written for this is when I say it\'s nurturing, because this shit is not nurturing. I think any musician or any person who travels will tell you that when you\'re on the road, you\'re thinking about being home; when you\'re home, you wish you were on the road.” **A Broadcast** “\[Guitarist\] Nick \[Steinhardt\] had started learning how to play the pedal steel. Less than a year before we did this record, he wrote that song on it. Every one of our records has what I call the ‘weirdo track.’ I was a little nervous with it, because it started coming together and I started freaking out, like, ‘What am I going to do on this thing?’ So when I was out in the desert writing the song, I was freaking out about that. I read probably like 50 Leonard Cohen poems, listened to a few of the songs, and one of the things that I think Leonard is so amazing at is his ability to write the four-line stanzas. I wrote probably 12 different stanzas, if you want to call them that. And then I just sort of cherry-picked the ones that I think connected the best with how I was feeling. So this is me just sort of paying homage to the people that have inspired me and influenced me in so many different ways.” **I\'ll Be Your Host** “This is my panic of the countless messages and conversations that I\'ve endured about people losing people in their life, and how that\'s had a dramatic effect on my personal life. It\'s really, really difficult to navigate other people\'s tragedies on a consistent basis. I\'ll be approached, and someone will let me know the person in their life that recently died, or whatever. And the thing is I understand completely why people are doing this. I would do the exact same thing. I completely get it. But I can\'t deny what it\'s done to me. It\'s a really hard thing to take on, and I do feel guilty that I don\'t respond to fans about it.” **Deflector** “Being such a fan of Glassjaw and the records that Ross did, I found myself hearing a lot of those elements in the ideas that he had for this song. The last chorus where the kick drum is just consistent, that was an idea from him. The chorus, for me, deals with situational anxiety, conversations that I\'m uncomfortable having, and also the impostor syndrome as well, sort of all tied together with not being comfortable with a lot of situations. So that was me trying to try my best to be a John K. Samson, with painting an image of two trapeze artists doing their act and missing the connection and falling to the ground. And what that means for the trapeze artist, and what that means for myself in a more literary sense.” **A Forecast** “I lost some family because of Facebook. It\'s the social platform that allows your family to comfortably, openly speak about things that you really wish they hadn\'t. So for me, the first big section of this opening song, it\'s really heavy, and it\'s really uncomfortable. And it\'s not an easy first couple lines here. I\'m in this extreme, insane jazz phase where I\'m obsessed with discovering new records constantly with it. And I never had the patience before. I\'ve always respected jazz to an extreme level, but it\'s just never connected to me.”

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

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

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

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

\"We never want to be pigeonholed into a band that only can do one thing,\" Movements vocalist Patrick Miranda tells Apple Music. \"And I think that people who want bands to stay the same forever, in my opinion, it\'s a selfish way of thinking about things.\" Produced by Will Yip, *No Good Left to Give* showcases the California-based quartet expanding into darker territory on their second full-length, both socially and thematically. Tracks like \"In My Blood\" and \"Don\'t Give Up Your Ghost\" introduce a Cure-like wrinkle to the band\'s post-hardcore sound, while \"Skin to Skin\" and \"Santiago Peak\" highlight Miranda\'s improved vocals. \"If fans don\'t like how we\'ve changed, that\'s fine,\" Miranda says. \"But you can\'t expect us to continue to do the same thing just because it\'s what they like.\" Here, Miranda takes us through *No Good Left to Give* track by track. **In My Blood** “I think a lot of bands try and hit the ground running right off the bat with their openers being a really banging, upbeat, fast-paced song, and we were like, let\'s do the opposite, and kind of like a slow burn, because there is one part where it does open up into a cool upbeat part, but you expect there to be more, and then you actually end up getting less, because it just goes back into this drone.” **Skin to Skin** “I think it\'s to me it\'s the most entertaining, it\'s the catchiest in my opinion, and it just gives off a fun, cool vibe to me. I find myself getting that song stuck in my head all the time, which is crazy because I usually can\'t stand to listen to my own music, and I\'m like, \'This is crazy, I wrote this, why am I singing it like it\'s a fucking song on the radio.\'” **Don\'t Give Up Your Ghost** “This was another one of those scenarios in which we were like, ‘You know what, let\'s do something that goes against the grain of what you would expect.’ We wanted the first look of the album to be, again, not like your typical first single. Everybody always drops the first single being a banger that\'s upbeat, fast, and boppy. And we were like, no. Let\'s do the opposite, let\'s release the slowest song on the record as the first single, because it\'s so different and so cool. We wanted the first single of the album to be something weird, and we knew going into that that it was going to be something where fans were going to be like, \'What the fuck is this?