Since completing their farewell tour in 2012, Southern Ontario post-hardcore heroes Alexisonfire have done a pretty terrible job of staying apart. Even as its members committed themselves to other bands—singer/guitarist Dallas Green with City and Colour, resident screamer George Pettit with Dead Tired, guitarist/vocalist Wade MacNeil with Gallows, drummer Jordan Hastings with Billy Talent—the everlasting power of what they created as Alexisonfire kept pulling them back together. Festival reunion dates in 2015 had, by decade’s end, given way to a string of stand-alone singles. Still, the prospect of a new full-length Alexisonfire album—following 2009’s *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*—was never a sure thing. That is, until COVID shutdowns presented them with a rare opportunity to make music without deadline pressures or looming tour dates. “This was just a bunch of guys getting back together and just creating for the sake of it,” Pettit tells Apple Music. “We\'re all very different people than when we wrote *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*, but I think that benefited us in a lot of ways, because there\'s been 10 years of us consuming different music and being inspired by different things.” Arriving 20 years after their self-titled debut album, *Otherness* reintroduces a band that’s lost none of its intensity, and shortens the aesthetic distance between Alexisonfire’s circle-pit strikes and the graceful balladry of City and Colour. And that’s not just Green’s doing—for the first time, Pettit eases up on the throat-shredding to actually sing a handful of verses and harmonize with his bandmates. “This album came to us without a lot of struggles,” Pettit says proudly. “On *Otherness*, we\'re all pulling in the same direction.” Here, Pettit gives us the track-by-track rundown of Alexisonfire’s new beginning. **“Commited to the Con”** “The con is conservatism. It\'s this notion that if we dismantle government for the sake of giving tax breaks or funneling money into billionaires’ pockets without regulation, that\'s somehow going to deliver us to some new utopia of freedom. That\'s just horseshit, and a lot of people are buying it. There are people out there that are committed to this con, this thing with no working models in the world. But when we band together, our tax dollars can prop up the cornerstone of civilized society—they pay for hospitals and schools and emergency services and infrastructure. So when we ask, ‘Which side are you on?’ it\'s like: Are you on the side of working together as people to make things better for everyone, or are you on the side of every-man-for-himself libertarian hypothetical nonsense?” **“Sweet Dreams of Otherness”** “The idea of \'otherness\' can be interpreted in any sort of way. The way that it applies to Alexisonfire is that we were all kids who grew up trying to find the secret corners of culture. I grew up in Southern Ontario, a third-generation Canadian with no ties to any sort of real culture from my ancestry. So you have to make it yourself and figure out the things that you want to represent your generation. And the things that were being presented to us through major media didn\'t appeal to us—we had to go and find those weird spaces. It could have been a CAW \[Canadian Auto Workers\] union hall where there was a punk show happening, or an independent record store, or the indie cinema that was coming out at the time. So the song is kind of about that, but it also has all sorts of implications for people who are nonbinary, or people who are LGBTQ. It\'s about finding strength in the fact that you\'re very different.” **“Sans Soleil”** “I\'m kind of a key component to Alexisonfire with all my screaming, but there have been times where we\'ve shoehorned that into songs just to kind of keep me in the band. But this is a beautiful song, and there\'d be no point in trying to have me scream for the purposes of keeping that in. So I took a back seat—I was just doing backup vocals with Dallas on this one. It\'s the type of song that we might not have put on one of our earlier records, but we felt like it was an Alexis song, for sure.” **“Conditional Love”** “This is about love as a choice, as opposed to it being some uncontrollable thing. And in some ways, that, to me, is better: the idea of being an active participant in my love and not have it be something that I\'m being dragged around by. That\'s the sentiment of the lyrics—but they just kind of fell into this ripper kind of rock song.” **“Blue Spade”** “\[Bassist\] Chris Steele started contributing lyrics on this record. Chris is a very remarkable individual who has been through a considerable amount, so having his perspective on a song felt right. Dallas took a section of his lyrics and found a way to turn it into a chorus. We have demos of the song where I’m screaming the verses, but when we got into the studio, I thought, \'I\'m gonna attempt to sing this.\' I\'m not quite confident in my ability as a singer, so I was like, \'Is this good?\' And then Wade walked in the room and was like, \'That\'s it! That\'s what this song needs.\' We had a really intense moment where we were just like, \'Okay, well, now there\'s nothing that we can\'t do!\' It just felt like we had unlocked a new gear within the band and found a new way to inject me into a song.” **“Dark Night of the Soul”** “The lyrical content is about Wade having a psychedelic experience on DMT, and the song matches the lyrics. We were really expanding this song, and there\'s that moment in the bridge—where it goes to that shuffle beat—and I thought, \'Let\'s do something jazzy here.\' We found a way to really make that song unique—it goes full Goblin. There were grand designs at one point to approach the remaining members of Rush to do like a 15-minute bridge for the song.” **“Mistaken Information”** “Dallas is the best singer that I\'ve ever known, so it was nice to actually sing \[harmonies\] on a track with him. After I was done recording my vocals for this, I was almost sad, because I was enjoying it so much. I think this song was actually in play for City and Colour’s new record, but Dallas was discussing it with his wife, and she was like, \'I feel like this is an Alexisonfire song.\' It\'s about the war on the truth, and how it\'s hard to understand what the truth is now because there\'s so much misinformation out there. But when we were recording it, I remember Dallas saying, \'Are people just going to think this is a breakup song?\' And I said, \'If they interpret it that way, it\'s valid.’ I feel like it works that way as well.” **“Survivor’s Guilt”** “I work in emergency services, and this song is naming a phenomenon that I see, where you see something horrible and then you go about the rest of your day like nothing happened. You have the ability to kind of detach, and it\'s not a particularly heroic quality, but it is, in some ways, a very necessary quality. I\'m not sure that necessarily comes through in the lyrics—I purposely tried to make it a bit more open for interpretation, but that\'s where the ‘survivor’s guilt’ sentiment came from.” **“Reverse the Curse”** \"We had a version of this \[for *Old Crows / Young Cardinals*\] that was extremely Kyuss-heavy, and at the time, we were uncomfortable with that—we felt like we were doing something that wasn\'t us. As a group of people who have great respect for the stoner-rock world, we didn’t want to disrespect it. It\'s the same reason why I would never make a reggae album, even though I love Jamaican music. But now, in the \'Dark Night of the Soul\' era of Alexisonfire, things are a little more open and we can kind of do whatever we feel like now. \[City and Colour touring member\] Matt Kelly got to play Hammond on it, and that really leveled the song up in a way that we hadn\'t been anticipating.” **“World Stops Turning”** “This is a love song Dallas wrote about his band, Alexisonfire. We had the most beautiful moment where he brought us up to his cottage and we sat at his dining room table and for three hours, we just talked, and discussed the history of the band. He let us in on things that had been going on in his life, and it was just a very introspective moment for all of us. And at the end of it, he presented us with a demo he\'d been working on of this song, and we just knew that this is going to be the new set-closer. We’ve always ended our set with \[2004\'s\] \'Happiness by the Kilowatt,\' and we turn it into this 12-minute version. And this song felt like the new version of that—we\'re gonna have this big sprawling epic, and I could envision it just blowing everyone’s hair back. It\'s a perfect album-ender—we went full Floyd on this one.”
