Revolver's 20 Best Albums of 2022 So Far

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.”

With a legacy that stretches back to 1990, Crowbar are among the sludge OGs. The New Orleans band’s 12th album brings back the suffocating doom of their early releases alongside the melodic heft of beloved albums *Odd Fellows Rest* and *Equilibrium*—not to mention new acoustic textures. “We really tried to mix it up a lot with the tracklisting,” vocalist, guitarist, and lyricist Kirk Windstein tells Apple Music. “I still always approach it as an album with two sides, as if I was flipping the vinyl and listening to the whole thing as one piece of work.” Lyrically, some of the songs on *Zero and Below* have specific meanings, but most are purposefully open to interpretation. “The way I am with lyrics, I really just write a lot of thoughts down,” Windstein says. “Some of the songs have an actual story behind them and some don’t at all. It’s up to the listener to decide what they think it means.” Below, he comments on each track. **“The Fear That Binds You”** “Believe it or not, most of the music we did for this song was originally written for Body Count. But by that point, they had already finished with drum tracks, and it was just too late. But I thought a couple of these riffs could turn into Crowbar riffs, and they did. It’s a ripping tune, so we decided to open with it.” **“Her Evil Is Sacred”** “That title was something that Robin, my wife, came up with. She always helps me a bit with stuff. I did a podcast with Jamey Jasta the other day where we listened to the whole new record together and he asked if the song was about the city of New Orleans. There’s really no exact meaning to that particular track, but now I can’t stop thinking about what he said, because I could see where it could be about New Orleans.” **“Confess to Nothing”** “Musically, the first riff is one of \[guitarist\] Matt \[Brunson\]’s riffs. I always tell people that I don’t write everything, and it’s true. I write more riffs than the other guys, but the riffs they do write are really important and really killer. This is a perfect example. So, I took that riff and ran with it for the rest of the song. Without it, I wouldn’t have had anything to feed off of. Matt even came up with the title. Jasta said it could be on a T-shirt—and it could. It’s a cool little saying.” **“Chemical Godz”** “I came up with the main riff and chorus, but the middle section is Matt’s and it’s beautiful. I laid a lot of harmonies on top of it, and it really takes you on a journey somewhere else. Lyrically, it’s one of the few songs that is pretty black-and-white. It’s about substance abuse, and we show that in the video as well. It’s easy for me to write about because it’s everywhere. Thankfully, with all the problems I’ve had, I’ve never had an opiate or heroin issue, but I have a lot of friends who have.” **“Denial of the Truth”** “I think I pretty much wrote all of this one, and it’s exactly what it was intended to be, which is a total doom track. In the beginning of the band, we had some doom stuff, but we got away from it a bit. Some of that stuff can be kinda monotonous live, especially if you’re a support act on tours. It’s not something we’d play supporting another band, but it’s definitely a song that I love and everyone seems to dig. When we’re headlining, I’d love to put it in the set.” **“Bleeding From Every Hole”** “I don’t even know how I came up with that title, but it’s a metaphor for just being in the darkest place you could ever possibly be, where mentally and physically you feel like you’re dying. I mean, it can’t get any worse than bleeding from every hole. But it’s a short, brutal song, hardcore with the drum beat and whatnot—a total upbeat tune. This one sounds killer at rehearsal, so it’s definitely going to be a live one. It’s actually going to be the second video as well.” **“It’s Always Worth the Gain”** “I was listening to the Motörhead record *Rock ’n’ Roll* on the way to the studio, and the title track is like an old-school call-and-answer thing with the drums and the vocals and this short little riff. So, I got to the studio and wrote this on the spot. It’s a little more rock ’n’ roll than a lot of Crowbar stuff—at least the verse is—but to me it’s really hooky and catchy. Lyrically, it’s about the music business. It’s talking about how cutthroat and stupid it is, and how bands are always in competition with each other, getting fucked over by