“We decided to call it *Radical* because it cuts a couple of different ways,” Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley says about the title of the Buffalo metalcore band’s ninth album. “It’s radical as far as the personal beliefs I’m expressing as the lyricist of this band, but it’s also radical because it acknowledges that radical changes may need to be made in order for things to ever get better.” Of course, Buckley is aware that “radical” also means different things to different people in 2021. “I was trying to find things that most people in the world can agree on, and what I came up with was ‘fuck cancer’ and ‘I just want to feel good,’” he says. “I don’t think this record will help in the fight against cancer—although I wish it would—but we tried to write something that acknowledges the idea that human beings all long for goodness. But it’s going to require some big leaps of faith in order to make things good.” Below, he discusses some of the album’s key tracks. **“Dark Distance”** “I wrote this in 2019 or maybe even 2018, when I was realizing where I wanted the record to go. I knew that I had an obligation to use my platform for positive things because the world is not a pretty place right now. So, I just had this idea that the whole thing needs to be reset. Pull out the Nintendo game, blow on it, put it back in. And what resets civilization? Historically speaking, a plague does that. So, I started by summoning a plague and then COVID happened. I apologize for that.” **“Planet Shit”** “This is about a kind of old-style French Revolution of the upper-class elite and ruling class. About two months after we recorded the song, the Capitol building was stormed on January 6. I wrote the song to seem like a newscast, so I will say that, yes, I did have some sort of clairvoyant image of the Capitol building being rioted. My guide for the song was Mitch McConnell. He’s the only person I ever see when I’m talking about evil old white people. That’s two clairvoyant things in a row now, so I’m looking into what that means.” **“Post-Boredom”** “I wrote this about what would happen if I died and was reborn. If I had another chance at life, what would I do differently? What would I do the same? It was written during the pandemic, when everyone was bored, so I started thinking about what was going to happen next. And then I actually did get a separation from my wife during the pandemic, so that was a very real second shot for me. But all the songs were written before I was separated, so it ended up having a bigger meaning.” **“Colossal Wreck”** “This one is so fast and so short that I just thought it would be really good to have really memorable, punchy lyrics. Obviously, we’re being ignored by whatever higher power has been looking out for us since the dawn of time. It’s time to realize that we need to make some serious peace here with whatever is running the show because we really fucked it up. It kind of falls in line with ‘Dark Distance’ in that way.” **“Desperate Pleasures”** “Like ‘Colossal Wreck,’ I was just kind of having fun with the imagery here. We’re all lost, so fuck it. Let’s give it back, let nature take over, let’s just stop even trying. Let’s just live with the shit we’ve created and let nature fix it. The mental image I had was of a building on fire. While I’m just standing there, all these people are running past me to the exit. We can fend this off if we want to, but everyone is just running away. Who’s stupider here? Me for standing there, or everyone else for running away? I don’t know.” **“AWOL”** “I thought this song was about something, but then I realized it was about something else. When I was writing it, I thought of it as my vision for what my life would be like when this record is released. But that version of Keith Buckley is not currently in this situation. Maybe he’s happy; maybe he’s not. I don’t know how to reach him because he doesn’t exist yet. But it’s actually not about that. It ended up being about a very specific person and a very specific time. I don’t think anyone reading Apple Music cares about this, so I’ll just say it’s a message to my future self.” **“Sexsexsex”** “That song is about me realizing that I am a very submissive person. That’s a personality trait I have. When most people think of the whole dom-sub thing, they think of whips and leather and stuff like that. The only reference point they have is sexuality. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the power exchange of a dominant and submissive. So, I made this song seem like it’s about sexuality, but it’s not. It’s about an energy exchange.” **“We Go Together”** “Everyone is born into a very specific set of circumstances—a certain time, a certain place, a certain astrology that has never been replicated. Your experience on this earth has never happened before. In a way, you are the only one alive. Everything that you see is your set of conclusions. In a sense, that makes you the source of it all. So, the song is about feeling like you might be at the center of everything. How does that change you?”
*The Myth of the Happily Ever After* is a bold name for the follow-up to Biffy Clyro’s 2020 album, *A Celebration of Endings*. But that’s just how things played out. If *A Celebration* explored the band’s optimism that things could only get better—socially, politically, and for our planet—*The Myth* is about realizing, with the arrival of the global pandemic, that rock bottom hadn’t been reached after all. “There was a strength to *A Celebration of Endings* but also, looking back, a naivete,” the band’s frontman Simon Neil tells Apple Music. “This album is a lot more vulnerable, a lot more in the middle of mayhem. It’s about trying to make sense of it all. It felt important to put this music out while we’re still going through this, because it’s a record of the moment.” Released just over a year after *A Celebration*, *The Myth* was unexpected—not least for the band, who had only initially been planning to turn some leftover tracks into a companion piece. But working alongside *Balance, Not Symmetry* collaborator Adam Noble from their farm-studio in Scotland, the band realized in late 2020 that album number nine was taking shape. “We didn’t tell the record label or anything that we were working on new music,” admits Neil (Biffy’s other members are twin brothers Ben and James Johnston). You’ll hear that liberation all over *The Myth of the Happily Ever After*, as the band lets loose on sprawling, multi-act tracks (“Holy Water,” “Separate Missions”) and strides toward new territory via synths and electro. “It was really just about friends being in a room together,” says Neil. “Things can become complicated when you’ve been doing it for so long. To know that we still have that magic together, and that joy, is just fantastic.” Read on as he guides us through Biffy Clyro’s ninth album, track by track. **“DumDum”** “This was one of the tracks that kick-started the record. Musically, it’s something out of left field for us. I sampled all my vocals and created these soft sounds, which was a different way of writing. The song is about my exasperation that people are so sure of themselves. Especially in this world that we live in, I don’t know how anyone can be so convinced that what they believe is the only way to live.” **“A Hunger in Your Haunt”** “The title of this song was a phrase I heard a couple of years ago, and it just stuck with me. I just thought it was a beautiful way to describe your inner fire—your get-up-and-go. If life’s tough, you can find yourself just digging your way down. This song is about shaking off that negativity and finding a reason to get a smile on your face and be there for the people you care about. I’ve never done any talk-singing, and this was the song to do it on, because whenever I found a melody, it felt like it was taking away from it.” **“Denier”** “It’s the story of abusers in general: They do horrific things and then pretend that they’re the victim. A real manipulator can really twist things, and I fucking hate that. That’s what this song is about, and it’s got those sinister aspects to it.” **“Separate Missions”** “I was listening to a lot of The Cure over lockdown and it’s always two and a half minutes before Robert Smith starts singing. I thought, ‘We’ve never done that.’ The birth of this song was the idea of making mood music for a while, something a bit sinister, a little bit tense. And the song is, lyrically, probably closest to some of the sentiments in *A Celebration of Endings*, which is just about finding out that you and someone that you’ve been close to your whole life are on different paths. It felt like a new step for us, musically.” **“Witch’s Cup”** “This is a carnival song about cults. Like everyone else in lockdown, I watched a lot of shit telly, and I went down a lot of cult wormholes on YouTube. I’m in awe—and also feel a bit sorry—for people who can put their life into someone else’s hands, who can selflessly give themselves over. I find that extremely dangerous. A theme in this whole record is people who are convinced of shit and have blind faith, and nothing existing out of that.” **“Holy Water”** “I had the full first half of this written about 18 months ago, but it wasn’t quite ready for *A Celebration*. I already had the lyrics about ‘Sinner’s in a hospital room/The saint is in the bed.’ When the pandemic happened, it was like the universe had talked to me. Suddenly, the song seemed very important. It was originally about climate change and running out of resources, but then it evolved into something about the moment we were in and lockdown. I wanted the ending to sound the exact opposite to the start. I wanted it to sound like the world was falling down. Because, at points, it was.” **“Errors in the History of God”** “This is a bit of a misanthropic song, to be honest. Humanity, we’re our own kind of disease: We take everything, we use up all the resources, and then we move on to the next thing. I include myself as well, but it’s just like, ‘That’s not what we’re here for.’ I don’t want this to be an oppressive song, but the attitude is, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ I do feel like we\'re trolling our own planet, which is insane.” **“Haru Urara”** “There was this wonderful story of a horse in Japan, and it lost, like, 130 races. It was the worst-performing racehorse in the history of the world. But in his last race, everyone was convinced it was going to win, so thousands and thousands of people from all over Japan went to this small town to see the horse win in its final race. Of course, it came dead last. But what a wonderful, optimistic outlook. Nothing’s a write-off—that’s what this song’s about.” **“Unknown Male 01”** “I was just sitting at the piano one day, playing around, and then just had these simple chords and melody. Not every idea you come up with feels special, but this did. This song is about losing people and about male suicide. Unfortunately, our friend Scott \[Hutchison, of Frightened Rabbit\] passed away, and that’s something that’s been sticking with me a lot. I think that’s why this song ended up mattering so much to me, and why I wanted it to be something more than just a two-minute piano song. It’s got every single part of what we do: loops, acoustic guitars, piano, riffs, weird shit. Because if I’m talking about my depression or having lost someone, I want to show every aspect of what that is. Darkness and depression aren’t linear things.” **“Existed”** “This is a simple song musically, and it’s about forgiveness and trying to grow to be a better person. It’s about not being afraid to make mistakes in life, because that’s what life is. Unless people have done something truly heinous, I think they deserve second chances. This song was another one that made me realize something new was coming out of me. This song came out really fast—literally in one day. I just felt magic in it.” **“Slurpy Sleep Sleep”** “I wanted people to finish this song and laugh. It follows some real moments of self-doubt and some really heavy subjects. I wanted the musicality of this to carry people home. But this song is also about making the most of what we have. Because what the last year has taught me is that we can’t take anything for granted.”
In a genre that can be unkind towards too much change, Architects\' ninth album aims to challenge that mindset. \"We can do whatever we want,\" drummer and primary songwriter Dan Searle tells Apple Music. \"The ultimate question is, do we like it? And the answer is yes.\" *For Those That Wish to Exist* showcases the British quintet taking new risks, such as incorporating an orchestral approach into their abrasive sound (\"Dead Butterflies\" and \"An Ordinary Extinction\"), expanding vocalist Sam Carter\'s range beyond just screaming (\"Flight Without Feathers\" and \"Demi God\"), and focusing more on accountability and less on nihilism. \"I just realize that there might be a universe that prevents us from having control, taking the reins to see what\'s going on in the world,\" explains Searle. \"I wanted it to be something a little bit more responsible. I began to question why I was so passive in my role in making the world a better place.\" Below, Searle walks us through *For Those That Wish to Exist*\'s 15 tracks. **Do You Dream of Armageddon?** “It\'s lyrically alluding to a sense that we\'re all in the same boat, and we\'re heading in that direction. And it doesn\'t feature anyone in the band except Sam.” **Black Lungs** “I really felt like it was the only way to open the record. I love the chorus. It really is like a showcase of every style. It\'s easing you into the record, because we stray from the usual path a number of times.” **Giving Blood** “When the song originally came together, it was just drums and synth. The guitars came later. Obviously, a lot of it is still a heavy rock song. But this is sort of your first taste of the band moving into new water, so to speak.” **Discourse Is Dead** “This is a good song to make enemies with because it\'s kind of a critique of just not speaking to each other and trying to move forward. But I know that compromise is not popular at the moment. People are more polarized than ever. And it\'s leading us further away from creating a better world.” **Dead Butterflies** “It starts just with the strings and the bass. We planned around those ideas and developed it into something that worked for the band. It sat around for ages on the shelf, and eventually we sat down with it and worked it out. I think it\'s one of the best songs on the record.” **An Ordinary Extinction** “Probably the heaviest part of the record despite the trippy nature of this song. It\'s still very Architects, but then you get tossed into the verse straight away and it\'s something completely different again. It\'s super heavy and it\'s in a key that fits Sam\'s voice.” **Impermanence** “It just felt like a stompy end-of-the-world song. And kind of thematically leading on from where we left off in \[2018\'s\] *Holy Hell*, a little bit more concentration about mortality and the nature of our existence.” **Flight Without Feathers** “This is like the pit stop on the record almost. I wanted to write a song that was just basslines, so I wrote all the vocals and built the rest of the song around it. It’s one of three songs on the record without any drums—without me actually performing on it at all. So it\'s really got to shine just on the quality of the basic parts in it.” **Little Wonder** “We all see what is wrong with the world, but at the same time we avoid wanting to see it because we all want an easy life. I think the lyrics are a little bit of a cheeky nod to the fact that this song is so stylistically different for us.” **Animals** “This song went from text message to done in about 48 hours, and it was just one of those magical moments. And if we tried to make an 11-track record, we would have never gotten to this song. I\'m so glad that we did, because I think it is probably the best Architects song.” **Libertine** “We thought the record needed something like this—something big and aggressive, something with a little bit of space in it. And in the end, it\'s an absolutely cool album track.” **Goliath** “I thought this sounded just like a metal Biffy Clyro song and we\'ve got to try to get Simon \[Neil\] on it. We just thought it\'d be cool to have the singer of one of UK\'s biggest rock bands singing over one of the heaviest parts of the record. It\'s kind of all over the place.” **Demi God** “It\'s really dark and it\'s a bit of a late jam on the record that I\'m really proud of. I felt like I didn\'t want to create a long record that just fizzles out, I wanted it to stay stronger and still be providing interesting surprises throughout.” **Meteor** “There\'s no point in pretending that this song isn\'t an arena rock song, because it is an arena rock song. We typically play in a genre where arena rock is forbidden and taboo. So this song is probably the boldest track on the record. And yes, this song is very much about us knowing that we\'re heading for disaster.” **Dying Is Absolutely Safe** “I decided that it should be an acoustic track because it felt like something that the record hadn\'t stepped into. But I think fans will get it. I think there\'s something in there that\'s pretty special.”
