Revolver's 25 Best Albums of 2020

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

Code Orange vocalist, drummer, and bandleader Jami Morgan says his band’s fourth album is all about duality. “It’s about societal introspection and looking at where we’re at as a youth culture,” he tells Apple Music. “But it’s also about looking at yourself as a person—and what you present to the world in this digital age versus what’s inside.” On *Underneath*, the unclassifiable Pittsburgh band—equal parts hardcore crew and groove metal enthusiasts, punk rabble-rousers and industrial technicians—imbue their hyper-modern musical style with cold-eyed sociological observations and deep existential malaise. “There’s a journey down this rabbit hole of anxiety and fear and all these regrets and pain,” Morgan explains. “You’re looking at the world and looking at the bitterness and negative stuff you have and trying to work through it and see where it’s leading us in this very noisy world where it’s very hard to stand out but everyone’s constantly talking.” Below, Morgan and guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers guide us through their new underworld. **(Deeperthanbefore)** Jami Morgan: “This intro is a trailer, in some ways—or the scene before the opening titles. It’s introducing a little bit of our narrative voice and setting up a feeling of dread. And it starts off with the theme from the end of our last record, which we continued on some of the EPs that came in between. It’s the theme song, in a lot of ways, for the last era of our career that phased out and this new voice phased in.” **Swallowing the Rabbit Whole** JM: “This is about taking that first step into the realization that you\'re going to have to go on an internal journey—going down the rabbit hole of success and hurt and envy and self-worth. And you can continue to live in shame, or decide to confront this monster that\'s been depicted in our last three albums, and that\'s on the cover of this album as well.” Reba Meyers: “It took us a really long time to put this song together. It was like we were trying to figure out what kind of album we wanted to write. But once we were able to put that song together, it was the centerpiece to everything. It made everything else fall into place. It was almost a testing ground for a lot of the glitchier guitars and layering and overdubs and bringing in the pianos and synths and everything that would really take the main stage on a lot of the verses and everything of the song. It gave us a place to work off of for the other songs.” **In Fear** JM: “In some ways it’s about this culture we have of throwing each other to the wolves, where the jury of public opinion is almost the most important thing. We have to live in fear now of what we do and say and how we behave. And that’s good in some ways. But in some ways you can be stripped of what makes you an individual. So this isn’t anti-callout-culture, because some of that is important. It’s about how important social currency is, and how it’s our most important currency in a lot of ways.” **You and You Alone** JM: “‘You and You Alone’ is the first real touch of bitterness and anger on the record. We find ourselves at odds with all this hate and resentment we have towards those around us. It\'s looking at this bitterness and saying, ‘Is it totally justified, or in my mind? Or even if it is justified, is this something that I need to hang on to?’ But on the other end, I’m saying this to myself: If I have to carry this burden, what’s my part in it?” RM: “Creating this was like bringing back the old-school chaos of the style of writing we did in our riffs. But we then took it to another dimension almost with bringing in all these digital clippings and glitches. The verses started out as a simple chaotic guitar riff, but we gave it to our keyboard player, Shade, and he looped them and added all these accents and spit it back out. Then we went back and relearned the riff that way. So it was a very cool, very modern back-and-forth process.” **Who I Am** JM: “This is an observation on obsession through the lens of stalkers, and how that was looked at in the past, versus how people present themselves through social media. It\'s this unrequited idealization. In the past—and still, obviously—it’s driven people mad and they\'ve done horrible things. But now it’s something that\'s just totally normal: constantly looking at people; stalking them. And using that new media to make excuses for our shortcomings.” **Cold.Metal.Place** JM: “‘Cold.Metal.Place’ is like the environment of the record. It\'s where I\'m envisioning the birthplace of our main character—or our main antagonist, if you\'re thinking of it that way. It\'s like this merciless, barren, glass world—a machine world. This world we\'re depicting inside the record layout and on the cover. It\'s this environmental embodiment of our own self-destructive thoughts and ideas. We’re abused by this echoing noise of criticism that is sometimes necessary and sometimes just pushes you deeper into your own head. And you go into the cold metal place.” RM: “We, as a unit, have all felt like we’re in that landscape and we’re able to relate in that way—which made it so much easier to connect on writing these songs. It\'s almost like being able to see it visualized has helped me, especially, be able to get through that trial of pointed