labels and stuff, but learning your lessons as you go.” **“Crush Negativity”** “Thirty years ago, when I was trying to find myself as a lyricist, I’d write a lot of negative stuff where I was kind of like, ‘There’s no hope, give up,’ or ‘We’re all going to die’—just dark shit that had no light at the end of the tunnel. As I get older, I’m trying to be more positive with every aspect of my life. Lyrically, this song is still heavy as shit, but I think it’s important to give people hope. I’m saying, ‘You can get through this. I know it’s hard, but you can do it and you’re not alone’ type of thing.” **“Reanimating a Lie”** “This one is weird. Musically, I think Matt came up with the opening riff once again, and then I took it and ran with it. It picks up, tempo-wise, and it’s a lot harder at the end, as far as the aggression and everything. But lyrically, it’s really strange because it’s almost about a dying sun. I normally never write fictional or fantasy type things, but with this song I did.” **“Zero and Below”** “This is a great closer for the record because it’s got a really cool vibe. It’s epic in its own way, with a lot of guitar harmonies. And it’s the first time ever in 30 years and 12 records that we actually have an acoustic guitar on a Crowbar record, which was our producer’s idea. I was going to play a 12-string, but he said I should play a six-string and do octaves instead—which is exactly what a 12-string is anyway, but it sounds way better doing it this way. It’s different than anything we’ve ever done.”

For their second album, Devil Master fashioned a mirror of their 2019 debut, *Satan Spits on Children of Light*. “Everything from the title to the instrumental in the middle of the album is a mirrored opposite,” guitarist and primary songwriter Darkest Prince of All Rebellion tells Apple Music. With a reconfigured lineup that sees new drummer and keyboardist Festering Terror in Deepest Catacomb (aka Chris Ulsh, formerly of Power Trip) joining the band while vocalist Disembody Through Unparalleled Pleasure takes on bass duties, Devil Master set out to create a more immersive experience with their signature blend of black metal, goth, and Japanese hardcore influences. In keeping with the band’s ritual magic practices, they finished recording *Ecstasies of Never Ending Night* on Walpurgis Night. “The way the release date worked out, the album comes out almost exactly a year later,” Darkest Prince points out. “The magician doesn’t believe in coincidences.” Below, he discusses some key tracks. **“Ecstasies…”** “Because we lost our touring keyboard player, this album is more guitar-oriented than the last one. We wanted to establish that with the opening track and this beautiful guitar melody.” **“Enamoured in the Throes of Death”** “This was written by our bassist and vocalist Disembody Through Unparalleled Pleasure, and it’s one of my favorite songs on the album. It fits the mirror pattern because he wrote the song after the instrumental that opens the last album, ‘Nightmares in the Human Collapse,’ and this is the only song he wrote for this album, just like that was the only song he wrote on that album.” **“Golgotha’s Cruel Song”** “Golgotha is where Christ was crucified, and the name means ‘place of skulls.’ I just imagine the skulls crying out for a crucifixion. It’s an anti-Christian song in the sense that we feel Christianity is the real death cult.” **“The Vigour of Evil”** “This is a song about fucking. I think we should leave it at that.” **“Abyss in Vision”** “This is the first song on side two of the vinyl, and just like the first track on side two of the last album, it’s a death-rock song.” **“Acid Black Mass”** “I wrote and demoed this song and the next one on K2 spice. Now that it’s illegal, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone try it. It’s killed more people than anything at this point. But I think this is a crazy-sounding song, and that’s why.” **“Funerary Gyre of Dreams & Madness”** “I got the word ‘gyre’ from the opening line of ‘The Second Coming’ by W. B. Yeats, and I like it because it means ‘vortex.’ We thought it would be funny to give the most elaborate black-metal title to the most punk song on the album.” **“Never Ending Night”** “We wanted the last track to be a goth dance song that you never want to end, like Trisomie 21’s ‘The Last Song.’ I also took inspiration from Selda Bağcan and Atabay Cargulyyew. Along with ‘Enamoured,’ it’s my favorite on the album.”