After releasing their ninth album in April 2020, Floridian metal veterans Trivium were faced with the same touring prospects as everyone else at the dawn of the COVID era: none to speak of. So, they hunkered down and began work on *In the Court of the Dragon*. “Knowing that it was going to be album 10, we all realized it was very significant,” bassist Paolo Gregoletto tells Apple Music. “We knew it was a milestone, so it had to live up to that.” As such, Gregoletto and his bandmates—guitarist/vocalist Matt Heafy, guitarist Corey Beaulieu, and drummer Alex Bent—settled on a sufficiently epic lyrical theme: creating their own myths. “We took inspiration from existing mythology and made our own thing,” he says. “We wanted the whole album to feel as though the themes and characters are all part of one story.” Below, he details each track. **“X”** “We opened the last record with ‘IX’ because it was our ninth album, and I feel like this record and our last one are connected in some way—almost like a double album—because that one was released at the beginning of the pandemic and this one was made during it. We had worked with Ihsahn before on the intro for *Silence in the Snow*, and he created the incredible intro for this record too. He also helped us with orchestration and synths to give the other songs some textures as well.” **“In the Court of the Dragon”** “We had this melody from a live soundcheck we did in Tokyo in 2008 or 2009, and Corey really wanted to use it on a new song. That melody led to the main riff, the one that kicks in right away. Then we wrote the rest of the song and realized that we didn’t need that melody anymore, because it didn’t fit. So, it inspired the song and then went away. Once the song came together in the jam room, it became very apparent that it would probably be the opening track and the title track.” **“Like a Sword Over Damocles”** “This was how we got into the whole mythmaking theme. Corey had a demo called ‘Sword Over Damocles,’ and I remembered reading the story of Damocles when I was in school. Once we realized we were going to be creating our own myths for the lyrics, we wrote about a character dealing with the weight and anxiety of power—having those things hanging over you and always having your life in the balance of the actions you take. So, it’s not a retelling of the story of Damocles, but we used those themes.” **“Feast of Fire”** “The song that you hear as ‘Feast of Fire’ on the album came out of the middle section of the demo, which was much faster. We started changing it in the studio, which is way late in the process for us and not something we would normally do. But I’m glad we did because it became something a little different for us—we took this trashy riff and slowed it down, so it feels like something new. Then that melody singing part just kind of came out of nowhere and it started feeling like a definite single.” **“A Crisis of Revelation”** “This is a song that Matt brought in. The first time we jammed it, it was a little more \[2003’s\] Ember to Inferno style. If you know our band, you probably know what I’m talking about. We recorded a demo that way, but when we came back a month later, I felt like the song was calling out to be really fast—more of a thrashy Ascendancy style mixed with the newer style that Alex really brings to our band. So, we scrapped the demo and started playing it more intense, which really made it come together. There’s also a cool key change at the end, which makes the part feel bigger.” **“The Shadow of the Abattoir”** “I had the middle-section riffs for this when I was still living in Chicago in April of last year. We were stuck at home like everyone else, not touring, so I was writing a lot. Then I moved back to Florida, and I was on my Twitch stream, and I started playing these bass chords that I really liked. This song was calling out to be a big epic, so we got Ihsahn to add some layers in the first half.” **“No Way Back Just Through”** “This came from a demo I did for the last record that we never jammed, because we pretty much had all the songs we needed at that point. It’s got a real driving double-bass part that reminds me of ‘Painkiller’ by Judas Priest. Lyrically, nothing on this record deals with any of the things that have been happening in the real world because I think we wanted to steer clear of that stuff. But I did see an article about the pandemic that said there’s no way to turn back through this. We just have to get through it and continue forward. It just felt right for this song.” **“Fall Into Your Hands”** “This is the first song we worked on together, so it really set the pace for this record. I think the reason we have so many epic proggy parts on this record is because we realized how much fun that stuff is to write when we put together this song. At the time, we didn’t have any touring set up, nothing on the horizon except making this record, so maybe this song reflects that. And the drum part on the intro is just crazy. I watched Alex record it, and I still don’t know how he plays it because it sounds like there’s more hands hitting things than he has.” **“From Dawn to Decadence”** “Matt brought in some of the riffs for this one, and I got the title from a history book. It was a later song in the process, and those are always the toughest songs to figure out, because you’ve got so much material already and you’re trying not to step on any of the other songs. You’re trying to be creative and dynamic, so we did a lot of experimenting with this one as far as the tempo and the vocals. Even up to the last minute, we were experimenting with production tricks for the vocal sound on the verses. It was a very tough song to finalize.” **“The Phalanx”** “Anyone who thinks this song reminds them of something from the \[2008\] *Shogun* album, well, you are correct. It comes from a demo from that album, and it was almost on the record. The original middle section, however, was taken out and put onto the song ‘Torn Between’ on that album. So, we were left with a really cool Part A and Part C. When we decided to write a new middle section, it became a total riff-fest—Corey, Matt, and I all came up with riffs that flowed together. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, it’s a good metaphor for where our sound has settled in for the last few records—a good link between the old and the new.”