After the release of PUP’s 2019 album, *Morbid Stuff*, vocalist and guitarist Stefan Babcock began to consider whether they should push and open up their sound without fundamentally altering it. “The line we’re always trying to straddle is, ‘How can we do something a bit weird without totally alienating our fans?’” Babcock tells Apple Music. “The goal with the guy who made the first three records, Dave Schiffman, was always like, ‘Here are the songs. Let’s try to make it sound like we’re literally playing the best live show we’ve ever played.’ We love what he brought to the table, but with this one, we wanted to push it and see what would happen if we had more time in the studio.” The Toronto punks stationed themselves for five weeks at producer/engineer Peter Katis’ residential Tarquin Studios in Connecticut to record their fourth full-length, *THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND*. Katis—whose credits include working with The National, Japandroids, and Interpol—distills the band’s essence with a little more kick. “It was a natural and unnatural fit at the same time,” Babcock says. “I think he was put in a position that he’s not used to—it was just a new challenge for him and that was an unnatural part, and the natural part was that we all think about music in the same way and appreciate the same types of qualities in music.” Here, Babcock guides us through songs from the album. **“Four Chords”** “It’s funny because there’s never been any piano on any PUP record, or keys or synthesizers of any kind, and we started this record with the stupidest piano ballad of all time. In one sense, it’s so un-PUP to have a piano ballad, but in another sense, it’s incredibly PUP to do something that dumb to start a record. I wrote the song as a joke after I bought a piano during the pandemic. I sent it to my bandmates, and we never talked about it again after. The last week in the studio, Nestor \[Chumak, PUP bassist/keyboardist\] was like, ‘You should record it and that should start the record.’ I slept on it, and the more that I thought about it, the more I thought he was really onto something. As soon as we embraced this idea that this was going to be the first song, the whole record started to make sense to me. It became more than just a collection of songs. I could almost see the forest for the trees.” **“Totally Fine”** “After ‘Four Chords,’ we had to go into a song that was very quintessentially PUP. It’s the same mentality we had on the second record when we started with a song called ‘If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will,’ which is a slow, mellow song, and then it goes into the most high-energy song on the record. So, there’s a little bit of not trying to recreate that, but a little bit of taking the elements that we liked—that dynamic between quiet and really ruckus—and shoving them together to start a record.” **“Robot Writes a Love Song”** “It’s a weird song for me because the vast majority of PUP songs are written from my first-person perspective. ‘Robot’ is not, but I was legitimately trying to see if I could write a really heartfelt love song, and it being just earnest, without any humor in it. So, this love song that I was trying to write, it just felt so yucky. It was so contrived, and it felt very not me and not PUP. When I decided to try and change the perspective, it worked so well. Suddenly, all of these things that I was saying, that I felt were so cheesy, were a little bit humorous and had more weight and impact to them. Hiding behind humor, for me, is a little bit of a crutch that I use, but I think that song turned out better because I was willing to take it to a place that wasn’t just entirely serious and super emotionally draining.” **“Matilda”** “This song is me trying to figure out why there’s such a strong emotional connection to an object, or what is it that ties you to this object? And usually, for me, it’s a very specific time in my life. On the first record, I wrote a song about my car, which I was very emotionally attached to. I did so much growing up in that car. I drove it across the country and I kissed a girl for the first time—all of these memories. So, this one is about my guitar, Matilda, and it’s the same sort of thing: Why am I so attached to this guitar? And it’s because it’s so connected to a time in my life that was so emotionally turbulent and also kind of wonderful. The first time that we ever went on tour, and we were trying to be a real band, everything was really new and exciting and weird. We were broke and loving it. That time in my life was almost like what I feel falling in love the first time, when everything is more vibrant. You feel every emotion so much harder than you normally would.” **“Relentless”** “Sarah \[Tudzin\], from the band illuminati hotties, sings on the chorus and in the bridge, and she’s awesome. There’s two sides to what I’m talking about here: One is trying to get ahead, being ambitious, pushing forward and trying to fight off the dread that comes with that, and the other side is this dread that you keep trying to get ahead of in life. I just feel like there’s always a demon over my shoulder and that’s how the world feels too. It’s so overwhelming; there’s no time or emotional or mental energy to look backwards or to look forward. You’re just dealing with what’s in front of you, and that’s a tough place for our world to be in.” **“Waiting”** “I asked Nestor to send me this running document of guitar riffs that he has. He sent me these five pretty heavy riffs, and from that we used one on ‘Waiting’ that I really love. I thought the best way to make it feel like a PUP song, rather than a metal song or a hardcore song, was the simplest, most uplifting chorus that I could write onto the really heavy guitar riff, and it worked in a very PUP way. There’s always this contrast in our music, the lyrics versus the actual music. If the lyrics are really serious, we try to make the music sound pretty fun and vice versa. I think we found that combination of heavy and joy that we’re always kind of looking for.” **“Habits”** “When I originally wrote the song, it was just guitar and voice, and it felt like a good PUP song. It wasn’t going to change the game for us, but we were like, ‘Yes, this sounds like us and it’s cool and it’s fun.’ But we kind of put it aside, and then one day Zack \[Mykula, PUP drummer\] came in and was like, ‘Hey, I made this thing for “Habits.” It’s kind of out there, but maybe it works.’ He was the one who crafted that synthy intro, which we also sprinkled elements of that throughout. I think we all really gravitated to what he did. For me, it took a song that we all liked and thought was pretty standard, but not in a bad way, into a new territory for us that made it so much more exciting.” **“Cutting Off the Corners”** “With most PUP songs—even when I’m writing the real dark and serious things—I’m always trying to find that little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, some silver lining or just some cathartic joy, and I very purposely avoided that as a crutch on this song. I don’t know how deep I want to get into it, but I wrote it three days after I lost an old friend. So, that was a song that poured out at me all at once, and it was very emotionally charged. We talked about adding some joy, some energy, some good vibes, and that felt like a disservice to what the song was about. So, it’s a strange one. That song is on the album for me and for her, and I just wanted to make something for them that didn\'t hide behind the humor.” **“Grim Reaping”** “I wouldn’t say we’re a traditionally political band, but the four of us all have very strong political convictions that we express in other ways—whether it’s through our social media or at live shows. It makes up for the fact that we don’t really talk politics too much in our songs, and the reason that we don’t is because I really struggle with making it sound genuine without it sounding super contrived. Like, ‘Fuck the man.’ I feel like every time I’ve tried to write those songs, I sound like a bad impersonation of OFF! or Bad Religion. I was trying to write about the state of the world but through a really personal lens, trying to express how myself and the band have been coping with those challenges. I’m pretty good at speaking eloquently about my emotions and less eloquently about other things, so I try to bring it into my universe.” **“PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing for Bankruptcy”** “This is truly an example of the unraveling of PUP, the band. This song is just so true to who we are as humans in terms of the lyrics, but also the way the music is arranged. It’s our version of being truly self-indulgent. If we were a prog-rock band, this would be our 14-minute epic. Also, part of the decisions that were made—the saxophone solo and then right after where there’s a room recording of me playing through the shitty PA that we found—came about because this was the last song that we recorded for the record. If it were during week one, we would’ve said, ‘No, that’s stupid. Let’s stay focused.’ And at that point, we’d been in the studio—where we were also living and sharing the same space together—for five weeks and were starting to get a little bit crazy. We were like, ‘That’s a great idea. What other stupid shit can we do?’”
All Songs by PUP Produced by Peter Katis and PUP Recorded by Peter Katis and Greg Giorgio Additional recording by Nestor Chumak and Kurt Leon Assistant engineers: Erik Paulson, Jake Gray Mixed by Peter Katis at Tarquin Studios Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound Additional keyboards by Thomas Bartlett and Peter Katis Additional Vocals by Sarah Tudzin (“Relentless”), Melanie Gail St-Pierre (“Totally Fine”), Kathryn Mccaughey (“Waiting”), and Erik Paulson (“Cutting Off The Corners” and “Grim Reaping”) Trumpet on “Four Chords” and “Grim Reaping” by Marie Goudy Trombone on “Grim Reaping” by Paul Tarussov Saxophone on “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy” by Colin Fisher PUP is: Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski
Contemplation and self-awareness run throughout Celebrity Therapist. “The whole album is about history repeating itself and how we kind of move in circles. It’s two steps forward and three steps back with a bunch of people in my life. The album is me reflecting on these people but realizing I’m guilty of the same at the end of the record. There are a lot of ‘fuck you’ songs because every heavy band likes writing those. But overall, the lyrics are more introspective and quite loving.” The Callous Daoboys come from the school of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die, and The Chariot, with a heightened degree of theatricality as one of the methods to their madness. Think Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy getting slapped around good-naturedly by Glassjaw. Celebrity Therapist even indulges in a bit of drone and avant-garde post-rock a la Sigor Rós and Radiohead.