When Foo Fighters came up with the idea for their 2022 comedic horror film, *Studio 666*, the script envisioned a fictional and ill-fated metal band called Dream Widow. In the movie, Dream Widow’s frontman becomes possessed by a demon and murders the rest of the band. Decades later, Foo Fighters—playing themselves—rent the mansion where the murders took place, and frontman Dave Grohl becomes a victim of the same curse. When it came time to create Dream Widow’s music for the film, Grohl took on the task himself, resulting in a full-length ripper that touches on thrash (“March of the Insane”), doom (“Cold”), and Southern-fried metal (“Come All Ye Faithful”).

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.”

Over a decade in the making, Ibaraki is the brainchild of Trivium guitarist and vocalist Matt Heafy. In creating this Japanese-themed black-metal album, Heafy enlisted Emperor mastermind and living black-metal legend Ihsahn to produce. The result is *Rashomon*, which shares its name with Akira Kurosawa’s iconic 1950 film but is actually a reference to the Kyoto city gates after which Kurosawa titled his movie. “It was Ihsahn who suggested that I tap into my Japanese heritage for these songs,” Heafy tells Apple Music. “I had never considered that possibility, so my mind was blown. I started revisiting all these fun Japanese folklore stories that my mom had taught me about, or that I had learned while researching designs for some of my tattoos. Within a week, I had the lyrics finished.” Below, he details each track. **“Hakanaki Hitsuzen”** “The title translates to ‘necessary fragility,’ which is something that Ihsahn told me that we needed to salvage from black metal. Originally, I was like, ‘Well, black metal’s all about mechanical precision on the instruments and very tight technical stuff.’ He’s like, ‘No. It’s the opposite. It’s actually very organic, an almost punk-rock sloppy thing that needs to happen.’ That’s the necessary fragility he was describing. My good friend Ken Sakurada, who owns Shin Sushi in Orlando, helped me with these translations and come up with this new Japanese term.” **“Kagutsuchi”** “Kagutsuchi is the Japanese god of fire. It’s something I’ve wanted to reference for a tattoo, but I can’t find a picture of him. He’s also known as Homusubi, and that means ‘he who starves fire.’ Which all sounds like ‘he who walks the fire breathes,’ which is, coincidentally, a Trivium lyric. This song was one of the first things I wrote for this record—back in 2010, 2011, and this is the one that made Ihsahn keen on the project.” **“Ibaraki-Dōji”** “Ibaraki-dōji is the demon of Rashomon. He’s the mascot of Trivium, also the name of this band, and it’s where this demon named Ibaraki-dōji, which means ‘demon child,’ was terrorizing Rashomon. A samurai named Watanabe no Tsuna chopped off the demon’s arm, but he comes back years later disguised as Watanabe’s aunt, grabs the arm, and turns back into Ibaraki-dōji. He’s never seen again in Japanese folklore.” **“Jigoku Dayū”** “‘Jigoku Dayū’ comes from a painting I saw at a museum in San Francisco when they had an exhibit of the Japanese courtesans. I didn’t know that prostitution was such a big thing in ancient Japanese culture, but there was this one piece of this woman in a kimono with all these scenes of hell, and I was really drawn to it. The story is that Jigoku Dayū had a noble life but was captured by bandits and forced into prostitution. To symbolize what she felt her life was, she made a kimono with all these etchings of hell. She’s known as the Hell Courtesan.” **“Tamashii No Houkai”** “Ihsahn has a record called *Das Seelenbrechen*, which is one of my favorite things that he’s done. The title is German for ‘the breaking of the soul.’ I asked my friend Ken if we could recreate that idea in Japanese, so the title is another term that we invented. Tamashii no Houkai means ‘soul collapse’ or ‘soul breaking.’ It was co-written by Ihsahn—I think they might be Emperor riffs that he never used—and he does a guitar solo on this one, too.” **“Akumu” (feat. Nergal)** “‘Akumu’ translates to ‘Nightmare.’ I wrote this song and ‘Tamashii’ before knowing this would be a Japanese project, so that’s why they’re a little bit different. When I presented Nergal with the track, I asked him to translate the lyrics to Polish and sing them that way. Just by coincidence, \[drummer\] Alex \[Bent\] was playing a reggaetón beat, so we’ve got a black-metal song with Polish screaming, a Japanese theme, and a reggaetón beat. Which, I’m pretty sure, is something that’s never happened before.” **“Komorebi”** “Komorebi is a Japanese term that already exists. It means ‘sunlight filtered through leaves on trees.’ I just thought it was so Japanese that there was a word for that kind of description. But the song is a lot like something I would write for Trivium, where it’s a new story that sort of pictures the world of Ibaraki like a Japanese version of that show *Vikings*. It’s mostly acoustic, but it crescendos into this big, electric cacophony of sounds.” **“Rōnin” (feat. Gerard Way)** “I think it’s so fun that a guy from Trivium and a guy from My Chemical Romance recorded a black-metal song together. Everyone always asks why Gerard Way is on the song. We’ve been pen pals for years, just as I have been with Ihsahn and Nergal. We first met at a big Australian festival called Big Day Out. We were the only metal band on it, but the promoter invited us both to dinner, thinking we’d get along. And we did—super well. We talked about comics and food and singing. Then, a couple years back, we started talking about black metal and I asked him to be on the track.” **“Susanoo No Mikoto”** “Susanoo no Mikoto is the Japanese storm god who was expelled from heaven in the Shinto religion. What I like about the Japanese stories of the gods is a lot like Norse mythology or Greek mythology, but Shintoism isn’t a mythology—it’s an actual religion. My mom practices Shinto. But the gods are imperfect, which I love. In this story, Susanoo kills an eight-headed dragon by getting each of the heads drunk on sake so he can save a fisherman’s daughter and force her to marry him. I have the whole story tattooed on my back.” **“Kaizoku”** “Kaizoku is the Japanese term for ‘Viking,’ which is a word I’d never seen before. I’ve described the outro as having an almost *Nightmare Before Christmas* vibe, if it had happened in Eastern Europe—or a kind of spaghetti western gypsy sound. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who’s a journalist in Prague, and she said it actually makes sense because spaghetti westerns were inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s films. So, the whole thing came around.”

Nearly 30 years into their career as one of the most globally recognized hard rock bands‚ not to mention pioneers of nu metal, proving severe guitar syncopation and high-octane rap-rock are no flash-in-the-pan genre trends—Korn returns with their 14th studio album. Not quite as dark as 2019’s *The Nothing*, written in the aftermath of the death of frontman Jonathan Davis’ wife, *Requiem* is a complex meditation on grief. Not softer, exactly, but nine tracks of real profundity: shoegaze-y detours (“Let the Dark Do the Rest”), death-metal sludge (“Hopeless and Beaten”), metallic scraping (“Lost in the Grandeur”), and the thick radio-rock melodicism of “Start the Healing” (featuring a surprisingly positive message: “I can take it all away, the feelings/Break apart the pain and start the healing”). This is not just the veteran release of a consistent band but one that chooses to evolve with each new record.