fingers at all of us. And it\'s a very special thing to feel and have gone through that as a unit through our whole journey of all these albums and coming to this one.” **Sulfur Surrounding** JM: “This is about how we manipulate each other without even meaning to. And sometimes, people mean to. Are you corroding your group by making everyone so connected and having to go on? That’s something I’ve struggled with. Is this the wrong thing for these people who are my friends? I want to do the right thing, but these feelings take over. And I feel everyone can relate to that in a way.” **The Easy Way** JM: “This song is like the bridge between the two halves of the album. We had a song called ‘Only One Way’ that we put out a year or two ago, and this is the sequel. And there\'s a part at the end of ‘Only One Way,’ melodically, that actually is the chorus of this song. Reba sings ‘Only One Way’—it\'s awesome—and then at the end, I creep in with this vocal melody, and that\'s the chorus of this song.” RM: “I think all of us knew when we were writing ‘Only One Way’ that it was going to come back around, just because of how strong the melody was at the end. It didn’t feel like it got its full time in the spotlight. And we always like having things connect and weave together so it doesn\'t just feel like a bunch of songs slapped together on an album. We always try to make it more of a journey—not just through this album, but through our whole trajectory as a band. And I think a lot of people who like our band like us because of that. We\'re all very obsessive about music that has more of an overall vision to it. And obviously, you can see Jami has planned all of this out.” **Erasure Scan** JM: “‘Erasure Scan’ is probably the darkest song on the album. Lyrically, it\'s about the school shooting epidemic, and maybe the events and brain trauma that turn people to committing these horrible atrocities. It gets into some light, probably bullshit, very poorly researched psychology, but I was just looking into the Triune Brain theory—about how the three brains can become rigidly locked. That\'s been seen in a lot of school shooters under psychological evaluation. They become very fixated on the external goal and mission that they\'re unable to divert from. We also talk about this parasite that we get deeper into later on ‘Back Inside the Glass,’ but it’s this aquatic worm that exists in grasshoppers, fucks with their brain and controls them and influences their behavior. So I was relating that to these shootings and talking about the government swaying public opinion with pointless gun and freedom debates, but nothing is really done to help reduce it.” **Last Ones Left** JM: “Other than ‘You and You Alone,’ I would say ‘Last Ones Left’ is pretty much the most bitter-ass fucking song on the album. It\'s about pride and it\'s about social climbing. It\'s pretty much saying we\'re the last ones left on the surface of real bands that have worked and climbed that fucking ladder through hard work and not through bootlicking.” RM: “We\'ve always needed to have that song on every record that empowers us. And for me, and I know the other guys, when we play that song, it definitely has that feeling to it—even at shows when we feel like it\'s us against the world, and no one there even cares or wants to see us—we can use that as an empowering song, and we\'re almost screaming it and singing it to ourselves at times.” **Autumn and Carbine** JM: “On the surface, the song is about the quick lives and deaths of these flavor-of-the-year new artists that are being propped up by corporations. They\'re told to be bombastic and loud, and their demise is very similar. It\'s quick and it\'s loud and then it\'s gone.” **Back Inside the Glass** JM: “Sonically, this song is very sci-fi hardcore in a lot of ways. Our main character, the monster on the front cover that we call The Cutter, is trapped inside this glass shell of how the world sees him—and how maybe even you envision yourself, for better or worse. And it’s that monster trying to get out. It’s your own mania getting the best of you. So you want to kill this thing inside you, but it’s going to come out like that monster. So you want it to go back inside the glass.” **A Sliver** JM: “Thematically, ‘A Sliver’ is the culmination of years of overexposure and noise that almost leads us to become deaf to the cries of everyone around us. Because we all watch these tragedies like they\'re a TV show. But it seems in the past, everything matters only for a sliver of time, and then it’s on to the next thing. We’re lost in the rat race, and it’s all been engineered by corporations for this exact purpose. So we all keep posting; we keep promising. But it\'s really for nothing. We\'re not heard at all. You\'re just a dollar or another voice in a sea of voices. Even that only matters for a second, and then people move on.” **Underneath** JM: ‘‘Underneath’ is really about being in that final, most important moment, facing this monster—whether that be proverbial or inner self. It’s the most positive song on the record, I think, because a lot of it is about redemption. It doesn’t really give you a clear ending as to what happened, but there’s a truth and you’re going to find out what it is. So we have to shed who we are and remove that machine inside. We either stand up to it or just disappear and become it.”