In blending black metal with African American spirituals on Zeal & Ardor’s 2016 debut *Devil Is Fine*, Swiss American artist Manuel Gagneux broke new musical ground. On his third album, he takes an industrial detour with lead single “Run,” which channels Ministry and early Nine Inch Nails, and “Götterdämmerung,” which he sings in German. Elsewhere, “Bow” plunges gospel chants into an electronic dirge, while “Golden Liar” sets soulful melodies and spoken word to a dark country twang. “It’s fun messing around with sounds and seeing what sticks to the wall,” he tells Apple Music. “That’s how I approach music—I’m just playing with different elements for the gits and shiggles of it. And then sometimes it turns out sounding good.” Below, he discusses each track on his self-titled album. **“Zeal & Ardor”** “We decided early on that our sound is basically just our atmosphere, and within that realm we can do whatever we want genre-wise. So it was pretty important to set the tone, to establish that atmosphere thoroughly. I think this summarizes the intent. It starts with a broody synthesizer and then one element after the other comes in. By the end, you should be in the Zeal & Ardor world.” **“Run”** “We wanted the have the first proper song on the record be kind of relentless. That’s also why we put it out as the first single. This is a nonstop aggressive song, and we’ve never really done anything in this manner. It felt like a good way to be off to the races.” **“Death to the Holy”** “I really like this track because it kind of summarizes what we’re all about in just three minutes. You have the bluesy stuff, some piano in there, and then that groove goes directly into this almost metalcore-type breakdown part with evil synthesizers. It’s the most Zeal & Ardor song on the record. It has the elements people kind of expect from us, so we wanted to get that out of the way early on so the record can get weird later.” **“Emersion”** “This starts off with a really relaxed kind of hip-hop beat. We always play with contrast, so to have the heavy part sound heavy, you have to precede it with a really mellow soft part. And I think this is the most extreme in that regard, because it starts super low-key and kind of dreamy—and then out of nowhere, this wall of black metal comes in. We also put some flavors of post-rock in there, some hopeful melodies, just to offset the abrasive contrast.” **“Golden Liar”** “I was looking into ways to make the atmosphere a bit thicker, and of course a master of atmosphere is Ennio Morricone. So I liberated some elements of his music—I stole them. I did it to have this kind of slow-burn song, and I think it’s one of the longer ones. I really like this track because it conveys heaviness without being really heavy in the instrument department.” **“Erase”** “This is one of the more proggy ones. I only noticed this after the fact, but all of the songs are rather simple when it comes to how many parts they have. But this one is an outlier in that regard, and there’s also a lot of modal changes. I think we started in D, and it goes to a different key in a way that you don’t really notice. But if you skip from the beginning to the end of the song, we have the same guitar lick in a different key. It’s like a teleportation for the listener without them noticing, like a little magic trick.” **“Bow”** “My influences are really showing here, because I listen to a lot of industrial and electronic stuff like Woodkid. I just wanted to explore different kinds of heaviness, which is not just double-bass drums and guitars but sounds that are awe-inspiring. So there’s a distorted horn section in there which I came up with, and not Woodkid or Hans Zimmer. That was totally me by myself. I just wanted the most grandiose sound.” **“Feed the Machine”** “Funny story about this one. I do demos on my computer, and I program the drums for those. When I showed it to our drummer Marco, he was like, ‘That’s too fast, man. I can’t play that.’ So this song would’ve been even faster were it not for that. But the whole gag of this song is that there’s a really harsh, Ministry-esque part which sounds like a machine pumping away—which is where the title came from, I’m afraid.” **“I Caught You”** “We’re kind of the outliers in this whole black metal thing, because people think we’re phonies or whatever because we do different stuff. And the biggest sin you could commit in black metal is to have nu-metal influences. So that’s what we did with this song. We even slowed down the speed of the song just for those sequences so they would sound as Deftones-y as possible. So that’s a fun one. I can’t wait to play it live.” **“Church Burns”** “The intent with this was to have the most potentially controversial lyrics of the album be in the most poppy or pop-adjacent song we have. And seeing how this was on the front page of Apple Music recently, I think we kinda made that happen. I’m actually in disbelief that it worked that way, because in itself it’s just a pop verse, and then the breakdown, if you wanna call it that, is kinda ZZ Top-ish honky-tonk. I was kind of worried about that, because it’s so un-metal, so I was relieved that people ended up liking it.” **“Götterdämmerung”** “This is the title of a movement in a Wagner opera, and Wagner was heavily used by not-so-great people in the ’30s and ’40s in Germany. So I wanted to reappropriate and reclaim Wagner, even though he himself was a huge dick, too—but dude wrote brilliant music. And here’s how idiotic I am: I was really worried about the German lyrics, like can people even emote to this? I was totally blanking on the fact that Rammstein is a huge thing at this point. So, duh. But German just sounds metal, and it’s a fun language to scream in.” **“Hold Your Head Low”** “This is an older song that wasn’t written for this album specifically, but it kind of fit in. I think this is us at our bluesiest, and it’s also kind of a slow burner. Here’s where my Opeth influences show in guitar writing. When we were on tour with them last December, I elected not to play it because I was afraid Mikael \[Åkerfeldt\] would say, ‘You fucking ripoff!’ But we put it on the album because it feels like a little breather after all that harsh abrasiveness.” **“J-M-B”** “I tried to put some jazz chords to metal, which I thought was kind of an idiotic endeavor at first, but when I presented the songs in the studio, we felt we should put it on the record. It almost became like a secret hidden track, which is impossible to do these days. But since I write all these demos alone, I give them all these little project names. This one was ‘Jazz Metal Blues,’ but you can’t put that on the record sleeve, so: ‘J-M-B.’” **“A-H-I-L”** “This is more somber. The title stands for ‘All Hope Is Lost.’ In black metal, the atmosphere is basically everything, and it’s like that hopeless, drab rainy day in Norway, like ‘my father just got killed by a pack of wolves’ kind of vibe. I just wanted to try and emulate that with synthesizers, as far removed from actual black metal as possible. It felt like an appropriate outro after ‘J-M-B.’ This is back to serious business and it’s time to go to bed.”
“We live in a bleak spot,” Architects vocalist Sam Carter tells Apple Music. “We’re in a world where basically 90% of news is bad news. We are surrounded by it, where it is all-encompassing and it can eat away at your fucking soul. And I think this record is really trying to get that across and explore that level of where we\'re at—and we\'re just fucked, really,” he says of the British quintet’s 10th album. Sonically daring and seething with discontent, *the classic symptoms of a broken spirit* is a compulsively engaging dissident in Architect’s 16-year pilgrimage from progressive metalcore to the most abrasive of electrified alt-rock. “We’re not the band we were on our first record, but if you listened to the last record, it’s a logical progression,” Carter says. “We were talking so much about change and how important it is that we all need to start doing more and looking around. We’ve always discussed these elements. This is the first time we’ve shown the reality of that—which is that it can be really exhausting to feel and be open and awake.” Here, Carter talks through the themes and ideas behind each track on the album. **“deep fake”** “It’s leading on from ‘Animals,’ one of the last songs we wrote on \[2021 album\] *For Those That Wish to Exist*. It’s definitely leaning into this industrial world that we wanted to take the record. Like, we’re not going to use strings. We\'re going to make sure that everything is led by these synths and led by these weird things that we were doing in the studio. This really shows where it\'s going to go. It was also really fun to have a breakdown like this and show that we’re still a heavy band.” **“tear gas”** “This song really epitomizes the story of the record. The state of the world is just fucking insane. It\'s absolutely insane. And it\'s almost like now, especially this year, the powers that be can do and say whatever they want and it just happens. It\'s almost like they\'re not even trying to hide some of the insane things that they do, especially in the UK: We are fucked. So this record and in particular this song is a real kind of ‘You\'re not alone in your frustrations and your anger, and we are here to be your soundtrack for that.’” **“spit the bone”** “We had it all. It was so simple. Then we just kept evolving and then super-evolving and then everything became about convenience. So there has to be 500,000 cars driving stuff around and planes dropping stuff off and everyone has to have the exact meal that they want, ready to go. And now we\'re just cannibalizing each other to get what we want and standing on people in less privileged positions: The amount of greenhouse gas that we are putting out into the fucking world in the West is destroying lesser economies with fucking tidal waves and fucking climate change.” **“burn down my house”** “Me and Dan \[Searle, drummer\] have always been very vocal about our struggles with mental health, especially since Tom \[Searle, former guitarist\] passed. I think it\'s important to discuss it onstage, so it was important to have a song that showed off that side of where anyone can be at; to really humanize it. I always want to reach out about it, especially when I\'m talking to crowds. I’d rather upset somebody and ask if they\'re okay than have them not be here tomorrow. I\'ve lost a few friends to suicide and it\'s fucking difficult and it\'s really fucking hard.” **“living is killing us”** “This song feels like a rave to me; really loud and live. It was important coming off the back of ‘burn down my house’ to pick things up again. I love the production on this song. It is massive. It\'s really in your face. And I love how much the verses drop out and it’s almost like you\'re in a club or something or in a rave and you just go into a different room. The verses are you literally walking into another room and being like, ‘Fucking hell, it\'s intense out there.’ Then you go back in for the chorus and you’re like, ‘Oh Jesus.’” **“when we were young”** “This one came later on in the record when we were all in the studio together. It just seemed to happen. I\'d spoken to Josh \[Middleton, guitarist\] about how I thought the record could have benefitted from a really full-on song. I just gave him a real rough idea. The next day he turned up to the studio and demoed what he’d come up with while we were having breakfast. It has its place on this record because we still put a lot of layers in there, bringing in the synths and the sub-bass and really filling it out.” **“doomscrolling”** “The feeds that we see on our phones are decided by what we engage with the most. And I think the things that we\'re always going to engage with the most are shocking news stories. They’re the first thing you see when you wake up. They’re the last thing you see when you go to bed, and it\'s like, ‘Oh my fucking god. This is real life, this is fucking horrible, this is fucking terrifying.’ It\'s so easy to just get lost for an hour or so in just that. It’s a reminder to put your phone down.” **“born again pessimist”** “I think it\'s probably inspired by all of us a little bit. It\'s really rocky and gives me a sort of Oasis vibe in the chorus, which is obviously a band that we’ve all listened to a lot for our entire lives because we\'re from England. I love the breakdown. Dan\'s drums are really good and the verses have got so much energy. I think that was the thing that we really wanted to get across with this song.” **“a new moral low ground”** “This is my favorite. It\'s a really, really cool song that showcases so much of where the band is now. The chorus gives me a kind of Jimmy Eat World sort of party vibe in a weird sense. By the time the vocals count to three, you\'re like, ‘Oh fuck, where\'s this four, five, and six going to go?’ That middle bit is so stonery. It sounds really clubby and then it almost drops into this Pink Floyd moment. I think it\'ll be one that will be in the set for a long time. It also has the first guitar solo we\'ve ever had on a record.” **“all the love in the world”** “We worked with Choir Noir on this one. They\'d done the last record as well, and were also on ‘tear gas.’ I think they really added to the drama here, too. It\'s a really cool, big-sounding rock song. My memories of making this are fun as well, because there\'s a beat that goes on underneath everything. It’s made up of someone slamming the dishwasher, someone hitting a fire extinguisher, someone stamping on the floor. We edge it all together to make this weird beat.” **“be very afraid”** “It’s the only time on the record where you really get to hear that sort of low, growly-type vocal. This song is relentless the whole way through. We pushed ourselves to the extreme here. It’s kind of like a ‘fuck you.’ We can still do this. We are never going to lose this side of our band. It\'s what\'s important to us. That said, The Beatles are one of my favorite bands and I always loved the way that they managed to finish records—hence the birdsong, which I recorded on my phone in Devonshire.”
When Cave In released their 2019 album, *Final Transmission*, many thought it might be just that. The band’s beloved friend and bassist, Caleb Scofield, had passed suddenly during the recording’s early stages, and it seemed—understandably—that heartbreak might prevent them from carrying on. Instead, vocalist/guitarist Steve Brodsky, drummer J.R. Conners, and guitarist/vocalist Adam McGrath enlisted their old friend and Converge/Old Man Gloom/Doomriders member Nate Newton to help them play benefit shows for Scofield’s family. In doing so, they breathed new life into Cave In and soon wrote an album that combines the band’s killer metallic hardcore and breathtaking space-rock eras with new and exciting musical forays. The result is *Heavy Pendulum*, Cave In’s first album recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou since their 1998 classic, *Until Your Heart Stops*. Below, Brodsky discusses each track. **“New Reality”** “A song about the new reality of Cave In without Caleb on this earthly plane. The verse riff was something he wrote years ago during the *White Silence* days. I always remembered it, and ‘New Reality’ seemed like a good opportunity to give it a home. There’s mention of the Old Man of the Mountain, the face of New Hampshire, \[where Caleb is from\]. Even after its collapse, it’s still part of the state imagery. I thought this was a beautiful way to illustrate how we keep Caleb in our memory.” **“Blood Spiller”** “We’re all fans of Nate‘s band Channel from his pre-Converge days. This one goes there musically—channeling Channel with a member of the band. Lyrically, this relates to the heated political nature of 2020, but it’s not as direct as, for instance, the song ‘Searchers of Hell.’ This song is also a call to action against anyone in your life who throws around their weight in a way that’s disruptive or destructive to your well-being—basically, bullies and assholes who need to be confronted on their bullshit.” **“Floating Skulls”** “Musically, this one had a pretty wild trajectory. It was originally in a different key, different tuning, different time signature, with wildly different lyrics. It took several trial runs before we got into Deep Purple’s *Burn* territory and it finally started to click. Lyrically, this is probably one of the more lighthearted songs on the record. I had a whole concept for a music video using helium balloons printed with skulls attached to headless mannequins...could be a cool stage prop, actually.” **“Heavy Pendulum”** “This is the first song that materialized as a full band demo when writing the album. We demoed it remotely at a time during lockdown when people still didn’t feel comfortable getting together in a room. If AC/DC had jumped on the ’90s grunge bandwagon, they may have pulled this one out of the ether before we got it. Kurt thinks it sounds kinda like ‘Fever Dog,’ which is fine with me because who doesn’t like *Almost Famous*?” **“Pendulambient”** “J.R. took to the song ‘Heavy Pendulum’ so much, he insisted that we make it the title of the record. This Interlude takes the five dominant notes from that song and spins them into a kaleidoscopic foundation created by J.R. in his German synth lab man cave. Most of the overdubs are from the original remote demo recording, either flipped backwards or made into some audio mutation. I think it’s a nice return to the vibe of having segues between songs like we did on the *Until Your Heart Stops* album.” **“Careless Offering”** “I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, which I guess officially makes it a protest song. During the George Floyd protests, I was seeing people with significant reach on social media use these platforms to encourage excess violence, and I felt this was the last thing we needed. Their words were like careless offerings to an already fucked-up situation, just being thrown like raw meat to people for the sole purpose of creating destruction. On a lighter note, one of the bands that Cave In fully embraced as an influence on this album is Into Another, and here it really shows in the whole spacey midsection of the song—that’s totally us worshiping the *Ignaurus* album.” **“Blinded by a Blaze”** “Out of the five or six songs from my initial burst of writing, ‘Blinded by a Blaze’ was the one that got everyone in the band equally hyped. Later on, Nate wrote the heavy, chugging bridge part and Adam came up with the artificial harmonic guitar line that sounds kind of like the music you might hear coming from an ice cream truck on Mars. In just eight lines, I did my best to capture a picture of driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at golden hour several years ago, and what it felt like to share that moment with someone I was in love with at the time.” **“Amaranthine”** “One night at rehearsal, Nate turned on his bass amp and the main parts for this song seemed to just fly out of him. At some point, Caleb’s wife, Jen, gifted us a notebook that belonged to Caleb. It contained lyrics, writings, and drawings that she felt could be of some use to us. Lyrics to a song called ‘Amaranthine’ really stood out, and we didn’t recognize them to be associated with any music that Caleb had written. Combining his lyrics with the first bit of music that Nate ever wrote for the band made a really cool concoction.” **“Searchers of Hell”** “The main riff was inspired by a song from the first *Between or Beyond the Black Forest* compilation, which is a bunch of European off-the-grid jazz-fusion shit recorded in the ’70s. Aside from ‘Amaranthine,’ I think this is the only other song conceived entirely in the full-band stage of making demos for the album. Lyrically, I was inspired by some of the coded language being used by people with power in the world of politics addressing others through the media. The lines ‘You’re dropping a bombshell/You wish each other well’ is a specific example of this. I guess the takeaway here is that we should always question what the media is telling us, but also what the media is selling us.” **“Nightmare Eyes”** “Leading up to the summer of 2019, I was, like most Tool fans, anxious for the release of *Fear Inoculum*. I was so excited for a new album that I literally dreamed I was hearing it one night. I rarely dream about music, so when I woke up, the feeling of this really struck me. I grabbed an acoustic guitar and made a quick recording of the song I heard in my dream, transposed to the best of my ability. It took 10,000 days, but I finally combed through every song on every Tool album, trying to find some likeness to my recording from the night before. Thankfully, I came up empty-handed and realized it was fair game. So, thank you, Tool, for gifting me—in serotonin form—the best song you never wrote.” **“Days of Nothing”** “I think Adam was inspired to create this shortly after the Cave In/Old Man Gloom tour in 2020, which ended about a month before the pandemic hit. He came up with a bunch of cool segues for the band to use. When it came to sequencing the record, I felt that we needed a good palate cleanser after the sonic rubble left by the ending of ‘Nightmare Eyes,’ and this did the trick. It’s also the only track on the album recorded entirely outside of God City \[Studios\] and mixed by someone other than Kurt. If I remember correctly, the song title references the fact that our calendars were essentially wiped clean at the height of the pandemic.” **“Waiting for Love”** “The sound at the beginning of this track spawns from one of my favorite effects pedals ever—the DOD Envelope Filter. The use of this pedal dates back to bands that me and J.R. were in even before the formation of Cave In, so hearing it on a Cave In album is a nice little nostalgic trip for us. Maybe if Van Halen had successfully gone grunge in the ’90s, they would’ve done something like this. The song is meant to be comforting for anyone searching for love and coming up short. Remember that you’re not alone, and it might just be a matter of time.” **“Reckoning”** “I believe this to be one of Adam’s finest moments as both a songwriter and a vocalist. He and I have been doing acoustic/electric duo shows for a number of years, and it’s pretty thoughtful of him to construct a song that works especially well in that setting. The way we recorded the lead guitar part was inspired by ‘Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon,’ a song from what is easily my favorite Earth album. Overall, the production on this song was necessitated by the fact that J.R. was dealing with an issue with one of his wrists, so we had to make do with a drummer functioning at less than 100 percent. In hindsight, I think it’s pretty unique because of it. Lyrically, I think Adam really hit the nail on the head when it comes to accepting grief after losing someone close to you and doing our best to manage it.” **“Wavering Angel”** “We knew this would be the closing track on the record, so we made no bones about song length or pulling any punches when it came to throwing everything into the pot from all songs previous to it in the sequence. Led Zeppelin has ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ so this one’s our ‘Stairway to Methuen,’ the town in Massachusetts where me, J.R., and Adam grew up. I tried my best to be honest about wading through trenches of heartbreak while reaching for a song to guide me along. Sometimes that song has wings, and if you just hold on tightly enough, you can let yourself fly. I hope that feeling inspires others in a time of need.”
Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge was in a Seattle bookstore in 2014 when he came across what would become the theme for the Swedish occult rockers’ fifth album, *IMPERA*. “I saw this book called *The Rule of Empires*,” he tells Apple Music. “I’ve always been quite interested in history and politics, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that every empire eventually ends. Right then and there, I knew that at some point I was going to make a record about the rise and fall of empires.” At the time, Forge was already planning to make a record about the bubonic plague, which became Ghost’s startlingly prescient 2018 album *Prequelle*. “I felt like those two subjects represented two completely different threats of annihilation,” he says. “One feels a little bit more divine, and the other a little more structured and fabricated. So I compartmentalized the two themes and made two different albums.” Below, Forge details some key tracks from *IMPERA*. **“Kaisarion”** “The story this song tells, or the perspective it shines light onto, is basically stupid people destroying something that they don\'t understand with a frantic smile on their face. This has happened many times and unfortunately will probably happen many times in the future, because unfortunately things that we don\'t understand or that we cannot control have a tendency to arouse those feelings. We want to kill it. We want to destroy it.” **“Spillways”** “In ‘Kaisarion,’ we have the en masse, frenetic, frantic buzz of being in a group. In ‘Spillways,’ we have a very internalized pressure that builds up to the next song, which is a distant call that ends up being a voice in your head—the insulated person who’s being communicated with from a higher power. That’s loosely how we move geographically between these three songs. If the leads remind you of Brian May, that’s because I like stacking solos and adding harmonies, which automatically puts you in Brian May territory.” **“Call Me Little Sunshine”** “This is similar to our song ‘Cirice’ in the sense that you have this betraying hand that leads you into the night pretending to have a torch in the other. Which is interesting, because we’ve placed ourselves in the devil’s corner, pop-culturally, so it becomes this paradox. Myself and other peddlers in the extreme metal world use a lot of biblical or diabolical references, and up until recently we felt we were doing it with a distance from history—like this was in the Old World, when people were stupid. But no—this is real. This is now.” **“Hunter’s Moon”** “This song was written specifically for the *Halloween Kills* soundtrack, which made it so much easier to write because I knew the context. If ‘Call Me Little Sunshine’ is a voice inside the head that’s actually coming from outside, ‘Hunter’s Moon’ is inside the empire of the brain of a maniac: ‘I’m coming to get you because you belong to me. Can’t you see I’m doing this as an act of love?’ It’s absolutely illogical, but if you place yourself inside the head of a maniac, it makes sense. It’s burning love.” **“Watcher in the Sky”** “This reverts back to the imperial world of Flat Earth Society members, basically. The narration is calling upon the scientific community to use whatever science we have here within this empire to stop looking at the stars and look for God instead. Can we reverse the tools that we have to watch the stars to communicate with the Lord? And is there any way to scientifically prove that the world is actually flat? Because it looks awfully flat from where we\'re standing. So it’s a song about regression.” **“Twenties”** “This is a machine disguised as a leader talking to liberal persons because we need their manpower, and without them there is no society. So it’s this cheer about the twenties, saying that it will lead to an even more hopeful thirties—but 1900s-style. It’s meant to give people hope, if you’re bent that way. It’s similar to our song ‘Mummy Dust’ in that both are more primally aggressive and have an element of greed.” **“Grift Wood”** “I love Hollywood rock like Van Halen and Mötley Crüe, and it just feels fitting to have an uplifting track towards the end of the record. Musically, one thing that inspired the more Sunset Strip elements of the song was knowing that it was going to throw you off with a really long curveball that felt like something no Sunset Strip band has ever done. And that enabled the more glossy bits to be even more in line with the traditional elements of an early-’80s Sunset Strip song.”
“The album represents a journey through the darkness,” Parkway Drive lead vocalist Winston McCall tells Apple Music about the Aussie metalcore band’s seventh record. “It was never designed to be a concept album, but the way we make music is always album-based. We’re not a singles band. We write a cohesive piece of art, and this one happened to be centralized around the concept of the dark night of the soul.” Considering that the pandemic lockdown in which the album was written was essentially a global dark night of the soul, McCall’s lyrics on *Darker Still* will likely resonate far and wide. From Parkway Drive’s perspective, it’s also their pinnacle achievement. “This is the album where our ability and experience finally caught up to the imagination that we’ve had for 20 years of being a band,” he says. “This is the kind of music that always inspired us, but we’ve never had the ability—or the time—to actually create it until this record.” Below, he discusses each song. **“Ground Zero”** “We wanted to write an album opener that was anthemic and had those big riffs that you’ve come to expect from Parkway, and really captured that live energy and that bombastic feel. The choruses are lifted up in a way that we’ve probably never even hit before, in terms of it being accessible and something that will get stuck in people’s heads. The idea for this was to give people something that they would feel is a safe, expected Parkway sound—but improved. This is the safe space before the twist around the corner.” **“Like Napalm”** “This is where the rage begins. It’s the beginning of the spiraling process of this album. We wanted something that just smashed from start to finish. This is when the groove and the rhythms of this album really start to kick in. It just goes the entire time—bang, bang, bang—and then you get about four bars of bass reprieve before it smashes you in the outro as well. But the choruses still have that melody which really lifts it through the roof with Jeff \[Ling\]’s signature lead guitar accents, which are a real staple of the entire album.” **“Glitch”** “This was one of the first songs we started working on. For such an accessible chorus and an accessible song, the layering that we put under it is quite creepy and unnerving. When you put headphones on, you pick out different chants and whispers and strange stuff going on, because essentially the song is about dealing with sleep paralysis and nightmares and insomnia. That\'s a very strange, dark, creepy concept, so weaving all of that stuff into something which was so palatable—and which was going to be a single—was another step down the spiral.” **“The Greatest Fear”** “The song is about death, plain and simple. It’s about redefining the greatest fear that we all share. It\'s the element of every person\'s life on this planet which unites us. Every single person that you know and love will one day die. And the fear of losing someone we care about was omnipresent through all our lives during COVID. But the idea of this song, lyrically, was to frame death as not a bad or evil force in itself—it simply marks a time of transition into a point of unknowing.” **“Darker Still”** “This is possibly the most different song we\'ve ever written. It took us three albums to be able to execute this song. We wanted to do a ballad for quite a long time, and we couldn\'t figure out how to actually do it. But Jeff came to us with an acoustic version of the main refrain, the main riff in the song, with a whistle attached to the front of it. And we knew immediately that it was too epic to just be a rock song. It had to be this massive ballad, which we\'ve never done before. For us, this is really the marker of how far we’ve come as a band, because I think it’s one of our biggest achievements to be able to execute a large, intricate composition like this.” **“Imperial Heretic”** “This one is an anthem for the times we live in. It was written mid-COVID, when it became quite apparent that we were going through something that was uniting everyone worldwide in fear and desperation. We watched the wheels come off our perceptions of the world we live in, in terms of equality and democracy and civil rights and everything going up in flames. We were realizing how fragile everything is, and how powerful the people in power actually are. So, this is an anthem written for the billions of people around the world who had the blinders lifted off them for probably the first time.” **“If a God Can Bleed”** “You’re definitely very far down the dark rabbit hole by the time this track comes along. If ‘unnerving’ has been the word to set the tone so far, you can couple the word ‘menacing’ along with it on this song. The idea for this one is based around the concept of complacency and becoming soft. It\'s kind of a rallying cry to us as artists to continue pushing. At this point, you can’t look away from the dark place where the album is trying to take you, but this song has these jagged little edges that will hook in your brain, and a narrative that will set your skin crawling a little bit.” **“Soul Bleach”** “This one is unrelenting, unbridled rage based around the concept of trust broken and positioning of a person as the embodiment of a villain in someone else’s eyes. This is taking all of the misunderstanding and the hurt and the reality that sometimes you are the villain to someone, no matter how good you are. Sometimes you have to embody that just to be the person that you are. And this song is spat out as hard and viciously as possible. This is the point in the album where everything goes to 11. There’s nothing subtle about this one, and that’s the entire point.” **“Stranger”** “This is one of the most peculiar little pieces that we\'ve ever put on a record. It\'s as minuscule and isolating as possible. It’s another one of those moments where we wanted to wrong-foot people, especially after something like ‘Soul Bleach.’ We wanted to give a moment to breathe and reflect. And it is a real reflection because the lyrics represent where we were at that point in time and where everyone was—which was completely isolated from every point in society and reduced to communicating on screens. All of a sudden, we all became strangers and the world became a strange place to live in.” **“Land of the Lost”** “The first riff we had for this has an industrial edge to it, so we chose to lean into that. The song plays off between the engine of that industrialized riff running at 100% capacity in the choruses with that chain-gang chant of ‘keep digging’ over the top of it. And the verses are played off with a triple layer of a computerized voice, which we programmed to sing the verse lines with a distorted human voice and then a real human voice. The concept is that you go from being a computer representation of a human to a real human full of emotion by the time you get to the last chorus.” **“From the Heart of the Darkness”** “This song represents the closest thing that there is to light at the end of the journey. It’s basically built around one powerful riff, one powerful refrain, which drives that rhythm so hard. It builds from a place of subtlety to a place of incredible complexity based around that one riff. Lyrically, it represents the acknowledgment of what the journey through the darkness provides—the reemergence of self and the repositioning of self within a world that was confused and destroyed.”
“The de-evolution of man.” That’s how Viagra Boys frontman Sebastian Murphy sums up the theme of the band’s third album. “My inspirations were how divided everyone is, people’s ideas of why things are happening, and just general craziness—especially reactions to the pandemic,” he tells Apple Music. “I was also very inspired by a few documentaries about monkeys.” As always, the American-born vocalist of the Swedish punk group puts a witty and humorous spin on the subject matter, but its roots come from the genuine despair he feels viewing his home country from abroad. “I definitely use the States as a reference point because it’s a real melting pot of insanity, in my opinion,” he says. “I mean, those types of people definitely exist here in Sweden, but they’re not storming the Capitol or anything.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Baby Criminal”** “My girlfriend said, ‘I used to be a baby, now I’m just a criminal.’ She said she had that feeling once, and I could really relate to that. There’s been times in my life where I’ve excused everything I do because I was just a kid. And then it just got to this point where I’m dealing drugs and getting into trouble. I’m just a criminal. But I took a more playful twist on it—I made up a character named Jimmy, who’s this guy sitting in his basement making a nuclear reactor. That’s inspired by a true story. I think there was a kid in the States who did that when he was 14 or something.” **“Cave Hole”** “This is a freestanding interlude made by a guy called DJ Hayden. He works with our producer, and he was working side by side with us while we were recording some of these songs. He makes super-cool electronic music, and I just wanted to have a few weird interludes between the songs. I actually wanted to call the album *Cave Hole*. I like it because it reminds you of a K-hole, so I’m glad I got to fit it into the tracklist.” **“Troglodyte”** “If one of these school shooters or mass shooters were to live back in the days when we were apes, and they had these ideas of doing a mass murder or some shit like that, they wouldn’t have a chance because the other apes would just maul the shit out of them. It’s basically a mixture of me saying that we would have been better off as monkeys, and at the same time, it’s a fuck-you to a lot of these angry idiots with extreme right-wing ideas.” **“Punk Rock Loser”** “I’m painting a picture of this guy who’s a real asshole, but at the same time, I’ve been that asshole as well. It’s a song I could’ve written a couple of albums ago because I was that person. Sometimes I definitely feel like I’m a punk-rock loser. It’s like a flashback to my life five years ago. I’m making fun of it, and I’m also kind of romanticizing it in a way, like when you’re walking down the street and you feel like you’re the king of the world. I love that feeling, but it’s not often I get to feel that way.” **“Creepy Crawlers”** “This is very inspired by this dude I saw get interviewed by Channel 5 News. He started ranting about the vaccine causing kids to grow tails and animal hair. I’m like, ‘How do you know if the hair is human or animal?’ But I have a love for extreme absurdities, like stuff you would read in the *Weekly World News*—stories about two-headed babies or the idea of Hillary Clinton using adrenochrome to stay young, or the idea that the global elite are these reptiles plotting against us. So, this is me putting myself in the shoes of a conspiracy theorist.” **“The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis”** “This is based on a documentary about chimpanzees that has the same title. It’s about this trade-off that happened millions of years ago, when we were all still chimpanzees and lived up in the trees. We could count at incredible speeds to assess a threat really easily, like a pack of predators coming in. When the chimpanzees moved from the trees down to the savanna, they suddenly developed a need to communicate with each other about these threats, like, ‘There’s a lion over there—maybe don’t go there.’ So, they developed the ability to speak, and the theory is that we traded our ability to count things really fast—really good short-term memories—for long-term memories. And my idea is, that’s what fucked us. Long-term memories gave us the ability to plan murder and shit like that. Monkeys don’t think about that. They live in the now.” **“Globe Earth”** “That’s another DJ Hayden thing, and the name is obviously from flat-earthers. When they try to diss us globe-earthers, that’s what they call us. Like, ‘You fucking globe-earther.’ I love it.” **“Ain’t No Thief”** “This is about being accused of something that I obviously did, but being a bit delusional about it, which I have been in many periods of my life. Especially when I was a speed freak, I would get accused of something and I would just be like, ‘How the fuck could you think that about me?’ Like this feeling of being betrayed because someone thinks that you’re a certain way, when in fact you are that way. It’s supposed to be a bit funny.” **“Big Boy”** “We were pretty drunk in the studio at, like, 3 am, and we had this idea of sounding like a ’70s rock band recording a blues song. So, we all got in there and we’re playing our instruments and it sounded like shit. But at the same time, it was cool. We ended up adding a hip-hop beat, and I made up lyrics on the spot that were the stupidest thing I could think of—feeling like a big boy. It goes back to that feeling you had when you were a kid, but you’re an adult. Like, ‘I’m a big boy. I’ve got an apartment with a big TV’—as if that makes you a grown person. It doesn’t. You can still be very childish and pay your rent.” **“ADD”** “I wanted to write a song about ADD because it’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager. I’ve just always had this inability to concentrate, and I forget things all the time. I’ll leave the house without my keys or put something down and forget it right away. Or someone sends me an important email and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to answer this.’ And then I never do. It’s about this inability to do menial tasks—that’s what defines ADD for me. I just can’t motivate myself to do the easiest thing in the world.” **“Human Error”** “This is another DJ Hayden instrumental.” **“Return to Monke”** “I saw a meme that was just a picture of a monkey, and it said, ‘Return to Monke,’ spelled like that. I love meme culture, and especially that meme. So simple and yet so strong. When I wrote the song, I imagined us playing live and I pictured people in the crowd completely losing it and turning into monkeys—flying all over the place, throwing shit, taking off their clothes. It was inspired by Rage Against the Machine as well. I wanted to create a song that people could sing along to, like chanting in a cult. That phrase ‘leave society, be a monkey’ is just taking the piss out of these people who think the world is a big conspiracy against them. Maybe they should just leave.”