\' We knew people were going to talk about it, we knew people were going to be kind of weirded out by it. In my opinion, that\'s the best way to get hype started about your new record.” **Tunnel Vision** “This is the crowd-pleaser. It is very much like its roots are still very much in vintage Movements. You got the screaming in it, you have the heavier kind of chorus, and it\'s very much like sort of paying homage to what Movements has always been.” **Garden Eyes** “We co-wrote that song with Andrew Goldstein, and he\'s more into the pop realm of things. He writes with artists like blackbear, All Time Low, Katy Perry—he\'s done some really big stuff in the pop world. The melody choices were very much inspired by early-2000s kind of rock and stuff that was on the radio at the time. And that to me was really cool because it was a new perspective that we didn\'t necessarily have on *Feel Something*, because we didn\'t really do many co-writes for that record, and this record we got to explore that realm a little bit more.” **12 Weeks** “This is a different one for sure. That\'s one of the songs that to me feels very fresh and different as far as anything that Movements has done before. It\'s a song about, again, grappling with these ideas of \'would things be better if you were gone?\' Would life be different for someone else in a more positive way if you had never existed or you died, or if you never were a part of their life, that sort of idea.” **Living Apology** “What we’re trying to accomplish is to make sure that each one of our songs is distinct in some way or another. That song originally was extremely upbeat. It had a fast kind of driving chorus to begin with; the verses were in a higher register. And the more that we listen to it and the more that we listen to the record as a whole, we were like, ‘This almost feels out of place, because it seems like it\'s already been accomplished on the record.’ That\'s when we came up with the idea of taking that chorus and instead of having it be a typical driving chorus, we decided to give it a swing and downtempo. It\'s almost to me hip-hop-inspired in some ways. And I know that sounds weird, because it doesn\'t sound like hip-hop at all, but just the vibe of it feels kind of like R&B kind of vibey different sort of sound.” **Santiago Peak** “There\'s always the fucking punks that are like, \'Oh, I hate my hometown, I want to get out.\' And I think for a while when I was writing music, that was a theme that I also agreed with was, man, I just feel so stuck where I am. It wasn\'t until we started touring that I started to really have a better appreciation and understanding for how good I had it where I grew up. I grew up extremely privileged, I grew up in a really nice area, I had a good upbringing and a good childhood, and that\'s so much more than what so many people can say about their own childhood, and to me, doing anything that talked ill or would be speaking badly about the place where I grew up just feels so disrespectful.” **Seneca** “Everybody has that one person who is the one that got away, and there was a theme that one of my friends was telling me about, like a term for that person. And he calls the one who got away a white buffalo. And I liked that sentiment, but I hated ‘buffalo.’ It\'s such a dumb word to put into a song. I came across an article about a specific breed of deer called the Seneca white deer. The fact that they were white deer, which kind of goes along the same vibe as the white buffalo, it was a cool-sounding name, it was something I could incorporate into the song.” **Moonlight Lines** “This is another song that I think shows our progression, or at least my progression as a vocalist. The things that I was writing about when I was 19 are not the same things that I experience today. And as I\'ve gotten older, and as I\'ve become more of an adult, I\'ve had different experiences—whether that be with people or just in general, I\'ve had more experiences. And this particular song is essentially about a one-night stand, and the feeling of shame or regret that comes after it.” **No Good Left to Give/Love Took the Last of It** “The entire idea is that they go hand in hand. The lyrics in ‘No Good Left to Give’ are the title and the theme of the next song. That interlude was part of the final, and we were like, that\'s going to make this song six minutes long, we should switch it up, we should make it a little different, we should have this song be its own song, which is cool, because it\'s only a minute and a half and it works really well. It\'s just a really cool interlude into the final track of the album, which to me is the perfect closer. I feel like \'Love Took the Last of It\' has such a strong epic chorus to end the album on. It feels very fucking \'roll the credits,\' you know?”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

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

What happens when current and former members of Fit For An Autopsy, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Misery Signals, Blacklisted, and Counterparts collide? A master class in modern metallic hardcore. *Splinters From an Ever-Changing Face* revels in screeching, slashing guitars (“Covet Not”), face-pounding pit slams (“Pariah”), and snarling, sample-laden grinds (“Hesitation Wounds”), while guest shots from Pete Morcey of 100 Demons (on “Absence”) and Tanner Merritt of O’Brother (on “Sands of Sleep”) bring vocal nuance to the pandemonium.