Nine albums in, Swedish tech maestros Meshuggah are still pushing metal’s boundaries forward. *Immutable* sees the band honing and expanding the djent style they’re credited with originating while offering a glimpse of an ominous future. “A lot of the lyrical content of the album is social commentary on what we see happening around us, and man’s inability to change and evolve,” drummer and lyricist Tomas Haake tells Apple Music. “The cover art tells the story—you have a man that’s burning, but he’s still going for a knife. The title also references the band itself—we’re doing the same thing we set out to do many years ago.” Below, he comments on each track. **“Broken Cog”** “This one is ‘third time’s the charm.’ We actually started recording this for *Koloss* back in 2012, but it just didn’t feel right. We tried it again for *The Violent Sleep of Reason*, but it didn’t happen again. This time, we finally got it to work. It was a deliberate choice to put this first, a song that builds and builds, and once the vocals kick in, it’s not even \[vocalist\] Jens \[Kidman\]—it’s just warped whispers and stuff. It’s definitely an esoteric choice of first track, but I think it’s cool because you have no idea what to expect of the next one.” **“The Abysmal Eye”** “This is a track that me and \[bassist\] Dick \[Lövgren\] worked on for a long time. We had two or three hours’ worth of different riffs that we honed down to this. Lyrics-wise, it’s the big AI scare. To a certain degree, it was inspired by an interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about AI. It’s daunting and scary if you allow yourself to get into that mode of thinking.” **“Light the Shortening Fuse”** “This is one of \[guitarist\] Mårten \[Hagström\]’s tracks, and he wrote the lyrics for it as well. It’s a commentary on how social media has changed everything and become such a tool for idiocy and disinformation. It’s become a political tool that people look to as some form of verified news outlet, \[whereas in\] reality it’s quite the opposite. No one should ever listen to it. And also, for kids, as far as body dysmorphia and all these filters that make you look a certain way—social media fucks with everything.” **“Phantoms”** “We’re one of those bands that can sometimes write music and rhythms completely based around drums. This was a song that I’d been messing around with for a while, and I put some weird, downtuned guitars on it, but then Dick came in and wrote real riffs for it. Lyrically, this is one of the few that’s a bit more personal. It’s about memories and regrets over things you’ve done or said in life that you really wish undone. As you get older and step out of your younger self, you get a better sense of how hurtful some of those things were.” **“Ligature Marks”** “This is another one of Mårten’s tracks, and to me it’s one of the strongest on the album. I heard him playing this thing about a week before we went into the studio and was like, ‘Dude, what is that?’ Apparently, he’d had it laying around for years, but it made it to the album with a week’s notice. The song is using S&M vocabulary as metaphors for how we act in life as masochists or sadists on a spiritual level—as a species, but also as individuals being the threat to our own existence.” **“God He Sees in Mirrors”** “Dick Lövgren wrote everything for this. It’s a very short, rhythmical phrase that never starts the same way, which makes it weird to listen to. Lyrically, this is about how the well-being of the individual and the collective is subdued under the policies of tyrants and dictators. Instead, the gaining of power and personality cult becomes way more important than policy-directing. See Trump, for example. Or Bolsonaro in Brazil. There’s plenty of them around the world. They see God in mirrors.” **“They Move Below”** “This is an instrumental, and it’s one of Mårten’s tracks. This is his go-to place. For each album, he always writes something in the style of this, where it’s a little sludgier, with almost one foot in stoner rock and one foot in metal. It also has a two- or three-minute intro that’s only clean guitar. It’s beautiful-sounding. We’re using this track as a tool on the album to take things down several notches and start over.” **“Kaleidoscope”** “To me, this one is a little bit like the *Koloss* track ‘Do Not Look Down,’ which was a little bit more rock and not quite as metal. This is another one me and Dick worked on together. We weren’t really sure about this one until we heard Jens’ vocals and started mixing it. Then we realized, ‘Oh, this thing is hopping.’ Lyrically, it’s imagining a drug you could take that lets you see things for what they truly are, whether that’s injustices or lies or even good things.” **“Black Cathedral”** “This is an intro for ‘I Am That Thirst,’ but it is its own track. The weird thing is, on the album there’s a long gap between them. I felt like they should have been more put together. But it really ties into ‘I Am That Thirst’ in the sense that you have the same tremolo-picking going on with something like 20 or 30 guitars stacked on top of each other. Sometimes you’re feeling like you just want to put something on there that’s not what people expect at all, and this is one of those things.” **“I Am That Thirst”** “That’s a track by Mårten, but I wrote the lyrics for it. He usually goes into sludge mode or thrash mode, and this is definitely his thrash mode. People might recognize this style from some of the earlier works we’ve done. Lyrically, it’s about man’s desire for wealth and immortality—and the thirst for more, regardless of the status or wealth that you already possess. A ‘grass is greener on the other side’ type of thing.” **“The Faultless”** “Another Mårten track with my lyrics. This is a first for us because it has Jens, Mårten, and me doing vocals for it. There’s a part that goes from left to right, where Mårten does a vocal and Jens does the answer. And then there’s a spoken vocal part that comes in—that’s my voice, and we just pitched it down a half a note or something. Lyrically, it’s about mental and psychological abuse through words and actions, and how some people go through life inflicting injury on others while being completely unable to see their own faults and flaws.” **“Armies of the Preposterous”** “This is one of me and Dick’s tracks. It’s a waltz, which is unusual. We’ve only done that once before, which was ‘The Demon’s Name is Surveillance’ off the *Koloss* album. It’s also one of the few songs on the album that has faster double bass for longer periods of time. Lyrically, it’s about the preposterous rise of neo-Nazism and far-right policies around the world. It’s scary to me how supposedly functioning individuals can stand there and say that the genocide of the Jews during World War II did not happen.” **“Past Tense”** “It’s been a few albums since we ended on something really calm like this, but it’s a tool we used to implement in the ’90s, especially on *Chaosphere* and *Destroy Erase Improve*. We just wanted to strengthen the sad note that ‘Armies of the Preposterous’ ends on by adding a final track that’s sad and melancholy.”

“Belly fat in the bio bin/The penis now sees the sun again.” This soon-to-be-immortal couplet comes from “Zick Zack,” the hilarious plastic-surgery send-up and single from *Zeit*. Given the decade-long gap between Rammstein’s untitled 2019 album and its predecessor *Liebe ist für alle da*, the relatively quick appearance of their eighth record comes as quite a surprise. Clearly, the German industrial overlords took advantage of the enforced downtime every touring artist was saddled with during pandemic lockdown and emerged with their famous sense of humor intact. *Zeit* (German for “time”) boasts plaintive yet soaring piano ballads (“Schwarz,” the title track), odes to big boobs (“Dicke Titten”), and even a raucous cock-rock-style banger in “OK.”

“Our main lyrical concern is just writing about death—not necessarily dying or anything being killed, but shit about dead stuff.” That’s what Undeath guitarist and main lyricist Kyle Beam tells Apple Music when asked about the theme of the band’s second album, *It’s Time…To Rise From the Grave*. Building on the breakout success of their 2020 debut, *Lesions of a Different Kind*, the Rochester, New York-based death metal crew honed their songwriting into a tighter and even more effective verse-chorus-verse format this time out. “We just wanted to take what we had before, make it a bit more concise, a bit more focused, to make sure the songs really stand on their own,” Beam says. The album even has a loose storyline that reads like *Army of Darkness* meets *The Terminator*. “It’s basically about dudes in hell equipping undead soldiers with sick guns,” he offers. Below, he discusses each track. **“Fiend for Corpses”** “We get a lot of comparisons to Cannibal Corpse just because we love them so much. I’d say this is the most Corpse-esque song on the record, so it had to be brutal lyrically. It’s a song about digging up bodies in the cemetery and banging them and eating them. It’s the first track on the record, so we just wanted to set the tone.” **“Defiled Again”** “When you first read the title, it sounds way more brutal than the song actually is. You’re kinda like, ‘Oh, no. Is this a sexual assault song or something?’ I didn’t mean for it to sound like that—I just wanted it to be brutal. The lyrics are just about reading a spooky book in a cemetery. It’s not the main character’s first time reading this book, and every time he reads it, it’s like his mind gets melted by the eldritch truth.” **“Rise From the Grave”** “This one is like the modus operandi of Undeath lyrics. It’s just skeletons with bronze swords and shields and bows and arrows, and they’re fucking clambering over parapets to get your village. It’s the title track, basically.” **“Necrobionics”** “This song gets into the nitty gritty of how the army of the dead is outfitted and equipped in the next track, ‘Enhancing the Dead.’ It was inspired by this game Quake 4, where your character is human in the first part. In the second part, he gets captured by alien forces, and they cut off his arms and legs and attach sick robot arms and legs so you can reload faster and run faster—all kinds of shit. But you don’t even have to be alive for it to work.” **“Enhancing the Dead”** “This one is sort of the overarching story of this conflict. The first lyrics are, ‘Cities of life, now cities of dead, bolstering the undead army,’ because the more people fall, the bigger the army gets—and eventually the whole planet is done. There’s nothing left, so they take off, onto the next planet. When they peace out, the lyric is like, ‘Take this foot beyond this earthly realm,’ or some shit like that.” **“The Funeral Within”** “This one is about going crazy. It’s about the death of oneself on the inside because of all the terrible things you’ve done.” **“Head Splattered in Seven Ways”** “This is about an interrogation. It was really inspired by Cannibal Corpse, too, because they have a track on *Kill* called ‘Five Nails Through the Neck.’ It’s the fifth song on that record, and a couple parts of the song are in five. Ever since I was a kid, I just thought that was the coolest thing. It’s kind of nerdy but brutal at the same time. So, ‘Head Splattered in Seven Ways’ has got seven syllables in the title, the whole song is in seven, and it’s the seventh track on the record.” **“Human Chandelier”** “If Corpse did this one, I like to think it would be about how this guy’s actually going out and killing people, taking their bones, and making them into a chandelier. But it’s actually a tamer track for us, lyrically and musically. Maybe not intensity-wise, but harmony-wise. It’s less grammatically dense and less atonal. It’s about a guy who lives alone in this dark-as-fuck mansion like *Beauty and the Beast*, and he goes to the local cemetery to pick out bones for the human chandelier he’s building. He’s not malicious—he’s just a weirdo.” **“Bone Wrought”** “Most of the riffs on this song are from our bass player, Tommy \[Wall\]. I gave him some direction for the lyrics, but he wrote those as well. I think they’re some of the best lyrics on the record. It talks more about how the army of the dead are forging the weapons they use.” **“Trampled Headstones”** “The lyrics to this one are kind of goofy. It’s about a cemetery cult who eat flesh, but they also eat gravestones. They can’t get all their nutrients just from eating each other, so they eat rock as well. They take bites right out of the headstones.”

“I loved it immediately because you know exactly what it means, but it’s not a real word.” That’s Underoath drummer, co-lyricist, and co-vocalist Aaron Gillespie talking about the title of the Floridian metalcore band’s ninth album. “Almost everyone living today scrolls through social media, living vicariously through each other in this sort of sad way. It’s even weirder when you’re watching people you don’t even know.” That observation prompted Gillespie to pose deeper questions about our collective relationship with social media: “What does that do to your psyche?” he asks Apple Music. “How does that help create the you that you are now?” It all became a jumping-off point for the lyrical self-reflection and human examination on *Voyeurist*, an album that Underoath recorded and produced themselves for the first time in their 20-plus year career. Below, Gillespie comments on each song. **“Damn Excuses”** “This is an angry, cathartic song that’s steady and fast, and it’s over before you know what happened. Lyrically, it’s kind of a frustrating moment. We all grew up in organized religion-centered homes. Many of us have deconstructed how we were raised, but your family is still your family. You’ve changed, but the people in your life haven’t, and you’ve still got to love and respect them. But it gets harder as you get older and you become more self-aware.” **“Hallelujah”** “The title is sort of sarcastic. We have a song called ‘It’s Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door,’ from our 2004 album, and it’s got this choir part in the bridge. We had the idea to do something like