Taking its name from a computer virus developed by the NSA and leaked by hackers in 2017, the debut album from Canadian alt-metal trio Spiritbox has nothing to do with cyberattacks. Instead, vocalist Courtney LaPlante uses the term to describe the mood that permeates the record. “The story of the computer virus is fascinating—especially how it came into existence and how much it messed with people’s stuff,” she tells Apple Music. “But I latched onto it because of how cool the phrase is. Now, the words mean something completely different to me than when I first heard them.” Below, she describes each track on *Eternal Blue*. **“Sun Killer”** “We wrote this in January of 2020, and we instantly knew that it would be the intro of the album. This has the drama that I look for when I’m listening to an opening of an album—it’s like when the band is walking out onstage for a show. When I hear this, I’m surprised by the flexibility of my voice because I’ve had a vocal cord injury for a long time. It’s finally healed itself up in the last couple of years, so this performance is like a mini-celebration that I feel like myself again.” **“Hurt You”** “All of our songs have a narrative, but they’re more about the feeling of the song. To me, this feels like the ups and downs of a toxic relationship. We always write the music first in this band, but I think it’s fun when you can have the lyrical content mimic the vibe of the music. The working title of this was ‘Heavy Clown,’ like Clown from Slipknot, because a lot of our favorite nu-metal references made it into this song.” **“Yellowjacket” (feat. Sam Carter)** “This is one of my favorites on the record. I think it’s a double drop-D guitar tuning, so it’s inhumanly heavy. I don’t do a lot of screaming on this song, but it definitely has some of the lowest, scariest screams I’ve ever gotten out of me. The rest of the song is me talking, and my inspiration for that was a lot of the alternative music of the ’90s—bands like Butthole Surfers, that had all this weird spoken-word stuff in their songs. And then, we had Sam Carter from Architects do some vocals on it, which sound amazing.” **“The Summit”** “I have this fantasy in my mind where there’s this new genre of music that doesn’t make sense, but it’s almost like the parameters are pulled off some genres that I like. And that’s where ‘The Summit’ lives. It’s hard to classify it as a metal song, but the guitar is so low and clear. Vocally, I took a lot of inspiration from The Weeknd and Charli XCX, especially the way she lets the last line of a chorus descend in a really playful way.” **“Secret Garden”** “This is one of the first ones we wrote back in the summer of 2019, but it wasn’t quite ready back then. The working title was ‘Chino’ because it reminded us a little bit of Deftones, who we are very inspired by. I think the song has such a nice vibe to it—it feels romantically sorrowful. Lyrically, it’s me being introspective and advocating for myself. I think a lot of musicians fear losing who they are as their star rises, but I think anyone who’s in any transition period in their life can understand that feeling.” **“Silk in the Strings”** “A lot of the songs on this album are heavy and open and slow, but all the more intense songs—like this one—were written later. When \[guitarist\] Michael \[Stringer\] first showed me this one, I wasn’t sure what to do because I always feel like the vocals need to match the energy of the song. So, whenever there’s something bouncy, I try not to think about what a metal vocalist would do. I look more to what I think good rappers would do. For this song, I was like, ‘How would the Wu-Tang Clan do this song?’ I would absolutely never be able to rap, but I really admire how important the flow is.” **“Holy Roller”** “We don’t really have a lot of other music that sounds like this song, but we just wanted something selfishly heavy. The narrator in this song is clearly not a good person. A lot of times in metal music, a song about a bad person is very on the nose—very graphic and explicitly violent. I wanted to explore something more insidious, like the religious cultism of someone like Jim Jones. I find those kinds of people so much scarier than a song about cutting someone’s head off or something like that.” **“Eternal Blue”** “This is one of the first tracks we wrote, and I think it’s my favorite. Our producer, Dan \[Braunstein\], really helped us dig a little deeper with the synth part of it, taking a lot of reference from New Wave acts from the ’80s, like Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode. I just love how heavy and beautiful the song is, and it has a very rare Michael Stringer guitar solo in it, which I love. Lyrically, it’s about someone who is at rock bottom but is trying not to romanticize that. Many people seem to glamorize depression, but I think it’s important not to get caught up in that.” **“We Live in a Strange World”** “Every time I listen to this song, I feel different about it. We first wrote it before the pandemic, before the band started gaining success. When I recorded it in February 2021, I had a lot more to say about how weird the world is. It feels like I’m just watching this stuff happen to me like a viewer—rather than it actually happening to me—because I’m just sitting in my house watching all of these people online starting to know who the band is. It’s a bizarre feeling, and you worry about messing it up.” **“Halcyon”** “This one’s Michael’s favorite song. Like ‘Sun Killer,’ I just love how dramatic it is. It’s a big heavyweight of a song, and it gives me a lot of room with my singing range. Most of these songs are me thinking about not wanting to mess up and not wanting to get my little spirit crushed. This one is me looking at all those successful people and the version of me that’s going to compromise everything so that they can be one of those people.” **“Circle With Me”** “This is the newest song on the record, and it was written in the studio. Michael wrote it in an afternoon. Some of the darker and dramatic parts remind me of Evanescence, but on the chorus I took reference from Tears for Fears. So, it’s this weird little song, but it really kind of unlocked a lot of creativity in us to make all of our songs better. We ended up putting it out first because it really represents how we’re feeling about our band right now.” **“Constance”** “Just as ‘Sun Killer’ was always to be the opener and ‘Holy Roller’ was always meant as the middle point, followed by ‘Eternal Blue,’ ‘Constance’ was always meant to be the last song. But the lyrics didn’t really start to form until last year when my grandma passed away. Writing this song just helped me think about the feelings of losing someone, and it’s dedicated to her because she always wanted me to put out a song that doesn’t have screaming in it.”
