In a genre that can be unkind towards too much change, Architects\' ninth album aims to challenge that mindset. \"We can do whatever we want,\" drummer and primary songwriter Dan Searle tells Apple Music. \"The ultimate question is, do we like it? And the answer is yes.\" *For Those That Wish to Exist* showcases the British quintet taking new risks, such as incorporating an orchestral approach into their abrasive sound (\"Dead Butterflies\" and \"An Ordinary Extinction\"), expanding vocalist Sam Carter\'s range beyond just screaming (\"Flight Without Feathers\" and \"Demi God\"), and focusing more on accountability and less on nihilism. \"I just realize that there might be a universe that prevents us from having control, taking the reins to see what\'s going on in the world,\" explains Searle. \"I wanted it to be something a little bit more responsible. I began to question why I was so passive in my role in making the world a better place.\" Below, Searle walks us through *For Those That Wish to Exist*\'s 15 tracks. **Do You Dream of Armageddon?** “It\'s lyrically alluding to a sense that we\'re all in the same boat, and we\'re heading in that direction. And it doesn\'t feature anyone in the band except Sam.” **Black Lungs** “I really felt like it was the only way to open the record. I love the chorus. It really is like a showcase of every style. It\'s easing you into the record, because we stray from the usual path a number of times.” **Giving Blood** “When the song originally came together, it was just drums and synth. The guitars came later. Obviously, a lot of it is still a heavy rock song. But this is sort of your first taste of the band moving into new water, so to speak.” **Discourse Is Dead** “This is a good song to make enemies with because it\'s kind of a critique of just not speaking to each other and trying to move forward. But I know that compromise is not popular at the moment. People are more polarized than ever. And it\'s leading us further away from creating a better world.” **Dead Butterflies** “It starts just with the strings and the bass. We planned around those ideas and developed it into something that worked for the band. It sat around for ages on the shelf, and eventually we sat down with it and worked it out. I think it\'s one of the best songs on the record.” **An Ordinary Extinction** “Probably the heaviest part of the record despite the trippy nature of this song. It\'s still very Architects, but then you get tossed into the verse straight away and it\'s something completely different again. It\'s super heavy and it\'s in a key that fits Sam\'s voice.” **Impermanence** “It just felt like a stompy end-of-the-world song. And kind of thematically leading on from where we left off in \[2018\'s\] *Holy Hell*, a little bit more concentration about mortality and the nature of our existence.” **Flight Without Feathers** “This is like the pit stop on the record almost. I wanted to write a song that was just basslines, so I wrote all the vocals and built the rest of the song around it. It’s one of three songs on the record without any drums—without me actually performing on it at all. So it\'s really got to shine just on the quality of the basic parts in it.” **Little Wonder** “We all see what is wrong with the world, but at the same time we avoid wanting to see it because we all want an easy life. I think the lyrics are a little bit of a cheeky nod to the fact that this song is so stylistically different for us.” **Animals** “This song went from text message to done in about 48 hours, and it was just one of those magical moments. And if we tried to make an 11-track record, we would have never gotten to this song. I\'m so glad that we did, because I think it is probably the best Architects song.” **Libertine** “We thought the record needed something like this—something big and aggressive, something with a little bit of space in it. And in the end, it\'s an absolutely cool album track.” **Goliath** “I thought this sounded just like a metal Biffy Clyro song and we\'ve got to try to get Simon \[Neil\] on it. We just thought it\'d be cool to have the singer of one of UK\'s biggest rock bands singing over one of the heaviest parts of the record. It\'s kind of all over the place.” **Demi God** “It\'s really dark and it\'s a bit of a late jam on the record that I\'m really proud of. I felt like I didn\'t want to create a long record that just fizzles out, I wanted it to stay stronger and still be providing interesting surprises throughout.” **Meteor** “There\'s no point in pretending that this song isn\'t an arena rock song, because it is an arena rock song. We typically play in a genre where arena rock is forbidden and taboo. So this song is probably the boldest track on the record. And yes, this song is very much about us knowing that we\'re heading for disaster.” **Dying Is Absolutely Safe** “I decided that it should be an acoustic track because it felt like something that the record hadn\'t stepped into. But I think fans will get it. I think there\'s something in there that\'s pretty special.”
On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”
Noctule is the new black metal solo project from Serena Cherry (Svalbard). During the UK national lock down in 2020, Serena decided to write an entire black metal album themed to the RPG computer game Skyrim. Each song is about different dungeons, story lines and weapons within the award-winning game. She notes: “I have always associated Skyrim with black metal. The snowy mountain settings, the morbid themes, the Norse mythology backbone – it just goes hand in hand for me.” Prior to her 10 year career as the front woman of Svalbard, Serena previously played in a black metal band and has been excited to get back to her musical roots. With hypnotic, interlocking tremolo guitar leads, pummeling blast beats and reverb drenched vocals; Noctule sees Serena spread her dragon wings and take off in an intriguing musical direction on her own.