For PVRIS frontwoman Lynn Gunn, her band’s third album *Use Me* marked “a line in the sand.” Sonically, that meant stepping away from the expansive rock that defined the Massachussetts trio’s previous two albums and embracing altogether more hook-heavy, dark-edged electro-pop. “This is where we’re at now, and we’re not going back from here,” says the singer of PVRIS’ new dawn, which Gunn honed with US producer and Paper Route frontman JT Daly. “You can hop on or you can hop off. I follow my taste and my interests, and I never want to compromise that for nostalgia or for the comfort of preserving old expectations.” But *Use Me* also represented another clear-cut change: the moment Gunn—for years reluctant to take full credit for PVRIS’ output—allowed herself to step out of the shadows and into the foreground. “The process of this album was a very singular, solo endeavor,” she says. “Things were naturally happening that way anyway, but we never really had the direct conversation about it. Everyone was down for this, because it’s a healthier, easier method. Finally being like, ‘This is actually how it’s operated,’ and having that conversation has been a really positive shift for us. It allows more freedom.” It’s not hard to see why *Use Me* catalyzed that new direction: This is an intensely personal record on which Gunn documents—and exhales—the turbulence of her life during the years leading up to its creation. “It was a really overwhelming time,” says the singer of the period after the release of 2017’s *All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell* and into 2019, when she began to write *Use Me*. That turmoil is spread across the record, from the pent-up ferocity of opener “Gimme a Minute”—a shuddering anthem which sees Gunn desperately placing a protective layer around herself—to “Good to Be Alive,” on which the singer ruminates on her ill health, sarcastically wondering, “Is this body even mine? Feels good to be alive but I hate my life.” But amid all that restless energy, there’s also release; as the album reaches its close, Gunn sails into noticeably calmer waters. That shift you can hear, she says, was “internal healing. It’s funny, because while we were making the album, I still felt I was holding on to a lot of things. The chaos was just very, very present. But speaking about it now, I feel healed from a lot of it.” Here, let Gunn walk you through the exhilarating *Use Me*, one song at a time. **Gimme a Minute** “This song feels like a really good start, especially if you’re looking at the album as a storyline. There was a lot of change during this album: personal changes, mental changes, physical changes. And I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease as well as Crohn\'s disease around this time, so it\'s navigating a lot of health factors within that chaos. I also have a hard time setting boundaries and asking for help or time off. The song is a cry out and just a catharsis of what I really wanted to say, which was just, ‘Give me a minute. I need a minute. I need to process what has happened in the last few years. I need to process what is happening to my body. I need to process what\'s happening to my heart.’ It was just a lot. Sonically, the song emulates that stirring stress and anxiety, and it eventually leads to this explosive breakdown and the ultimate freak-out.” **Dead Weight** “Again, this was about reflecting on being a people-pleaser and always putting others’ feelings and expectations before mine. The song is about wanting to shed those habits and patterns. But also about shedding people who don\'t understand that and won\'t allow you to set those boundaries—old friendships, old relationships, old anything that don’t allow you to be your best self. The dynamic of the song really ties into the sonics; they reflect this dance that I feel I am always having. I always want to be straightforward and transparent with the people around me, but I always want to do that with love and do that in a way that\'s not going to upset anybody. But sometimes the truth is you need to just set that boundary and do it unapologetically and not worry about it.” **Stay Gold** “‘Stay Gold’ just flew out—it was a really quick song to write. The message of the song is wanting to write a song for somebody, but also not wanting to, because when you write a song about somebody, they\'re immortalized. They can be consumed by a listener in whatever way they want, whether that\'s to put them up on this grand pedestal or to tear them down. And this person just felt so special that I didn\'t even want to give the chance for either of those things to happen. I just wanted to keep them safe. I didn’t want to let their greatness die as we would play the song over and over. So, ironically, I ended up writing a song about them, which is the song about not wanting to write a song about them.” **Good to Be Alive** “The line in this—‘It feels good to be alive but I hate my life’—is supposed to be a little cheeky and a little