For their third album, Kentucky hardcore troupe Knocked Loose chose a title that resonated deeply with vocalist Bryan Garris. During an airplane takeoff that triggered Garris’ fear of flying, the woman seated next to him offered the comforting words, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” “The line struck him so strongly that it immediately occurred to him that it should be the title,” Knocked Loose guitarist Isaac Hale tells Apple Music. “It also became a lyric in the last song, ‘Sit & Mourn.’ Like the rest of our records, this is a collection of stuff from Bryan’s personal struggles dealing with anger and loss and depression and sadness. It’s a reminder to him—and all of us—that we’re still here. We made it through all the hardships that came with the past four years of writing this.” Musically speaking, Knocked Loose entered the writing sessions for *You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To* with a very different mindset than the one that drove their 2019 breakthrough *A Different Shade of Blue* and revered 2021 concept EP *A Tear in the Fabric of Life*. “There was just way more pressure, and we had way more experience,” Hale says. “Some people view the third album as a make-or-break record. We had pressure from the fans and the outside world, but more so pressure from ourselves. We thought, ‘How can we possibly outdo what we’ve done before?’ It was tough, but I think we were able to come up with a record where every song accomplishes something unique.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Thirst”** “This was written in the first session that we ever had for this record. It was written before *A Tear in the Fabric of Life* even came out. It came from a jam session we were having where we wanted to create a really difficult song on drums to challenge our drummer Pacsun. We wanted something super short, super intense, and we just made it as complex as we could. And to start the record, it’s something we’ve never done before—a super in-your-face jump scare.” **“Piece by Piece”** “This was our attempt at doing kind of a Hatebreed-esque banger. It has a hook to it, but the hook is one of the mosh parts in the song, akin to \[Hatebreed’s\] ‘Perseverance.’ One of the things we wanted to accomplish on this record was to create stuff that was hooky and catchy, but at the same time crazy heavy. In many ways, I think that it’s the most hardcore song on the record, and that’s what we love about it. It’s our version of a catchy hardcore track that can really connect with people.” **“Suffocate” (feat. Poppy)** “We wrote this song after we thought we had a finished record. Before we went to record, Poppy slid into Bryan’s DMs asking if we would be interested in collaborating on some music. Me and Bryan are huge Poppy fans, so of course we said yes automatically. That same day, Bryan called me like, ‘Hey, man—I’m coming over. We need to write another song.’ We wrote the track the next day, and it was one of the smoothest writing experiences on the record because we wrote it knowing Poppy was going to be a part of it. And because of that, we were able to do some sassy parts that maybe we wouldn’t put on a normal Knocked Loose song but that really work with her voice. I think it’s one of the most special songs we’ve ever written.” **“Don’t Reach for Me”** “This was our attempt at writing a song with a more rock- or pop-oriented structure. It’s different from stuff that we\'ve done before because it has a slightly melodic chorus with a hook. It has a soft bridge with a jam part and some cleaner guitar. And a lot of it is midtempo, besides the very beginning. It only gets fast very briefly. That’s very new for us. There’s like seven mosh parts, so we needed to balance those. It took a long time to figure out, but I think the final product really succeeds in that juxtaposition.” **“Moss Covers All”** “This was written in the second writing session that we did for this record, up in Michigan. We woke up one morning, started jamming, and we were just not coming up with a lot of stuff we liked. We were pretty much just throwing paint at the wall and getting aggravated. When we took a break, I had an idea and basically wrote this entire song in my head in about a minute. I voice memo’d it briefly on my phone and then immediately started putting it down without telling the guys. When they came back, I played it for them—and what I played is pretty much exactly what’s on the record. It’s short, sweet, and super heavy, with a breakdown and a spooky lead that goes directly into the next song.” **“Take Me Home”** “‘Moss Covers All’ and ‘Take Me Home’ are very much connected songs. ‘Moss Covers All’ was written first, but then we really felt the need to have a song on here that’s meant to scare you. We didn’t worry about a mosh part or any sort of heaviness. We just wanted a scary track that’s uncomfortable and throws the listener off guard. When we were thinking about what shape that could take, I immediately thought of that spooky lead from ‘Moss Covers All,’ which we ended up looping as the blueprint for this track.” **“Slaughterhouse 2” (feat. Chris Motionless)** “This song started as an inside joke because Motionless in White was kind enough to reach out to Bryan and have him collaborate on one of their songs, ’Slaughterhouse,’ a very heavy, politically charged track. We’re all huge Motionless in White fans, so of course he accepted. And then we were able to tour with them. As soon as Bryan did that track, we were joking that we should do a song called ‘Slaughterhouse 2.’ We were just kind of laughing about it for a while, but then we thought we were kind of shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t do it. Chris was down from the beginning, and his voice is amazing on this. It was a challenge to match the theme and vibe of the original song, but I think we were able to create something that’s not just a great sequel, but that really stands on its own as a highlight of the record.” **“The Calm That Keeps You Awake”** “The funny thing about this one is that the song totally revolves around the huge breakdown at the end. That part was written first, as part of another thing that was written before *A Tear in the Fabric* had even come out. So, like four years ago, we needed to write new parts because the rest of the song we’d written wasn’t up to par, but that breakdown was super necessary. In doing so, we created this really cool, Meshuggah-esque, kind of Sepultura-auxiliary-percussion vibe that’s one of the most unique parts of the record.” **“Blinding Faith”** “We definitely have some jabs at religious hypocrisy throughout the Knocked Loose discography, and this is just kind of an update on that situation. We hadn\'t done one in a while, and it was something that was feeling close to home for Bryan at the time. To me, this sounds like a mix of some of our greatest riffs that we’d written over the course of a year—it’s kind of a riff-salad song. In some ways, it’s one of the heaviest and scariest songs on the record, so we put it out as a single to say, ‘If you thought we were going to get any softer, absolutely not. And here’s proof.’” **“Sit & Mourn”** “This one revolves around the melodic lead and the kind of ambient post-rock breakdown at the end. We wrote that in the first writing session in Joshua Tree, and it took us a while to come up with more parts that we felt were that good. But the song is very, very anthemic. It sounds very dark and melancholic, but at the same time, the lyrics are positive in a way. Thematically, it’s kind of a title track in the way that the lyrics relate to the name of the record. I know it was a very cathartic song for Bryan. In many ways, it’s the saddest song on the record, but in other ways it’s the most positive. And it’s mentally exhausting from start to finish. It ends with a sound clip that I won’t disclose, but it’ll take you by surprise.”
Chat Pile’s sludgy mix of nu metal and ’90s underground rock isn’t anything new, but it’s hard to imagine it existing so comfortably at any other time. Part of it’s their willingness to traverse what in another era would’ve been uncrossable cultural lines: Pledging your allegiance to the funny, post-punk surrealism of a band like Pere Ubu (“Camcorder”) at the same time as the single-entendre misery of Korn (“Funny Man”), for example. If metal is, on some level, guitar-country, Chat Pile is firmly set in its rhythm section, which is as rumbling and inescapable as the power lines and strip-mined hills of the Middle America outside their window, leaving the guitars primarily to peel paint. Where guys this misanthropic might’ve been considered social liabilities in their past (or at least dangers to their parents and church youth group), now they sound content to stay in their rooms and pig out on memes about the world they’ve always known was in ruin. “Tape” is the peak here not because it’s the hardest but because it’s the funkiest, whatever funk means to bands like this. Forget alienation—they’re laughing.
For the title of his fourth album under the Zeal & Ardor banner, avant-garde metal musician Manuel Gagneux turned to ancient legend. The greif, or griffin, is a mythological creature—part lion, part eagle—that appears in many of the oldest cultures. In Gagneux’s hometown of Basel, Switzerland, the griffin figures prominently in the annual Vogel Gryff procession. “It’s basically a guy in a big old bird costume that reveals its backside to the rich part of town,” he tells Apple Music. “It’s like an 800-year-old tradition. It’s so endearing, I thought it was worth sharing with the world.” *GREIF* is also the first Zeal & Ardor album to feature Gagneux’s live band. “By now, people know us more from our live performances,” he says. “So, it’s more representative of what it is that I associate with Zeal & Ardor. Doing the opposite would’ve been weirder to me at this point. It felt very organic to have them involved. Just like the greif is an amalgam of animals, everyone doing their part on this record is an amalgam of us. And it’s our most eclectic record, I think, so it feels quite fitting.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Bird, the Lion and the Wildkin”** “Yeah, wildkin. In all honesty, I might’ve made up that word. But as that procession happens with the greif, it’s accompanied by piccolos and snare drums. So, that’s what I tried to emulate with the whistling and the drums there. Also, it’s a melody that will return later in the record, and I thought it kind of a nice little booming opening to welcome this weird, strange world of *GREIF*.” **“Fend You Off”** “It’s the first, or one of the few times, that I use the ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ in a Zeal & Ardor song. It’s quite a personal-struggle song, not in a specific thing that happened to me, but it’s about self-preservation. Sometimes we take steps that hurt ourselves just to make way for others. So, it’s about yielding, basically, and how not good of an idea that sometimes is.” **“Kilonova”** “The word ‘kilonova’ is a fairly new term about two supernovas colliding, which is objectively cool. It’s also about how our spirits and our weird ideas, or our weird playing, collides on this record. It’s one of the more occult songs on the record, with references to old, old books. And it’s one I hold really dear to my heart. It started as a funk song, and then I started distorting guitars. It kind of has reminiscing factors to another band that were not planned, but they are there. I’m not going to name names, but there’s some utensils at play.” **“are you the only one now?”