Red Fang are known for two things: highly infectious stoner-rock jams and hilarious music videos directed by Whitey McConnaughy. The band’s fifth album, *Arrows*, combines both—and has the added bonus of being named after a song that’s actually on the album. “We had a very, very, very long email chain about different ideas we all had, and we couldn’t settle on a title,” bassist/vocalist Aaron Beam tells Apple Music. “Eventually, we ended up talking about the fact that so many of our records have been named after songs on other albums of our own. What if we just named this album after a song on the album? And so, *Arrows* just seemed like the obvious choice.” Below, Beam discusses each track. **Take It Back** “This is a weird-sounding thing that \[guitarist\] Bryan \[Giles\] made when he first started learning how to make recordings on his computer, but I love the mood of it. It was just him, and it was a detuned guitar for the bass sound. In its original formation, it was longer, but we cut it in half and ended the record with what was originally the first half of this, if that makes any sense. So, it’s like bookends—and it’s definitely less structured than a typical Red Fang song.” **Unreal Estate** “This is almost a one-riff song. All of the different versions that you hear are just modified versions of the main riff. When I originally wrote it, it was much faster and had way more notes in it. It was a kind of complicated, dorky prog rock/thrash metal song. We started playing it much slower and simpler in practice so everyone could latch onto it and decided that was actually way better.” **Arrows** “I wrote the main riff for this a long time ago—about three years before I figured out the rest of the song. Then I just woke up one morning at like 4 am, went straight to the practice space, and Frankensteined it together after years of banging my head against the wall. In true Whitey McConnaughy fashion, the video he made for this song is totally unrelated to the lyrical content, which is kind of about a struggle between two sides of someone’s personality. One side is trying to just deal with s\*\*t and see the positive, while the other side is more depressed and prone to self-medication.” **My Disaster** “This was an accidental composition. \[Guitarist\] David \[Sullivan\] had this riff I really loved, and we threw it together in the studio with a riff I had, just to see if something would happen. So, you can hear the last chorus get kind of cut in half by this cymbal-heavy drum part, because we didn’t know what the singing was going to be at the time we recorded the music. Bryan wrote the lyrics for this, and I think it has a lot to do with all the yelling back and forth between the left and right, and people just refusing to really listen to each other at all.” **Two High** “Bryan is the master of wordplay in the band, and he came up with this title. There’s a lyric in the song that goes, ‘Too high to try.’ It’s another substance abuse song about giving up on making your life better, because you’re too high or too drunk or whatever. But of course, Bryan changed it to t-w-o. I feel like this is one of two songs on the record that have the most old-school Red Fang feel to them. We could’ve written this song 15 years ago and it would’ve fit in with what we were writing back then.” **Anodyne** “This is another Bryan song, and the bass part does this weird loop thing that’s kind of sneaky. Lyrically, I think it’s centered around the definition of ‘anodyne,’ which is something that’s like a pain reliever, but it’s also something that, colloquially, is something that’s kind of bland and boring. I can’t totally speak for it, but I think whatever he’s talking about, it’s just a bunch of inoffensive, boring s\*\*t.” **Interop-Mod** “There’s not much to say about this. It’s an interlude named after the keyboard that was used to make it.” **Fonzi Scheme** “\[Drummer\] John Sherman came up with this song title. I was talking to Bryan and David about how my bass was tuned down to A when I wrote the main riff for this. John was like, ‘Aaay…’ like The Fonz would say. Hence, ‘Fonzi Scheme.’ We also added some strings to this one, and Bryan had a lot of ideas and inspiration for the sisters who came in and did the string parts.” **Days Collide** “This song kind of typifies the Red Fang writing process, in that in rare cases things are easy and obvious, but generally that’s not the case. One or the other of us just knows somewhere deep inside that there is a better solution to make the song right, and we just need time to do it. In this case, it took me about six months to come up with the right bass part. And about two weeks ago, I realized that what I came up with is almost exactly the same bassline as ‘Forgot About Dre.’ The notes are slightly different, but it’s the same pattern.” **Rabbits in Hives** “David wrote the music to this about five years ago, and I always loved the way the song jumps back and forth between two really different fields. The first part is like this half-step thing, and then it goes into a weird kind of Suicidal Tendencies shift to the real caveman mosh part. This is another one that’s similar to ‘My Disaster’ in that we decided to record it before we even knew what the singing parts would be, just to see if it would end up sounding cool.” **Why** “About eight years ago, we got asked to do a song for a Jim Henson Productions compilation covering songs from *Fraggle Rock*. I loved that show when I was a kid, so we dug through some old episodes and found this kind of upsetting and melancholy song called ‘Why.’ Then, I actually took this very old song that I’d written for an old band of mine that had already broken up and put the lyrics from the *Fraggle Rock* song to it. But no one heard that compilation, so we decided to rewrite the lyrics and release it ourselves, because the music and melody are all mine—and now this version has original lyrics, too.” **Dr. Owl** “For me, the most interesting thing about this song is that some of it was cut together in the studio after we finished recording, so we never actually played it live the way you hear it on the record. We just started practicing again at the beginning of 2021 because of COVID concerns, so we decided to learn the song the way you hear it. The first day back, we spent a bunch of time working on it. Then I drove home, parked right across the street from where I live, and the car in front of me had a vanity license plate that said ‘Dr. Owl.’” **Funeral Coach** “I was driving down the freeway and saw a car that said ‘funeral coach’ on it. The first thing I thought of was the other kind of coach—somebody who’s coaching people on how sad to be, or when to start crying at a funeral. The song has nothing to do with anything like that, though. I think Bryan wrote the opening riff, like, 12 or 13 years ago, and we’ve been trying to turn it into a song ever since. We finally just got sick of not putting that riff out, so here it is.”
RED FANG return with their highly anticipated new album, Arrows! Their first album in four years, everyone's favorite beer-crushing, zombie-killing, air-guitar-contest-judging metal heroes are back in action, doing what they do best- AND MORE. “This record feels more like Murder The Mountains to me than any record we’ve done before or since,” bassist/vocalist Aaron Beam ventures. “It doesn’t sound like that record, but Murder the Mountains was us doing whatever the fuck we wanted, and that’s what this is, too.” Arrows was recorded at Halfling Studios in the band’s hometown of Portland, OR, with longtime collaborator Chris Funk, producer of Murder The Mountains and 2013’s Whales and Leeches. “Chris is a major influencer as far as the weird ambient stuff in between the songs and the creepy incidental noises within the songs,“ guitarist Bryan Giles points out. “I think he definitely creates an added layer of atmosphere that we wouldn’t have otherwise.” Arrows is also a proper title track, which is new territory for the band. “This is the first time we’ve named an album after a song that’s actually on the album,” Beam explains. “We have other albums that are named after songs of ours that are not on those albums. So this time we’re really fucking with you because we didn’t fuck with you.” Similarly, fans might not believe what the song “Arrows” is partially about. “If you’re confused by some of the lyrics to the song, that makes sense,” Beam explains. “But it makes reference to meditation. I started meditating six years ago, but I can only do it when I’m not feeling too anxious. So, when I don’t need it, that’s when I can do it.” Elsewhere, “Fonzi Scheme” was named after legendary Happy Days cool guy Arthur Fonzarelli—if only because it’s in the key of his famous catchphrase, “Aaay.” Producer Chris Funk came up with the idea of bringing in string players from the Portland Cello Project to class up the track. Meanwhile, the opening riff of closer “Funeral Coach” was written 11 years ago. But it took until recently for the song to blossom into its full double-entendre glory. “I was driving around and I saw a hearse that said ‘funeral coach services’ on the back,” Beam explains. “So the first thing that popped into my head was a dude with a headset and a clipboard going, ‘Alright, dudes—more tears! Five minutes in is when the tears are critical, or no one’s gonna believe that anyone cares that this person died.’” In a nod to tradition, Arrows will be available in formats that include all the drums, bass, guitars and vocals. But it could’ve gone another way. “Our original idea was to release the album with no vocals or guitar solos,” Beam explains. “If you want the guitar solos, it’s an extra five bucks. If you want the vocals, it’s an extra ten bucks. So basically people should feel lucky that we didn’t do that. You get to buy the whole thing altogether.” RED FANG think of it as a generous display of gratitude toward their fans. “Yeah,” says Sherman, “Thank you for buying our album, you lucky bastards.”