bit funny. But it’s also supposed to be completely honest. JT had set up a little miniature writing camp with some awesome writers. And there was one day we were just working alone, and during this time, I was having a really bad flare-up in my stomach and in my body. I just wasn\'t feeling good, and it was really hard to just show up to the session and be on and be present. I was feeling a lot of the weight of those health issues, which was ironic because mentally I was in excellent health—the best place I\'ve been in my adult life and in our career. What I think music is really great for is delivering the deep, honest, and maybe difficult message, but if you can make someone dance to it or sing along to it, it just feels so much better.” **Death of Me** “This is about that fine line you dance right when you are interested in somebody and you realize you really care about them and like them. And you have to surrender in a way, or at least for me. I\'m go hard or go home. If I\'m going to commit to somebody, I\'m fully committed and ready to just dive in (that’s definitely a good indication of the no boundaries thing). It’s about the risk you take when you are connecting with somebody and putting it all out there. Sonically, it\'s similar to ‘Good to Be Alive,’ where I feel like if you just read the lyrics straight out, it can sound pretty dark and maybe not the most positive. I knew I would need somebody who could bring that perfect element of a little bit dark, but a little bit fun, and I chose Daniel Armbruster from Joywave. He helped like really capture that dark energy, but also a little bit of a cheeky wink in there.” **Hallucinations** “It\'s funny, I didn\'t think the song would make the album. I was reading this book at the time about hallucinating, and it just kind of felt like I was living in a weird little dream. There were a lot of areas of my life where I was kind of contemplating what was real and what was something I was thinking up or projecting, and trying to identify and really pin those things down. The book really lined up with how I felt at that point in my life. A fan actually gave me that book, too, so whoever it was, I owe them a huge thank you.” **Old Wounds** “I think this is the most directly I\'ve ever written about love. It feels like a love song—it’s about that all-or-nothing mentality and that willingness to get hurt again from somebody the second time around. I wrote it about three or four years ago. I had this really short-term but really special connection with somebody, and it just ended very abruptly. And there was a time when they had come back just to talk about it and for us to process something, and I remember one of my friends just said to me, ‘Don’t open up old wounds, don\'t do it.’ I was like, ‘That\'s a good lyric, that\'s a good song idea.’ At the time I was staying in a hotel in New York and I just went back to my room and blurted the song out in a day. And I had the demo for a really long time; I just wanted to finish it and wanted to get it out. I showed it to JT one day and a couple of people on our team, and everybody was like, ‘We need to finish this.’ I was like, ‘Thank you. I thought so.’ I\'m definitely a hopeless romantic, and this captures that.” **Loveless** “When I wrote this, I was dealing with a breakup and I just didn’t want to write about it. I didn’t want to give it any more attention or energy, I guess. But I knew, deep down, that I needed to write about it and get it out. So I very reluctantly wrote about it. But I think making the song allowed for that final release and that final acceptance and just surrendering to it for a moment. Once that energy was pulled out, it allowed for this breath, which I think the end of the album has. It feels lighter, it doesn\'t feel as chaotic, even if there is still a little bit of sadness. The song is about admitting that you\'ve been defeated and admitting that somebody hurt you and that you\'re giving them this salute. Like, ‘You hurt me, dude, you hurt me real bad.’ I feel like this is the first song where I\'ve just fully laid that out there. Something about admitting that takes the power back.” **January Rain** “A much more retrospective reflection on that same situation. JT and I were just finishing everything and finishing tracking, and just kind of getting everything together. But I woke up one morning with the vocal melody for this song and the chorus in my head and I just jumped to my computer immediately. I wrote the track and got the melody before it ran away and I brought it to him. I didn’t have the lyrics and I didn’t know what I was feeling. But ‘January rain’ just kept popping up. It was looking back on that relationship a year later and reflecting on what it all felt like, which was it was really special to me. But which, very early on, I knew was doomed. I just remember there was one week where it just rained and rained and rained and rained, and that\'s when that feeling felt the heaviest.” **Use Me** “There\'s