For some bands that get that far, a seventh album can turn out to be a landmark moment—the point in an artist’s career where they take stock of what’s gone before and map out a thrilling new path ahead. History is certainly dotted with era-defining examples from some of rock’s greatest acts. AC/DC’s *Back in Black*, U2’s *Achtung Baby*, Radiohead’s *In Rainbows*, Springsteen’s *Born in the U.S.A.*, and Dylan’s *Blonde on Blonde* are just a few lucky-number-seven records. That sense of reset and restart hangs over You Me At Six’s *SUCKAPUNCH*.“Maybe there’s something in the universe with the number seven that makes you want to shake it up a little bit,” vocalist and frontman Josh Franceschi tells Apple Music. “We really went into it with a no-fear mentality.” The follow-up to 2018’s *VI*, *SUCKAPUNCH* sees the British quintet inject their trademark rock anthems with an array of influences, eager to make their own music sound like the stuff they actually listen to. Across its 11 songs, the album takes in trap, rave drops, hip-hop beats, and electronic soundscapes as part of an ambitious sonic voyage. “When you’re making a body of work, you don’t want to put the same thing out again,” says guitarist Max Helyer. “As a creative you sit there and go, ‘How do I challenge myself again?’ And that’s taking inspiration from absolutely anything and everything.” Here, the pair take us on a tour of the group’s brave new world, track by track. **Nice to Me** Josh Franceschi: “This is Max’s brainchild. He basically had the song written musically, and from the moment that I heard that riff I was like, ‘Yeah, that needs to be the opening track of the record.’ Max had a very clear vision for the song, and when somebody in the band has just a very, very distinct direction they want something to go into, you just have to trust that.” Max Helyer: “It’s probably one of the best songs I’ve done, in terms of presenting to the band. I had a vision and wanted everyone to be part of making it as well. I was trying to emulate something like Radiohead, that kind of glitchy drum sound, but also kind of marrying it with a Guy Ritchie movie and how that would be interpreted. I just had that vision of it being like, ‘It’s got to be like building a chase into something, and then when the chorus hits, it’s just got to slap.’” **MAKEMEFEELALIVE** MH: “I’d been sitting on this riff for a while. It was in an angry phase of my life and I was reminiscing on some of the acts that I’ve seen and grown up with, from Marilyn Manson to The Prodigy. I think it was around the time Keith Flint passed away and I was inspired by that. I remember watching The Prodigy when we played with them at Isle of Wight festival and it was so insane. I was like, ‘We need something with energy and a raw breakbeat kind of thing.’ I took the idea to Dan \[Flint, drummer\], we spent a couple of hours on it and showed the rest of the guys. It came together so quickly.” JF: “I think I was just caught up in lots of things that were happening in society that made me angry and a little bit devoid of hope in the system that we’re intertwined with—whether it be politically, but also slightly culturally and socially. I wanted to write a song that felt would be like an anthem for the misfits.” **Beautiful Way** JF: “With the ‘We’re fucked up in a beautiful way’ line, I wanted that feeling where people would turn round to each other at our live shows and scream the lyric in each other’s face because it felt like it was their mantra. I think that’s a really powerful thing when people accept who they are and what they are. This song is a celebration of that.” MH: “The minute Josh came up with the tagline, it was such a statement, but the music wasn’t matching the lyric. It just felt ploddy. We needed to pick up the tempo. I was going back to when I was younger, watching all my friends go to \[London club\] Fabric and come back being drum ’n’ bass heads. I was like, ‘We need to channel that old-school sound, The Prodigy, Pendulum. Bring in that absolute beat where you can bop to and it can be a driving tune.’ The minute we started doing that, there was a groove, there was swag. It had movement but it also had pace and energy that kind of felt anxious, and you felt on edge.” **WYDRN** JF: “It’s an acronym for ‘What you doing right now?’ I was trying to get down with the kids, man. It doesn’t feel like a You Me At Six song that you’ve heard before. It was trying to emulate the stuff that we really enjoy listening to—J. Cole, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar. I remember turning to \[producer\] Dan Austin and saying, ‘Don’t you dare flood this song with guitars.’” MH: “I knew that was Josh’s angle on this song. Knowing the music that he liked, I approached this song as more, ‘I’m just going to track stuff that’s going to be sample-based, make it not sound like a guitar.’ It was a breath of fresh air to approach a song on this record that wasn’t the same way we normally approach a song.” **SUCKAPUNCH** JF: “We called the album after this track because it felt like it was the song that really embodied the ethos we had of no fear. And also, it feels like it’s a hybrid of so many of the things that we were trying to bring into the record across the board. It was the perfect mishmash of it feeling familiar but also foreign at the same time. There is a big You Me At Six rock chorus, but then everything else is very, very, like, ‘Oh, I haven’t heard them do that yet.’” MH: “The words that Josh was putting together for this song felt like the experience of making this record. It managed to articulate the whole entire process of this record, of making this record, but also in our individual lives and what we were going through. And that’s why it resonated with us so much.” **Kill the Mood** JF: “Max does this thing about two years before we eventually go and make a record where he’ll play a riff over and over and over again in sound check, every day in every country around the world, subliminally trying to tell us, ‘This is going to be a song, so you better fucking start liking it.’” MH: “We were in LA on tour and I was saying to Josh, ‘There’s some great studios here, I’d love to go and be productive instead of going shopping or walking about or just waiting to play a gig.’ We hit up our publishing company and they got us in a room with a couple of guys. We walked in and Josh was like, ‘Do you remember that idea that you always used to play in sound check? Let’s do that.’ And then this song just kind of fell out the sky. I think we were in the studio for four hours.” JF: “Even less. It literally felt like we walked in, Max played the idea on the guitar, and then we were like, ‘Okay, we want this to feel like classic rock meets West Coast hip-hop, like Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre. Whatever our interpretation of that is and what that means to us.’” **Glasgow** JF: “We always like to try and have a slow song on the album. And this one sort of presented itself in a way that was quite melancholic but without it being overly sad. I think if you put on a record and every song feels like the track before, you start tuning out. Something that we really spoke about was how can we have a bunch of islands, and approach the songs as their own thing, and then colonize them and make them feel like this overriding You Me At Six product. ‘Glasgow’ slotted in and took the role of the slow song.” MH: “It’s a payoff when you get to that part of the song where it lifts off. You feel a massive release of endorphins. That’s what this song was about to me, the journey. And I think Josh’s lyrics articulate that really well.” **Adrenaline** JF: “This is a song that Matt \[Barnes, bassist\] and Chris \[Miller, guitarist\] had written. We recorded the album in Thailand, and this was the first one we did. It was really exciting, because you’re getting a sense of what it’s going to feel like to record in this space. For me, this is the song on the record that pays a lot of homage to our past work—it feels like a quintessential You Me At Six song, but with a nice flex on it.” **Voicenotes** MH: “I jammed out an idea and a riff and presented it to the guys. I was really inspired by hearing the last Tyler, The Creator record, *IGOR*. I didn’t want it to become a rock song; I want it to have some feel, to embody some of that hip-hop sound and some of that groove.” JF: “The thing that we spoke about quite a lot was how none of us wanted to have things come across too ‘rock,’ we didn’t want it to be like middle-of-the-road rock music. It had to be rock that was tasteful, and that we could move into this new era of rock music, which is something that excites us to be part of.” **Finish What I Started** JF: “This song is fucking weird because we wrote it on tour in Germany when we were touring our record *Night People*. It was originally recorded in 2018 when we were putting together *VI*. I think there was a reluctance on my side to really push this song to get used because I said some pretty dark, deep shit that maybe I don’t want people to hear me say about myself. But we kept on coming back to it, and I think our manager was like, ‘Look, if you don’t use this song on this record, I don’t think it’s ever going to come out.’” MH: “This song feels like you are coming to the end of the record. That’s why it fits so well, because it’s a very exposing song lyrically, but I think there’s a lot of people who will connect with that.” **What’s It Like** JF: “I like the sentiment of leaving the album on a question mark. It hasn’t got a full stop. At the end of the whole thing, it’s like, ‘Well, what’s it like being perfect all the time?’ It signs off this love letter to our former selves in that sense. It’s also a song that does provoke conversation. And it has energy. I think \[that’s\] important as well, to finish on a high.” MH: “It was also the song for me that really did kick-start this writing period for the record. It was the starting chapter, but it’s at the end because the lyrical content sums up the whole entire record. So it’s like *Memento*—you’re finishing the record with something that actually started the record.”