Ask Rob Zombie what inspired the characteristically lengthy title of his seventh solo album, and he’ll tell you this: “I’m never really sure what inspires anything, to be honest. I’m always just taking things in all the time, and little pieces of phrases stick in my head. So I say it as a joke, but I also mean it: The title means the sounds coming off the record.” Propelled by Zombie’s signature blend of metallic grooves, trashy movie samples, and horror-inspired lyrics, The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy is an apt description of this delirious and often danceable collection of songs and sample-driven interludes. “When I’m recording, there is no plan—ever,” Zombie tells Apple Music. “I never go in thinking, ‘I want it to be catchy. I want it to be heavy.’ We just start, and the weirdness creates itself.” Below, Zombie discusses each of the album’s non-interlude tracks. **The Triumph of King Freak (A Crypt of Preservation and Superstition)** “This song was written toward the end of the album. And the songs are always being created as we record. We don’t jam. We don’t rehearse. So I record everything as we’re writing. And usually when I do vocals on a song, the first couple of times doesn’t sound right. But when I did this song, the first pass fit so perfectly that in my headphones it felt like I was lip-syncing to my own voice. So it just had a spark to it right out of the gate. I remember thinking, ‘Shit, man—I wish they all came this easy.’” **The Ballad of Sleazy Rider** “That was the first song written for the record, so it was real fresh and fun. We put the backwards guitars on there, and that really gave it its own life. That’s one of the reasons I like to record over a long period of time—you always have a certain amount of energy. I never want to go into the studio and hammer out 18 songs in a row, because by the time you get to the end, you’re just beating a dead horse.” **Shadow of the Cemetery Man** “*Cemetery Man* is a good movie, and it was really funny. This song isn’t based on the movie or anything—I kind of realized afterwards that the movie title was in the song title. This song started with a drumbeat. A lot of times, all I need is a beat. I’ll lay the vocals down over the beat and then we’ll build everything else around the vocals—instead of conventionally, where you lay down the guitars and sing to those.” **18th Century Cannibals, Excitable Morlocks and a One-Way Ticket on the Ghost Train** “This is another one that was very much done to just a drumbeat, because I wanted to do something that was sort of like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ one of those Dylan songs where it\'s just kind of going and going. So I freestyled the wacky vocals over the beat, and then John 5 came in and laid down some really good chicken pickin’ and banjo playing and it sort of morphed into a country tune. And then I got really into cutting and pasting dynamically opposing parts, like with the chorus here—it just slams in. You wouldn’t logically write a song like that. You have to experiment to write that song.” **The Eternal Struggles of the Howling Man** “To me, this feels like a throwback metal song—almost like Deep Purple at times. I’ll always write parts separately from themselves and then force them to go together, because you can make it work. And it’s amazing how people can wrap their minds around it. That\'s why I like putting in a lot of weird changes, and I like doing it in a short amount of time. Some of these songs aren\'t that long, but the arrangements are complicated for two and a half minutes. It almost became like a science experiment in the studio.” **The Satanic Rites of Blacula** “I remember we wrote this around Halloween. I always have a TV going in the studio with movies playing, and sometimes I’ll even play other music in the studio while we’re recording—not to inspire us, but just so that there’s noise in the air all the time. There have been times if you could isolate my vocal track, you’d probably hear the TV playing in the background. And at the time, I was watching *Blacula* or *Scream Blacula Scream*—so that’s how the song started morphing into this.” **Shake Your Ass-Smoke Your Grass** “We were listening to a bunch of English glam rock, like Slade, The Sweet, and especially T. Rex, where they always have that particular drumbeat. So, again, we found that beat and built the whole song around it. It’s infectious. With the title, I can picture the font on that bumper sticker, ‘Gas, Grass, or Ass—No One Rides for Free,’ just because of the age that I am. As a kid, I was just surrounded by that stuff, and it’s still burned in my brain.” **Boom-Boom-Boom** “Sometimes you come up with a piece of music that has kind of a cool groove and then you figure out what to do with it. It sounds like it would be in a horrible strip club at a truck stop somewhere. It’s a very simple song, but it goes along with everything else on the record in the sense that I try my best not to make songs sound like each other.” **Get Loose** “We got ahold of a sitar guitar, which just sounds so amazing, and then it’s a pretty straight-ahead kind of metal chunk song. This was one of those situations where I knew the riff was cool but I wasn’t sure what to do with it at first. Sometimes we’ll take a riff and slow it down or speed it up or play it backwards, because you’re just struggling for a way to connect with it. In this case, we slowed it way down and now it makes sense.” **Crow Killer Blues** “This song starts as this big, heavy thing, and by the time it ends, it’s like ‘Riders on the Storm.’ We’re always trying to find some new instrumentation to give each song its own signature. One’s got a sitar. One’s got turntables and a scratch. And this one has some cool-sounding keyboards. I never want to have just guitar, bass, and drums. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as a kid, growing up with later Beatles stuff like the White Album or *Magical Mystery Tour*, where the music is crazy and all over the place and experimental, that’s what we like to do.”
“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”