harp in here, plus strings. This was one of the songs, along with \'Stay Gold,\' which we were fighting really hard to get onto the album. I was watching *Euphoria* and I just really loved the soundtrack for it. I loved the dynamics between Rue and Jules and just the concept of using a person as your escape or your medicine—whether it\'s good or bad. You can see it as a really healthy thing or unhealthy, it just depends on the situation. I tend to get very singular and solo in my own life. I almost wrote it as a love letter or a love song from someone else\'s perspective, and the dialogue or message that I wish someone would be able to speak to me and sing to me. So it was like this weird backwards love song and kind of putting that into the universe. Maybe one day somebody will be able to be that for me and be that person to lean on. But there’s a double-sided energy to it. Because you could almost look at the song as a kind of funny, passive-aggressive, ironic message of just saying, ‘Just go ahead, use me. Do whatever you need.’ It’s very empowered. There\'s also an empowering component to it as well, if you\'re looking at it from that angle.” **Wish You Well** “I never want to burn bridges with people. I never want people to be hurt. Even if a situation was toxic or wasn\'t healthy, I still always just want the best for somebody. But sometimes you need to let things go and you got to let certain people go. I feel it\'s right to have this at the end of the album. It just really captures that no matter what somebody\'s put me through, I\'m not going to hold that against you. I\'m always going to hope that you can grow from this and heal. But I also love a good four on the floor, really groovy bass, fun song. So it was the first time we\'ve really gotten to make something like that. It had to be on the album.”

Such is the emotional weight of *Cannibal*, the sixth studio album from British metalcore band Bury Tomorrow, that frontman Dani Winter-Bates had moments of doubt about whether they should be releasing it at all. Detailing the depths of his own mental health struggles, *Cannibal* presents as a record of unbridled intensity, both musically and thematically. Though, away from music, the vocalist has long worked a career in the NHS and even organized safe-space workshops for fans to discuss their own issues, it wasn’t until recently that he felt ready to detail his own battles. “Truthfully, in the past, I don’t think I was well enough to have properly addressed what I have gone through,” Winter-Bates tells Apple Music. “But in sitting down to write this album, I felt I had reached a point where it was time for me to articulate my own journey to people.” In doing so, he hopes listeners can look past the darkness that engulfs the album to find a comfort in the nakedness of his most mature songwriting yet. “Going through the process has given me a really strong understanding of my resilience, but also where I need support in my journey. If people can take one thing from it, take that you’re not alone.” Here, Winter-Bates takes us through that process, track by track. **Choke** “The album’s opening lyric is one that really resonates with me, and which sets up what you’re coming in for on the record: ‘Sick of hiding the truth/Fucking lying to you.’ As brash as it is, it reveals that I’m opening the book and telling you something honest and meaningful now. I wrote that line very early on in the process. I tend to live by the notion that you shouldn’t always dismiss your first idea, because it can often be your best. I think it really encapsulates what the album is about.” **Cannibal** “As the title track for the record, this thematically really tells the story of the album, and musically is also very representative of what Bury Tomorrow is about—past, present, and future. It was actually one of the latter songs I wrote, and it works through my personal timeline in song. As a species we eat away at other humans in the way we treat each other, and the manner that we treat ourselves eats away at our own mental and physical health. I felt it was important to present these important themes as openly as possible, and not to wrap them in metaphor. It would be negligent to do that, almost.” **The Grey (VIXI)** “I believe this song takes the band to a whole new place. It has an off-time, waltz-like feel to it that provides space to think, which I believe is a real key to getting people to truly listen to the meaning of the song. We’ve felt a really deep connection with our fans through this song. ‘VIXI’—‘I have lived’ in Latin—really struck a chord with me, and was something I’d noted down a good six months before I got to writing this song. It connected with me in the darkest moments. What have I lived? What have I achieved? If I were to ‘go to the grey,’ what would people say about me? The lyrics in the breakdown have a nod to mindfulness, of which reconnecting to nature and understanding our core purpose is a big thing. A lot of people