The Hyena Kill's new album A Disconnect is a bleak, intense masterpiece that attempts to find reconciliation of personal trauma and pain, creating a distinctive area where spaciousness can be heavy and contact is always uncomfortable. Steven Dobbs (vocals / guitar) explains: “The bulk of material was written during a very low point in my life, and as a result this album fell into place with a sense of claustrophobia and finality, of being trapped in a hospital bed, linked up to life support, unable to regain your own agency and escape the situation you find yourself in. Of being bound by the traumas of the past that you’re unable to cast away, and ultimately feeling suffocated by them. Wanting to escape and be absolutely anywhere - or anyone - else. These are lyrics that deal with and focus on uncomfortable subjects that were dominating my life at the time of writing. The words and movements in this record are mostly without resolution. There are no happy endings or moments of clarity.” The result is an album that presents a dichotomy of softness/harshness with an earnestness that never relents over the course of ten tracks, but becomes transformative with repeated listens. Brimming with emotion and at times ethereal wonder, Dobbs’ vocals are extraordinarily impassioned and present whilst Lorna Blundell’s drums offer relentless dexterity with a wild, dirty earthiness. With each track comes the chance of an emotive journey to the extremes of existence, there’s a real push-pull between each musical element as Sam Jones’ razor riffs explode like fireworks, flooding the room with light whilst Charlie Seisay’s driving bass underpins each vast soundscape. Elements of Deftones, Nirvana and Chelsea Wolfe combine on a dynamic LP that that terrifies, haunts and inspires all at once, a key element of why THE HYENA KILL continue to sound exciting and alive. With the release of A Disconnect the band are positioned to take a journey into unfamiliar territory and are as emotional as they’ve ever sounded. Opening up their inner world of proximity and intimacy THE HYENA KILL’s personal scars are fully on display, ready to drag listeners down into their turmoil and testament to the fact that they kept on going, even when it started to hurt. This is an album to truly sink into and once you attune to its escapism and caustic brutality, everything about it is wondrous.
Soon after completing their biggest-ever tour in early 2020, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes (Carter and bandmate Dean Richardson) sought to capitalize on the jubilation and went off to Thorpe Forest in Norfolk to begin writing a new record. “Within two weeks of that session, the whole world had started shutting down and it was just chaos,” Carter tells Apple Music. From there, the duo decamped to locked-down London and got to work on their fourth album. Titled *Sticky*, it’s a record that pairs the feeling of triumph from the UK Top 5 success of their third album, 2019’s *End of Suffering*, with a punky defiance, offering up snapshots of pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, and mid-pandemic Britain in the form of anthemic, rattling rock. “I was constantly writing about energy and everything that was lost,” says Carter. “I always wanted it to be more of a celebratory album rather than a lockdown album. That was the most fun part: figuring out what I wanted to talk about that I was really fucking excited about getting back in my life—essentially all the ways that you can get sticky.” Making a record while the world was at a standstill had an effect in other ways. It’s Carter and Richardson’s most collaborative effort, featuring guest appearances from Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, IDLES’ Joe Talbot, experimental pop artist Lynks, and Essex rocker Cassyette. “We saw the opportunity to be like, ‘If we call people now, they won’t be on tour, they’re at home,’” says Richardson. “I produced the record, so we had the ability to stay late and get someone down. We had no restrictions.” Let the duo take you through the world of *Sticky*, track by track. **“Sticky”** Frank Carter: “This is about me doing this slow transition from the countryside to Hoxton, London, in the middle of a pandemic. Moving further away from my family but closer to my work—and moving into the belly of the beast at a time when there was no one else around. The song takes a pretty brutal look at who I was when everything was taken away from me, just kicking around with too much time on my hands, up to no good at three in the morning with all the other fucking foxes. If you’re going to put that anywhere on the record, you might as well put it at the front.” **“Cupid’s Arrow”** FC: “This is about falling in love with someone a little bit quicker than they fall in love with you—and by that, I mean they never do. We\'ve all had those weird dating app dates where you find yourself at one in the morning having a panic attack in someone’s bed, like, ‘Have you got any CBD or anything?’ It’s about how emotions are thoughts and feelings but they can feel so physical.” Dean Richardson: “This is one of the ones that came from the early cabin sessions. When we made it, we were like, ‘This is what this record should sound like.’ It got us really excited.” **“Bang Bang” (feat. Lynks)** FC: “It’s about how class A drugs just have such a tremendous effect on your life in good and bad ways. I was writing it from the perspective of this office worker who’s just biding his time, gets to Thursday and he’s already tipping a bit, and by Friday at 8 pm, he’s already off the rails, and then 8 am Monday morning, he’s still off the rails, but he’s back in the office. Lynks just got it. His lyrics are some of my favorite on the album, and that is incredibly frustrating.” **“Take It to the Brink”** DR: “This one technically predates the album. We’d written this wild psychedelic version of the verse, and took a second dive at it when we were in the midst of everything and got it to feel like it fits in the world of *Sticky*.” FC: “The song is about doing too much all the time and how if there’s one thing you’re consistently good at, it’s pushing it over the edge—and that’s us all the time.” **“My Town” (feat. Joe Talbot)** FC: “I was trying to find a decent analogy for the collective mental health of not