“Human beings are the most savage things walking the earth,” Body Count frontman Ice-T tells Apple Music. “We’re in this form of denial about why the earth is fucked up and why life is fucked up, but all we do is eat and destroy shit.” It’s the kind of shrewd observation that has propelled the gangsta rap pioneer since the early ’80s, and which catapulted Body Count into the public eye with 1992’s ultra-controversial “Cop Killer.” But Ice assures us that the title and overall sentiment of the LA metal band’s seventh album doesn’t just apply to meat-eaters. “It has nothing to do with your diet,” he says. “Vegans might think they’re on some type of higher level because they don’t eat animals. But they still eat life—plants are alive too—so don’t try to tap out of being human with that bullshit. We’re all part of the same human nature—we’re all carnivores.” Here are the stories behind each of the album’s tracks, directly from Ice-T himself. **Carnivore** “My overall belief of human nature is that we’re very violent, we\'re very dangerous, and it’s self-preservation over everything. Humans are the only thing that kills for sport. We’re very interesting creatures, and we figured out ways to justify the shit we do. So that\'s what the carnivore is: animals that stand erect. That\'s us.” **Point the Finger (feat. Riley Gale)** “This was Riley’s idea—he wrote the outline of the song. It’s about one of those cases we’ve seen too many times, especially recently, where people are getting shot by the cops and then the cops vilify the victim. ‘They used to be this, they used to be that, they were bad.’ It’s common tactics: An unarmed person gets shot and it’s like, ‘How the fuck do I end up being the problem?’ Now, as far as Riley, I got turned on to Power Trip when I was out on the road. Everybody was telling me they got big riffs that are heavy like Body Count. So I went to see them, and I was blown away. Riley’s bad as a motherfucker and the group sounds dope. So when it was time for the collabs to kick in for this album, it was natural to get him. I think it’s one of the hardest crowd-moving tracks on the album.” **Bum-Rush** “‘Bum-Rush’ has got a little Public Enemy going on, a little Prodigy vibe to it. In order to conquer they have to divide, but the sooner we figure out that we\'re all on the same side—that we all have the same issues—we become a problem. So they got to keep throwing out all this extra bullshit: Get mad at this, get mad at that. And we as stupid human beings do it, instead of realizing that a focused attack cannot be stopped.” **Ace of Spades** “Ever since \[2014’s\] *Manslaughter*, we made it a thing on our albums to do tributes to bands that influenced us. On *Manslaughter* we did Suicidal Tendencies, and then last time we did Slayer. On this one we did Motörhead. People ask, ‘Where’s your Motörhead influence?’ and I’m like, ‘Listen to “Cop Killer.”’ ‘Cop Killer’ is Motörhead—it’s got those open guitars and that sound of being on a Harley going down the highway. I was fortunate enough to work with Lemmy on *Airheads*—we did a song called ‘Born to Raise Hell.’ In this song, he says he doesn’t want to live forever, but I think everyone wanted him to live forever. The funny thing is, I didn’t realize I was going to have to actually *sing* this. But fortunately Lemmy wasn’t Céline Dion and I was able to pull it off. It’s Ice trying to sing Lemmy—I did my best.” **Another Level (feat. Jamey Jasta)** “Jamey has been a fan and friend of Body Count since the beginning. I met him when he was the host of *Headbangers Ball*. They told me his band was called Hatebreed, which sounded like the Klan to me. But when I got to know him, I realized he couldn’t be further from a racist. He’s a cool-ass dude who understands hardcore music like pretty much nobody else. My name on Twitter is Final Level, so he came in with this track like, ‘Yo, man—“Another Level”—this is your shit.’ So I started writing about overcoming adversity and not letting people tell you what the fuck you can’t do. And that shit slams—it’s one of the heaviest tracks on the album, and it’s got a really good hook.” **Colors - 2020** “When we do Body Count shows, there’s always an Ice-T fan yelling for ‘Colors’ or ‘6 in Tha Morning,’ but we never had it in the set list. So \[bassist\] Vince \[Price\] was like, ‘We should just cover your songs so we have them in our clip.’ So we did ‘Colors’ and it came out hard. We got \[ex-Slayer member\] Dave Lombardo to play drums on it, and it’s a trip that you can do a metal rendition of a song and it doesn’t change it much. It just makes it harder. And that goes to show that there’s a lot of similarities in this shit.” **No Remorse** “‘No Remorse,’ to me, is the hardest song on the record. It\'s just brutal. If you look at my albums, if you hold them up to each other, they\'re kind of like blueprints. So ‘No Remorse’ is in the place of \[2017’s\] ‘All Love Is Lost,’ with that same anger and emotion, ’cause what I try to do with records is hit emotions. That’s where the best songs are written. The feeling of ‘I fucked you over, but I meant to’ is a real emotion. That’s where the fire of the lyrics comes from. I can’t really make records about outer space or dragons and shit, ’cause I don’t know. I’ve never met a dragon, but I can sing about a motherfucker that crossed me and now thinks I should give a fuck. And I’m like, ‘Nah, motherfucker. Die slow.’ We all have somebody that we could dedicate that song to.” **When I’m Gone (feat. Amy Lee)** “When Nipsey Hussle passed, they sold the Staples Center out in two hours for his tribute. But could he sell it out for a concert that quick? It’s kind of fucked up that we’ll rally when someone’s dead, but not really pay attention when they’re alive. So it triggered an emotion in me and I started writing this song. We’ve got a tech in our group named Tyler who is connected some way to Amy, and somehow or another they got the song to her and she wanted to fuck with it. I didn’t know she was on it until she had done it. So I get the track and I’m like, ‘How the fuck did you get Amy Lee on this track? That shit is fire.’ She took the record to another level. And then she wrote me an email saying she had lost somebody too soon, so you got a song where both people are writing from the heart, which is very rare.” **Thee Critical Beatdown** “This is aimed at internet tough guys. Kind of like ‘Talk Shit, Get Shot,’ but instead of getting shot, I’m just going to beat you down. It’s textbook Body Count grindhouse. I always call my band grindhouse because it’s like wild karate movies or the blaxploitation films where motherfuckers knock you through three walls and shit. It has a touch of humor, and if you don’t get the humor, then you’re missing the point. It’s ultraviolent to the point that you laugh. It’s some motherfucker talking shit and me saying, ‘Let’s meet up,’ but just like a bitch he never wants to meet up. And then finally in the end of the song we meet and we got like a kung fu fight, with sound effects and everything. It’ll definitely be fun to perform.” **The Hate Is Real** “Jim Jones from Dipset wrote on Twitter, ‘The love is fake but the hate is real.’ I was like, ‘That’s a fucking song right there.’ So I started thinking about how we throw the word ‘love’ around loosely, but when someone hates you, they *really* fucking hate you. They wish you bad luck. They wish you bad health. They really wanna see the worst shit happen to you. And now we live in a world with so much racial hate and religious hate—it’s unfortunate, but that’s what it is. This one also has a cool guitar solo with Ernie C and Juan \[of the Dead\], where they harmonize at the end, which is some classic rock shit. And we’ve got Jello Biafra doing the intro—he’s been down with me from the beginning. That’s Jello talking shit over a Black Sabbath track on one of my Ice-T albums. He’s always put that politics and real shit in music, so he was perfect for this.” **6 in Tha Morning - 2020** “This is a bonus track. We wanted to have some Ice-T songs in our clip, so we did ‘Colors’ and this one. ‘Colors’ was my biggest record that broke me nationally, and ‘6 in Tha Morning’ was the record that was considered the invention of gangsta rap and started everything. If there was never a ‘6 in Tha Morning,’ there would never have been a Body Count. If the song hadn’t hit, I’d probably be in prison. That record detoured my entire life. And it’s a fun song—we took the breakdowns in it and used drum fills. It’ll be dope to play in concert.”