find a solace in that.” **Imposter** “Imposter syndrome is something I both live with and also teach leadership groups on. It’s the feeling that you’re going to get caught out in what you’re doing. You could be the top-tier data analyst in the world yet feel like you can’t even open a spreadsheet; you could be a revered musician who has had every accolade thrust upon them, but still feel like you’re phoning it in every night onstage. The song builds to a frantic breakdown that reflects reaching the point where you simply want to remove your brain in order to be free of these thoughts. It’s a condition that particularly affects aspirational people—it preys on the vulnerability of people who want to further themselves or progress. I’ve had it with my vocals, but I have also really noticed it in my professional work with the NHS. I’m not someone who took the traditional route of education or a degree with my career, and that leads your mind to prey that people might be judging you for it.” **Better Below** “This song finds me at my most vulnerable, and is the most honest song I have ever written. It outright calls myself out for hiding warning signs and symptoms of my depreciating mental health. I want the song to be a discussion of how someone can end up feeling this way about themselves. It has plenty of ‘space,’ and the space allows us to bring more emotive feel to the song. It’s interesting for us to place our most brutal lyrics and place them within the most melodic song on the record; it really shows the place I was in–or am still in now, even, as the lyrics are written in the present participle.” **The Agonist** “The worst part about anxiety is something called scanning, where your brain is actively looking for something to be anxious about. Subconsciously we look for these situations that lead you to have such debilitating feelings. We almost put ourselves in the piranha tank, knowingly or otherwise, and expect not to get bitten. I think ‘The Agonist’ is a reflection of what it’s like to be disenfranchised from your own mind, and to live with those feelings constantly.” **Quake** “‘Quake’ is probably the only song on the record that is wrapped in a metaphor. I wanted to talk about that snap from reality to breaking point, from stability to instability; the feeling of your world being shook and being thrust into chaos. The only way I could to really convey that was as an earthquake. From my own journey, I was living my life, walking along—and then one day, suddenly the world opened up and swallowed me. I think for a lot of people, that is the reality of mental health problems. It makes it a hard thing to recover from, too. Without that validating moment, almost, of a traumatic event, it can be really difficult to understand. There’s a guilt attached to it, even.” **Gods & Machines** “This continues the theme of ‘The Agonist,’ about putting ourselves into positions to then be destroyed by them, and relates in particular to the digital world and social media. These things have almost taken over as the new religion, and we’ve lost a sense of these things being designed to connect with people. The facelessness of the digital age has bred a level of incivility and unkindness that can kill people. The term ‘trolling’ frustrates me a great deal because it’s putting a juvenile face on something that can ruin someone’s well-being. We’re never going to win a battle to change the world we’re in, but we can educate people on the impact of these things on their lives, and how to be kinder to people as a whole.” **Voice & Truth** “The freeing nature of truthfulness and honesty is really, really important, certainly from a mental health perspective. It gives you vulnerability, and vulnerability, I believe, is power. Suppressing that has a detrimental impact upon a person, while in lying and behaving in an uncivil way to others, you are a contributing factor to what that person goes through as a result. It’s one of the most aggressive, savage songs on the record.” **Cold Sleep** “This is another particularly brutal song. When we were going through the record, the guys were like, ‘Really? Another brutal one?’ and I said, ‘That’s what this is like, it’s not a nice journey.’ ‘Cold Sleep’ as a title has obvious connotations, but for me it’s also representative of that feeling of lying in bed, being unsure of whether you are able to face what’s going to happen when you wake up—or even if you want to.” **Dark, Infinite** “I’m expecting this song in particular to be a tough listen for people. I can hear the emotion in my voice from when I was recording this; I can hear the cracks and imperfections, where I’m hitting a certain emotional depth. Ending the record in such a dark place, rather than closing it out with a more hopeful song, demonstrates that this struggle isn’t an isolated experience–I will have these feelings, ups and downs, for life. It’s very grounded in that reality. It’s a message I want to stay with people long after the record is over.”