just London, but all the smaller towns that I was nipping to and from during the pandemic to see family or pick up my daughter. Without life, you could really start seeing those places fall apart, and that was a good reflection of how everybody in those towns was feeling. I reached out to Joe Talbot because I really needed someone to help me push it.” **“Go Get a Tattoo” (feat. Lynks)** DR: “We always have one every record and it’s always the main single. For whatever reason, we are gluttons for punishment and we fight against it, but it finds its way on.” FC: “The resistance is because we just know: We can hear that it’s probably the closest we’ll get to a hit, that’s got all the right things in the right place. Francis Bacon used to dismantle and destroy his most perfect paintings. Set it on fire and throw it in a bin.” **“Off With His Head” (feat. Cassyette)** FC: “It’s about the patriarchal chokehold on the world and how brutal it is to watch in yourself. It’s so ingrained in me and I’m having to do quite a lot of work to undo it all the time and there are times where I completely fail and it is really frustrating. So naturally I was like, ‘We’ve got to do it with a really strong female vocal, or at least someone that is actively trying to chop up the patriarchy every day.’ Cassyette is walking, talking rock ’n’ roll. She’s got the greatest voice, the greatest look. She just embodies it. She rocked up at 9 am, smoked a fag, and just went in and started howling. She nailed it and I hadn’t even had my breakfast.” **“Cobra Queen”** FC: “This kind of goes hand in hand with ‘Cupid’s Arrow.’ It’s about when you’re chasing down this unrequited love and falling in love with the wrong people. You never know when that’s happening until it’s happened. It’s about the intoxication, it’s like a cobra being in the room. It’s beautiful. It’s fucking deadly, but you just don’t take your eyes off it.” **“Rat Race”** FC: “‘Rat Race’ is about the first year of lockdown and how savage and *Groundhog Day* it was for everybody. The pandemic was an equalizer for most humans. When we get to the end of the pandemic, it’s as if every rat has completed the race and now they’ve got a choice: Do you want to go back in the maze or do you want to go into something else? The sad thing is a lot of people will go back in the maze.” **“Original Sin” (feat. Bobby Gillespie)** FC: “Bobby Gillespie is a fucking living legend. He’s a hero, the ultimate rock star. He’s just pure inspiration. Primal Scream have written some of the best rock ’n’ roll songs ever.” DR: “Whether we mean to or not, we leave our records on this kind of tease of what might come next. If you go through all our records, the last track is always where I think we’ve started moving into our future.”
In March 2020, Beartooth founder Caleb Shomo had almost all the music written for the Ohio metalcore band’s fourth album. But he hadn’t begun writing lyrics when the pandemic triggered lockdowns around the globe. As a result, *Below* took on a very different lyrical tone than it otherwise might have. “This album really is like a timestamp of lockdown in a way,” he tells Apple Music. “It’s about all the stuff that gets buried inside you that you don’t really deal with, but that comes boiling back up due to all the isolation. It’s about slowly losing your mind over time.” To mirror this mindset, Shomo sequenced the songs to gradually get darker as the album progresses. “I tried to reflect my mental state during lockdown,” he says. “As it went on longer and longer, I was breaking down more and more.” Below, he discusses some key tracks from *Below*. **“Devastation”** “I was in a hotel room on a day off on the Motionless in White co-headlining tour, and my buddy gave me this distortion pedal. I had this little recording setup, and I just remember making this guitar sound, and then the next thing I know, the music for the song is written. It really captured everything I was going for—the energy and the speed, but also the big riffs and the breakdown-y stuff. But the lyrics are just incredibly defeating. I wrote them knowing this song was written for the live show, but we had no idea when that was ever going to happen again. So, it’s just me coping with that.” **“The Past Is Dead”** “This was the first complete song I wrote for the album, in November 2019, so it’s been around for a while. It was kind of the discovery of what I wanted to do sonically with the album. I found all the guitar tones, and musically it felt really well-built. It was the catalyst for the rest of the songs. In the video, we have Barry, who is our new mascot dude. He represents all the things that are buried below, all the stuff that came out of lockdown and this whole insane year. He’s very heavily influenced by Iron Maiden’s mascot, Eddie.” **“Fed Up”** “I had a really fun time making that song. I’m a really big Foo Fighters fan, and I like that ’90s, garage-y, just driving-the-whole-time kind of sound. It’s got pretty much one drumbeat throughout the majority of the song. I just wanted it to sound kind of dirty, grungy, too loud, and over the top. Like the majority of the songs, the lyrics came out of one of those days in the middle of lockdown where it’s like, ‘I’m so sick of this, and all I want to do is rock again.’” **“Hell of It”** “This was another very live-centered one. I wrote that on that Motionless in White tour as well—at least all the music. I was probably listening to Motörhead and wanted something with that kind of groove. I just wanted the guitars to kind of growl, so I wrote really simple riffs in the breakdowns and stuff. It’s got a super-basic drumbeat behind it and it’s just a good time, plain and simple.” **“The Last Riff”** “This is my favorite song on the record, and probably my favorite closing track we’ve ever done. It’s the first time Beartooth’s ever done a fully instrumental song. With all the previous records, the final song takes a big shift. It’s usually some sort of super-deep, personal, emotional song that’s all focused on the vocals. But I just wasn’t in the mood for that. I felt so beat down that I didn’t have anything left in the tank, lyrically. So, I just wrote a really long, slow instrumental. And in a weird way, it is an incredibly emotional song. To be able to do that without any lyrics was really cool.”