** “It was an intentional decision to make the title all lowercase. It’s about these minichapters of the record, and basically these few \[lowercase\] songs prefacing what is coming after them, in a thematic sense. This is another personal one. It’s about solitude and finding peace in solitude, because there’s a huge difference between loneliness and solitude. It’s about embracing being alone, and that even time perceptively wasted being alone is still time that was spent working on oneself. I’m very much a person that enjoys being alone and kind of revels in solitude. It sounds very, very mopey, but I think I’m quite happy when I’m alone.” **“Go home my friend”** “This is a callback, musically, to the things we did prior to this record. It’s a taste of, ‘Oh, remember this?’ I think it conveys the idea of what it wants to be quite well, and there’s no need to expand on it. It’s just, ‘OK, this is it.’ It goes exactly where it should go, and then it ends without being ruined. And I quite like that.” **“Clawing Out”** “I think, in many ways, it’s the most aggressive song we’ve put out, or the most intense. Because it has these mean tempo ramps that just fuel anxiety, I think. And I really love that. It all culminates in these aggressive, hardcore electro kicks, which I find so, so nice. And it kind of blends well with the metal aesthetic in a weird way. I’m very happy with this one. It’s a new flavor of heavy.” **“Disease”** “That’s basically about how good intentions can have bad results. Because I think I’ve hurt a lot of people just by trying to help them, and I’ve been hurt by people who’ve tried to help me. It’s not about the intent, but sometimes a helping hand is just something in the way. That sounds very cynical, but I think there’s truth to that. It kind of needs to be spoken to.” **“369”** “This is a reference to a Tom Waits song called ‘Clap Hands,’ which itself is a reference to a Shirley Ellis song called ‘The Clapping \[Song\],’ which starts out ‘Three, six, nine, the \[goose\] drank wine.’ So, it’s a cover of a cover. Or a theft of a theft. I kind of wanted to pay my dues, although it’s so obscure no one will ever know unless I explain it. So, I don’t know if my dues are really paid.” **“Thrill”** “This is basically one of the newer emotions that we try to convey with this record. It’s not imposing, it’s not dark and brooding or ominous. It’s basically still aggressive, but most of all excited. I think that’s an emotion that I’ve always wanted to convey with this band, and I think I finally got to do it on this record. I wouldn’t even say it’s a metal song. I’d say it’s more like a rock song.” **“une ville vide”** “I go on long walks at night. And the town I live in is quite sleepy, so it’s empty a lot of the time, which I find one of the nicest feelings. I wanted to convey that feeling of being in between these looming buildings, and you kind of feel like a little mouse in a huge, strange world. There’s freedom to that, and that’s what I wanted to convey with this instrumental. Also, it’s kind of a palate cleanser between songs.” **“Sugarcoat”** “That’s another fun one. It’s such a simple song, and it almost veers into the goofy. There’re no solos, there’s no, ‘What is that rhythm structure?’ It’s kind of just a banger. It’s silly, and it’s supposed to be that. It’s one of those songs, when I wrote it, I giggled to myself and said, ‘This is going to be so much fun live.’ And the times we’ve played it live, by the last part of it, people are just singing that little theme thing. That just makes me almost burst with glee.” **“Solace”** “In many ways, this is the saddest song I’ve ever written. I honestly wasn’t sure if it would make it onto this record because I thought it was too much of a whiplash moment. But now I think of it as kind of a necessity to balance things out. And it took me a really long time to write this one. I just wanted to get everything right, and I’m really happy with the result. It’s inspired by a lot of Portishead and this song The Book of Knots did with Mike Patton called ‘Planemo.’ I just wanted to replicate that absolute dire, heart-wrenching situation. I’m not sure if I can do that one live because I might cry.” **“Hide in Shade”** “That’s basically vintage Zeal & Ardor because it’s the only song that’s older. It’s not only a callback—it’s actually from that time. It just never really got a home on an album until this one because I had to arrange it properly. So, it’s been brewing and stewing for a while. It’s just kind of a reminder of where we come from.” **“to my ilk”** “Another not-so-heavy track. I think this is the softest record we put out thus far, and I’m really happy with it in terms of how the three voices that we have are featured on it. It’s very distinct. It’s not too far from what people expect of us, but it kind of veers in a distinct direction. I mean, we could be blamed for selling out or whatever because it’s such a poppy track. But I think it still has this emotionality that is very much us. That can’t be denied. It’s not the best track to get the party started, but it’s still a good one.”