that on the chorus of this song, as opposed to \[vocalist\] Spencer \[Chamberlain\] or I making a typical Underoath chorus. So, we called some friends over to our studio one night and just made sort of a mock choir. It felt very DIY, and I like to think that we still try and do things that way when it comes to crafting music after 20 years of being a band.” **“I’m Pretty Sure I’m Out of Luck and Have No Friends”** “We wrote this one together in an Airbnb in Florida during the height of the 2020 mayhem, which is not usually how we do things these days. Usually, songs start on a computer, you know. I really like the sample in the beginning with the 911 call. Maybe this guy is doing drugs and coming in and out of consciousness, or maybe he’s just in some kind of weird headspace. We found it on YouTube and recorded it into a cheap handheld microphone, and then I chopped it up to make the sample you hear.” **“Cycle” (feat. Ghostemane)** “Have you ever seen the Netflix show *Dark*? It’s incredible—and ‘Dark’ was the working title for this song. The lyrics were kind of written around the idea of that show: How do you know what’s real and what’s not? Around the time we talked about getting Ghostemane on the track, I randomly got a direct message from him saying, ‘I just wanted to thank the people that I grew up listening to. Thank you for your music.’ And I was like, ‘Well, actually, thank *you*. But also, I require your services, sir.’ Such a crazy coincidence.” **“Thorn”** “I love this song so much. The lyric has to do with explaining yourself to someone with a bit of an apology, like, ‘I’m a thorn in your side,’ but you’re also saying, ‘I can’t help it—this is who I am.’ It was weird because this song took so many iterations to get where it is. When you make your own music, you inevitably self-edit, which I think is healthy right up to the point when it’s not. Then you just start going in circles. This song felt like that at times, but I feel like we got it in the end.” **“(No Oasis)”** “We had the idea of doing an interlude but making it more of a song. I love when Trent Reznor puts a record out and there’s something on there that might be noise for three minutes, but it feels really purposeful. This was an attempt at that, but we gave it two verses and a chorus. That part where you hear someone walking down the stairs is actually Spencer walking down the stairs, and we recorded him laughing too. These days it’s easy to create stuff like that digitally, but we did it the old-fashioned way.” **“Take a Breath”** “This was one of the first songs written for the album. I want to say we did it in February of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. At first, the opening riff was exactly like a Deftones song, until our guitar player came in and pointed it out. But he already had the fix, which is what you hear now. I love this song because the bridge kind of feels like Tool. Listening to their latest album, *Fear Inoculum*, I got really inspired by that rolling tom thing they do on the drums.” **“We’re All Gonna Die”** “Again, the lyrics reference the really conservative religious background we all come from, where people always say, ‘I’m praying for you.’ I’ve been guilty of saying that to people when I was in high school or in my twenties, and it wasn’t true. It’s something you say that’s almost like a pat on the head. This isn’t a knock on anyone’s religion—it’s more like calling out people who are disingenuous. The song is saying that we’re all in this together. We’re all gonna pass away at some point. Don’t say you’re going to pray for me.” **“Numb”** “This one started with our keyboard player, Chris \[Dudley\]. He brought in that drum and bass thing in the beginning, and we wrote the song around it. Most of the song is one drumbeat, which is really rare for Underoath. I do topline songwriting stuff for other artists, and the chorus lyric is a line I wrote for Glitch Mob two or three years ago that they ended up not using. We had tried writing the chorus for ‘Numb’ so many different ways, but that was the one that stuck.” **“Pneumonia”** “I think this is my favorite Underoath song ever. Our guitar player, Tim \[McTague\], his dad had been sick with cancer and ended up passing away from pneumonia, which was a complication of his original ailment. His dad was a real pillar of the band in the early days—we practiced in their garage and everything. Tim was really close with his dad and wanted to memorialize him. He wrote the lyrics to the back half of the song, which he’s never done before. Usually, Spencer and I write all the lyrics, but Tim wrote these from his dad’s perspective. It’s really powerful and special.”

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.”