The title of twenty one pilots’ sixth LP is a play on “scaled back and isolated,” words that summed up frontman Tyler Joseph’s world as he wrote and recorded in his Ohio basement during lockdown. “It just felt very confined,” he tells Apple Music. “I had this little dragon figurine that I kept on my desk during the entirety of the writing process, and I just knew that when you focus on even the tiniest little detail in your room—or wherever you\'re confined—that thing can come to life and fly around your room. That dragon on the cover really represents what can be accomplished with that sort of imagination.” And as has been the case for everyone, the challenges of pandemic living had a noticeable impact on Joseph’s work—but maybe not quite how you’d expect. “I was actively trying to push against that natural inclination to come in darker,” he says. “The idea of adding to the pressure of what\'s going on in our world, it didn\'t feel right.” Instead, *Scaled and Icy* finds Joseph pushing his genre-defying alt-pop into brighter, more hopeful territory. “It felt like I needed to go the opposite direction,” he says. “I wanted to escape a little bit more and provide people with that opportunity to escape too.” Here, Joseph takes us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Good Day”** “I designed it to feel like something was coming to life. If you really listen to the song, it\'s so upbeat and shiny on the surface, and then lyrically I\'m talking about trying to cope with the idea of if I were to ever lose my family and friends. I would probably go through a period in the mourning process where my reaction to anyone asking me how I\'m doing would be like, ‘I\'m fine. Everything\'s great, I don\'t even know why you\'re asking me.’ Making them feel stupid, like, ‘Why would you even ask me that?’ That\'s what this song is.” **“Choker”** “I come from a basketball background, and choking is: You’re standing at the free-throw line and you need to make one of those two, and if you miss them both, you choked. I think for me, with certain friendships and relationships, there were moments that I could have risen to the occasion and I didn\'t, and that\'s something that I\'ll have to live with. I think that everyone has those moments where they feel like they choked. The song is trying to work that through and trying to figure out if that’s someone that I was born to be. Can I shape this? Is this something I can turn around?” **“Shy Away”** “My brother said, ‘Hey, I just want you to show me, from the beginning, how you start a record. How do you start writing a song?’ So I had him over at the studio. A lot of times when I sit down to start, I\'ll tap into my phone and I’ll have a bunch of voice memos of ideas that have hit me randomly. Sometimes it’s just a single word, sometimes it\'s a melody. I started to build up the track from there, and it turned out that it was talking about wanting him to pursue his dream of chasing music. Most of my songs are very inward, but this is one of the few that I feel like the message is outward, coming from me. The only thing harder than figuring out what your purpose and identity is, is watching someone that you love trying to figure out theirs.” **“Saturday”** “When you strip away what day of the week it is, you lose your rhythm. You lose your sense of what is up and what is down. And that\'s a lesson that \[drummer\] Josh \[Dun\] and I learned pretty quickly on tour, because a Friday night and a Monday night could feel the exact same, whether or not we had a show. When the pandemic happened, everything\'s shut down, everyone was starting to learn that same lesson, where the days of the week lose their meaning, and it was messing with people\'s reference of time. You feel like you\'re swirling and your feet aren\'t planted. The song is really, I\'m talking to my wife, hoping that she sticks with me, even though I\'m working through this, even though I\'m kind of tumbling into nothingness.” **“No Chances”** “I recruited my brother and a few of his friends to come over and record gang vocals. You have this microphone in the middle of the room and I have everyone in headphones and I\'m kind of directing them in what to say and what to yell. That was the first time I\'d ever really produced a room full of people. I was thinking of athletics and college sports specifically, where there\'s overwhelmingly this hometown crowd, and how intimidating that can be and powerful that is in the face of opposition. I definitely was writing from that—I felt the energy of a gymnasium or a stadium and was wanting to capture that.” **“Redecorate”** “I had a friend of mine whose son passed away and they would keep his room the same way that he had left it. I remember thinking how crazy powerful a story that is, and how it makes me wonder, like, ‘What will people do with my stuff?’ It can actually bring you back down to earth, make sure that you don\'t make any horrible decisions. I\'m realizing now how difficult it is to talk about, but this song is really important to me. I love the messaging of it, and I hope that our fans hear what it is I\'m trying to say in it. Because it is a bit delicate, but it\'s one of my favorite tracks and it\'s pretty powerful if you let it.”
Deafheaven’s fifth album might seem like a drastic departure from the blackgaze sound they helped pioneer, but to anyone paying attention, it shouldn’t be. The foundation for *Infinite Granite*’s more traditional song structures, nearly metal-free shoegaze, and clean vocals was laid—or at least hinted strongly at—on the band’s 2018 album *Ordinary Corrupt Human Love*. The lyrics also reveal a new level of poetic nuance from frontman George Clarke, as he weaves a narrative marked both by family history and the time the songs were written in. “*Infinite Granite* was originally centered in my relationship with extended family, but because it was written during various social and environmental anxieties of 2020, more immediate reflections were included,” he tells Apple Music. “Throughout the album there is a double narrative: one that highlights familial issues and one that reflects the current world at large.” Below, he comments on each track that contains vocals. **“Shellstar”** “‘Shellstar’ deals with questioning one’s objective feelings toward emotional situations. That idea is coupled with allusions to California fires and Gulf floods.” **“In Blur”** “A song about futility. A nonbeliever, in the wake of having lost a child, reaches out to God for solace knowing nothing’s there.” **“Great Mass of Color”** “‘Great Mass of Color’ describes insomnia during the early-morning blue hour. The lyrics also reflect thoughts on boyhood—what it means to be a man, looking up to other men for a path and the constrictions and conflicts in that experience.” **“Lament for Wasps”** “A love song filled with direct references to insomnia. Blue represented a warm, safe feeling while making this album. It is also the favorite color of my partner, who I use as a character in this song—someone that represents benevolence. I exemplify this benevolence using wasps, as they\'re an irrational phobia of mine.” **“Villain”** “I thought about my family’s history with alcoholism and abuse, how that past affects future generations and what it means to share blood with cruel and violent people.” **“The Gnashing”** “‘The Gnashing’ looks at new parents, state violence, and an idea of taking care of who takes care of you. Like ‘In Blur,’ this song references losing a child, but focuses on a mother figure instead of a father.” **“Other Language”** “While recording ‘Mombasa,’ we were told a friend of ours had died. We stopped the session and went home. That night he was in my dream. We were in a large passenger van and I was sitting on a bench behind him as he told a story to people around us. I put my arm around the front of his chest, holding him by the shoulder while we laughed. When I woke up, I saw thick smoke from the wildfires had come in through the open windows. I laid until I had to leave for the day’s session, writing most of the lyrics in bed.” **“Mombasa”** “My grandfather lived with me for a few years while I helped take care of him. When it became too difficult, my father and I worked to get him into an assisted care hospital. He would speak about how he’d become a burden. He would apologize for having not died. This song is about the kindness and freedom of death, one in which an afterlife reveals itself to be aloneness in cosmic love.”
“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”