When a DIY ethos is baked into your core, your intuition is always likely to guide you right. Since forming in 2014, Nova Twins have established themselves as alt-rock explorers constantly crossing genre boundaries to absorb ideas and recast them in their own vision. The London-based duo of Amy Love and Georgia South approached their second album by dialing up both the brightness and heaviness of their debut, 2020’s *Who Are the Girls?*, operating on gut feel. “We have label support now, but it’s all still about us,” Love tells Apple Music. “It’s the shit we’ve always done, but they’ve helped us to facilitate the things we need to make the sound even bigger. There was no pressure, no schedule; we were just writing because we wanted to.” Written broadly during the pandemic and from within the Black Lives Matter movement, *Supernova* centers on the duo’s experiences of grief, heartbreak, erasure, and the empowerment of self-owned sexuality, as they battle their way through darkness to find light. The result is an album of intensity, energy, and enough fighting spirit to share around. “Life isn’t perfect, and we all have shit times,” says South. “But with *Supernova*, we want to give people that extra skip in their step, to feel like they can push through. Whatever you have going on, there is always a way to come out as a winner.” Let Nova Twins guide you through the album, track by track. **“Power (Intro)”** Georgia South: “We wanted a word that set the precedent for how we wanted the album to make people feel, and that word was ‘power.’” Amy Love: “It feels like a new beginning, a new era for the Nova Twins world. By putting this as the beginning and then ending on ‘Sleep Paralysis,’ it’s a wake-up call, like being born again.” GS: “It was just a nice little way to introduce the album and bookend the world that we created. If you were to be transported through a vortex, this is what it would sound like.” **“Antagonist”** AL: “This one came after the heavy lockdown. It felt so good to be able to finally meet up in person, and that energy and sense of connection is audible. It was just us together in a room, having fun.” GS: “We worked with Jim Abbiss again on production for the record, but in lockdown, we got really into Logic, the nitty-gritty of making beats and doing vocal production and sound effects ourselves. We learnt so much more about quality this time that a lot of the demos were good enough to go right on the album, and then, with Jim’s production style and live drums, we could focus on building up that really big sound.” **“Cleopatra”** AL: “The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was a traumatic time. It was so dark and depressing and terrifying, but when we all started unifying and marching, it felt like there was some sort of hope. It spurred us on to write something that would make people feel good, to feel powerful and proud of where they’re from. ‘Cleopatra’ was written in that moment of feeling truly part of something; we’re confident Black women, but it’s only when you start talking with others that you shine light on areas even you didn’t understand properly. We wanted to have a song that reflected the times, but also something which would give hope in the future.” **“K.M.B.”** GS: “With ‘K.M.B.’ \[Kill My Boyfriend\], we homed in on the sassy ’90s R&B that we both love. We love groups like Destiny’s Child, and we also love heavy music, so we thought that if we paired the two, we’d have the sassiest, most badass thing ever.” AL: “So many people can relate to the idea of getting revenge on a ex. When we read the lyrics back in isolation, we were like, ‘Is this a bit much?’ But then we were like, ‘Nah, it’s a joke. Right?!’” GS: “That’s why we made the music video so bright and colorful, to really get the joke across. The day of filming was so fun; the woman who owned the house came in and was like, ‘Can we rename the song “Kill My Husband?”’” AL: “He had cheated on her 47 times! She was like, ‘This video is the perfect send-off.’ She definitely saw the sense of humor in it.” **“Fire & Ice”** GS: “‘I tend to start with drums and then write riffs on top of the beat, building up in layers. We didn’t use any synths on the album, just bass, guitar, drums, and a bunch of pedals, which will make it a lot of fun to play live. I’m going to need a third leg!” AL: “Conceptually, it’s about all our moods as human beings. People assume that we’re scary or we’re this and that, but we’re all those things and the opposite. As women, we’re never just one thing; we can be moody, upset, loving, happy, vulnerable, sweet. It’s just about being a normal girl today—it’s not always pretty, but that duality is always going to be something you love about us.” **“Puzzles”** GS: “‘Puzzles’ puts us back in our ’90-2000s era. When you’re in a club, there’s those classic sexy tracks that you just want to dance to, like Khia’s ‘My Neck, My Back’ or ‘Pony’ by Ginuwine. We all want to feel sexy, to feel good about ourselves. We wanted it to be heavy—something you can mosh to but get down to at the same time.” AL: “It’s a fun song, but it’s also there to challenge people who are still living in the dark ages. There’s no line with Nova; we might like wearing baggy tracksuits, but at the same time, we also know how to let loose and have fun with our sexuality. If people are still uncomfortable about that, then a song like this is needed.” **“A Dark Place for Somewhere Beautiful”** AL: “We don’t always share our personal home truths in our music. Time is the biggest healer, and if something is still quite fresh, you can only talk about it so much. People can read between the lines and take what they want from it, but we all experience grief in our lives at some point, and this song is just describing what it feels like to go through that. A part of you disappears, but you also grow so much. Loss really does change you.” **“Toolbox”** GS: “It’s all about flipping the script on all the social pressures and beauty ideals that are usually aimed at women—changing up the roles so we’re singing it to a man. We’ve had to say, ‘Fuck you’ to so many men all the way along our career, and it’s built us into these strong women as a result. I’m grateful for it because it comes across in tunes like this.” **“Choose Your Fighter”** GS: “This was the last song we finished; we only had 24 hours to do it because of vinyl lead time. We were in the home studio writing, really tired. Whenever one of us was lagging, we’d have a tea break, put ‘Work Bitch’ by Britney Spears on, and then be like, ‘OK, we can do this.’ We truly have to thank Britney for this one—without her, we would have just slept.” AL: “In lockdown, we were sending songs back and forth, and then, suddenly, this was one where we were like, ‘I guess we’re writing an album.’ Lockdown was terrible, but it really helped us to find our way to this body of work, to say all the things that we wanted to say.” **“Enemy”** AL: “‘Enemy’ is about the time in our career where people weren’t quite getting it. We’ve seen other people be able to walk through so much easier because they fit the mold of what people perceive to be a riot grrrl. This was our kick back to the people who said that we look like we should only be doing hip-hop.” GS: “It’s pure rage, but we were also laughing so much while making it, putting people on our imaginary hit list. Obviously, we’re not trying to promote violence, but people can relate to that feeling in the moment. They can listen on their headphones going to work with their horrible boss, or at school if somebody’s picking on them. It’s a song about standing up for yourself.” **“Sleep Paralysis”** GS: “We were playing with different dynamics. It feels like you’re on a crazy loop because it joins back with the intro, and it’s a bit trippy and chaotic. It was definitely reflective of where we were at the time. We were locked down, BLM was going on, there was so much loss, and it was just like, ‘This is a full-on nightmare.’” AL: “We created this world where it almost felt like *Stranger Things*, The Upside Down. Everything seems really peaceful and calm and then, suddenly, the chorus hits. That gnarly hellscape feeling truly felt like what we were living through. It shows that we’re not afraid to not be super loud, that we don’t put boundaries on ourselves. Everything we’ve done with this band, we don’t plan; we just jump and see what happens. It’s always worked for us, so we’re going to keep jumping.”
Subtlety is not The Chats’ strong point. Exhibit A is the blunt-as-it-comes title of the Queensland trio’s second album, a 13-song record in which only two of its tracks surpass the three-minute mark. Add the fact that bassist-vocalist Eamon Sandwith sings like a chainsaw, snarling and raging over a series of tightly coiled riffs that rarely dip under hyper-speed, and you have the sonic equivalent of a swift boot to the face. Recorded in six days, the album finds Sandwith’s everyman lyrical focus taking in subjects such as the cost of cigarettes (“The Price of Smokes”), hoon driving culture (“6L GTR”), and being busted for buying an under-14s train ticket (“Ticket Inspector”), all with a turn of phrase that’s unquestionably Australian. (“Starin’ at the ATM/It says insufficient funds/That’s just not good enough/’Cause right now I wanna get drunk,” he growls in “Paid Late”.) More sober themes occasionally pop their heads over the bar (“Emperor of the Beach” lambastes surfers who view the beach as their own), but even they’re delivered as delicately as a headbutt. And if you don’t like it? Well…you know what you can do.
Pale Waves’ third album is the sound of a band unafraid—and more importantly, unapologetic—about who they are. *Who Am I?*, released in 2021, saw lead vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie open up a more personal side to her songwriting, but its follow-up *Unwanted* delves even deeper, exploring betrayal, jealousy, depression, rage, addiction, loss—and on the heartbreaking “The Hard Way,” the suicide of a schoolmate. “It’s from me maturing and becoming more comfortable within my own skin that I can be more confident and open,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “I feel like with the first album, and even slightly with the second album, I was still so timid. As I grow up, I become more sure of myself and that\'s displayed through how much I\'m able to put out there for everyone to see and hear.” Sonically, too, *Unwanted* is a far tougher proposition than its predecessors. Tracks such as the middle-finger-up pop-punk of the title track and the classic-rock crunch of “Jealousy” hold back some of the Manchester quartet’s more ethereal synth-pop trademarks to deliver a heavier kick. “That was 100% a conscious decision,” Baron-Gracie says. “When the pandemic happened, we were so upset that we couldn\'t play live, and that definitely influenced the direction we went in with this record, because we knew that when we stepped back onstage, we wanted to have the best time. We wanted to have that more heavy sound sonically; we didn\'t want to play these slow, sad songs.” That’s not to say *Unwanted* is short on poignant moments (you can practically taste the grief that powers the epic ballad “Without You,” for instance), yet the roar that breaks through the pain is one of defiance. Read on as Baron-Gracie walks us through her band’s album. **“Lies”** “We’re easing fans into the transition—we’re placing them in the swimming pool, and we were putting them in the shallow end. Even though there’s something quite dark about the subject matter, it puts people in a good mood because it’s got this drive running through it. It’s so fun to watch people dance to it when we play live.” **“Unwanted”** “‘Unwanted’ really summarizes the overall record, too—the dark, traumatic themes that run throughout. Feelings of neglect, anger, vanity, jealousy, sadness, depression…a lot of worlds that I think Pale Waves haven\'t tapped into before. It was really important that we made this record because I feel as a woman in today\'s society, when we project these feelings, we get labeled crazy. If a man\'s angry, they’re seen as more confident because they know their point, they know what they want. Whereas when a woman\'s angry, she\'s a crazy bitch. I wanted to show other women that it’s OK to feel these things.” **“The Hard Way”** “It\'s such a traumatic story about an amazing young girl at my school who had so much potential, but she was being bullied and took her own life because of it. She couldn\'t take any more of the abuse. I feel partly responsible that I didn\'t step up when I was a child and I saw that happening. It’s something that’s really affected me throughout my life. I hope that me telling her story in some form will influence other people and show them that everyone\'s fragile and to be careful with your words and be careful with your actions, because you never know when you\'re pushing someone too far.” **“Jealousy”** “I wrote ‘Jealousy’ with Whakaio Taahi from Tonight Alive. I’d written a few songs with him and a lot of them were very soft and mellow and they just weren\'t sitting right with me. I didn\'t feel like this was the next Pale Waves record. And then one day I came in and he played the ‘Jealousy’ riff and I was like, ‘Oh my god, you genius. That is amazing. That is exactly the direction that I want to go in! Forget all these soppy songs that we\'re writing. Let\'s write about jealousy and make it this sexy, aggressive song!’” **“Alone”** “’I don\'t think I\'ve ever been as brutal as I am on this track. It’s about when you say no to someone and they just don\'t leave you alone. So many times—in clubs, in bars, in goddamn Tesco—where someone comes up to you and they\'re like, ‘Can I buy you a drink? Can I get your number?’ And you say, ‘Sorry, I\'m not interested.’ And they still get all handsy and physical with you. Do you not get the message? Don\'t touch me. It\'s as simple as that. Leave me alone. I\'m absolutely fine by myself without you. It’s the ultimate rejection song. I just channeled all those nights where I\'ve said no but they\'ve continued to harass me.” **“Clean”** “Even though there\'s a lot of negative emotions on the record, I really wanted a moment or two where there was some kind of positivity or some kind of hopeful agenda. I wanted to write a cheesy love song. Like a song that they would play in a movie when the couple was falling in love and decide to run away together. I wanted to capture those moments that you feel when you\'re falling in love. There\'s nothing quite like that thrill of the very start of a relationship where those feelings are growing.” **“Without You”** “I knew that I wanted a huge ballad on the record. I feel like this record, because it\'s so loud and it\'s so in-your-face, that this ballad had to be on the same level as tracks like ‘You\'re So Vain.’ It couldn\'t just be a ballad where I\'m on my guitar or on the piano again. It had to be dynamic and flow through the emotions. ‘Without You’ is about me losing someone so close to my heart that I struggle to comprehend how I can live life without them. It\'s the sad realization of you have to find a way to get through it and cope with it and realize that they aren\'t coming back.” **“Only Problem”** “‘Only Problem’ is about me having this constant thing in my life that I was always battling with and was always pulling me down. It was always something that I relied on in my states of feeling fragile and it brought me back up, but then it would always drop me back down. I had to learn and come to terms of removing that from my life for good. Alcohol would give me that fake confidence that you need when you feel insecure. There can be such reliance on that, and people in this industry normalize it, and it shouldn\'t be normalized. It can be abused, and I wanted to learn to live a life without it. So I removed it completely, and now I\'m much happier.” **“You’re So Vain”** “There\'s a lot of pop-punk on the record, which I love, but then you get to ‘You\'re So Vain’ and it\'s almost more classic rock and roll in a way. I wanted to push it more in this direction. We came up with the riff first and I was like, ‘Yes! That’s it!’ And then I was like, ‘OK, we need a subject matter that is going to work with this. It needs to be badass. It needs to be confident. It needs to be unapologetic…’ I feel like there\'s a lot of egotistical people in the music industry, people that I may have looked up to that I\'ve met and I\'ve figured out that they’re an awful person. I channeled my anger towards people\'s egos with this song. I wanted to take them down a step.” **“Reasons to Live”** “This has the dark and it has the light. The chorus is the light and verses are the dark. It\'s about when I was really struggling with my mental health. I felt like it was deteriorating and I felt really fragile, and then I found love that enabled me to see the light. Love pulled me back and showed me a new perspective on things. It helped me get healthier and helped me to really fall in love with things. Even to really fall in love with music again.” **“Numb”** “I go through periods in life where I hit this wall of depression and it can last days. I don\'t want to move out of bed, I don\'t care about anything, I don\'t care about anyone. I know that a lot of people feel this way and go through the same thing, and I feel it\'s important when you get to that point to know that other people go through it too, and to be able to relate to something. So I wanted to write a song about the way I feel when I get like that. I wanted it to be really stripped back, just me, an electric guitar, and some harmonies. I didn\'t want any other distractions, I just wanted everyone to focus on what I was saying.” **“Act My Age”** “It is about growing older. It’s a battle between being like, ‘Shit, I need to grow up,’ but then also, ‘Oh, shit, I miss when I was a child and I didn\'t have to worry about anything.’ It’s that realization that everyone gets older and everyone needs to get their shit together. I was turning a page in my life where I was wanting to remove a lot of toxic things out of my life and I was reflecting on childhood and that innocence that we have and wanting to channel some of that into where I am right now.” **“So Sick (Of Missing You)”** “I wrote this because I was tired of writing about myself or other people that I knew in my life. I was watching *Sex Education* at the time, and I wrote this about the period where Maeve and Otis aren’t talking and they\'re missing one another and they’re both like, ‘How could you be so mean to me and just cut me off like that?’ I related to that so much, and I love their relationship. I think it\'s so interesting and *Sex Education* is such a good show. After listening through various track listings for the record, it felt like this could be the only closing act. No other track felt right. I didn\'t want to do the typical Pale Waves thing and finish on the classic ballad, because we\'ve already done that twice.”
A fiery, confident kick-back against convention, Pale Waves’ third record Unwanted sees the group building on the promise of last year’s UK Top 3 album Who Am I?, and staking their claim as British rock’s most dynamic young group. “It’s bold and unapologetic, and that’s what the Pale Waves community is about,” says frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie herself. “We don’t need to fit a perfect mould, we don’t need to apologise for being ourselves, and we won’t change for anyone. That acceptance is what connects us.” Led by riotous lead single “Lies”, Unwanted is a record that reaches out to the passionate community of misfits and LGBTQI+ fans around the band, tapping into darker emotions than ever before while also striking a fresh tone of defiance.