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

Playing video games has served as a reprieve for many during the lockdown, but for Oli Sykes, these virtual post-apocalyptic adventures also influenced the shaping of Bring Me The Horizon\'s new EP. Drawing inspiration mainly from DOOM Eternal, the Sheffield quintet tapped Mick Gordon, who composed that game\'s soundtrack, to produce this collection and capture the spirit of a big-budget video game. The angsty \"Dear Diary,\" begins the record with an airing of grievances, the LINKIN PARK-leaning \"Teardrops\" channels nu-metal\'s glory days, and tracks like \"Parasite Eve\" and \"Ludens\" build off the heavier moments from 2019\'s *amo*. The EP features collaborators that span multiple genres: \"Kingslayer\" fuses *Suicide Season*-era deathcore with BABYMETAL\'s kawaii metal stylings, while \"Obey\" weaponizes YUNGBLUD\'s raspy vocals alongside Sykes\' menacing growl to tackle societal oppression and corruption. And the haunting kiss-off \"One Day the Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest as You March Towards Your Death\" features a chilling duet between Sykes and Evanescence\'s Amy Lee, the track\'s glacial funeral march offering nothing more than a bleak look into the future.

With their fourth album, metal duo Spirit Adrift wanted to create a sharp contrast to the doom and gloom of their first three. As such, *Enlightened in Eternity* is an upbeat and triumphant record that recalls the chalice-hoisting classics of a bygone era. “I\'ve put enough energy into making really emotionally devastating and painful music,” guitarist, vocalist, and founder Nate Garrett tells Apple Music. “That\'s been pretty much everything Spirit Adrift has done up to this point. So I wanted to make something that was a little more empowering and uplifting. It still deals with death and pain and suffering and trauma and all of this stuff I\'ve always been trying to unpack and analyze, but I feel like it focuses more on the solutions rather than just the problems.” Below, Garrett shows us the path to heavy metal enlightenment. **Ride Into the Light** “I didn\'t even know that I was working on a new album—I just picked up the guitar and started playing some of those riffs. But then I kind of realized that it was taking on a shape of what sounded to me like an epic, classic type of opening track to a heavy metal album. So it became this completely unapologetic, badass heavy metal song. I tried to make it really aggressive and intense, kind of in the tradition of the classic, epic album openers like \[Judas Priest’s\] ‘Electric Eye’ and songs like that.” **Astral Levitation** “When I started playing around with this, it was pretty obvious to me that I was drawing from the Iommi School of Riffs, but every era of Tony Iommi. It\'s taken me a little bit of maturity and more open-mindedness to appreciate the later stuff, like the Tony Martin era of Black Sabbath, so I wanted to represent the entire history of that school of thought. When I was trying to come up with fitting lyrical content, I thought about a story in his autobiography where he explains without a hint of irony that he has the ability to astral project. To me, it seems to explain a little bit how he is able to just keep cranking out these archetypical, powerful songs for so long. So I took that concept and applied it in a more general sense. The song ended up being about how to achieve and maximize your full potential as a human being.” **Cosmic Conquest** “I was getting tattooed, and I heard a certain drumbeat in the tattoo shop and I realized it was that straightforward, faster rock drum beat that we hadn\'t utilized yet. I don\'t even remember what song I was listening to, but I wanted to incorporate that. I was also listening to a lot of Rick Rubin-produced metal albums at the time, like Danzig and Slayer and Trouble. Then I tried to turn my mind into Rick Rubin\'s mind and produce a Spirit Adrift song. That\'s ‘Cosmic Conquest.’ Lyrically, I like to talk about science fiction and religion and spirituality and where they all intersect. I feel like it\'s a good literary tool to chip away at some deeper questions. I\'m definitely doing that on that song.” **Screaming From Beyond** “Track four on our last few albums has been important—we’ve been doing the track-four ballad thing that so many bands have done over the years. But I got really tired of tripping over my foot switch all the time to change from dirty guitar to clean guitar, so I decided I wasn\'t going to do a ballad on this album. That\'s why there\'s no clean guitar anywhere this time. But I still wanted to make track four special, so I decided to write what I felt like would be our radio hit in the vein of bands I grew up with, like Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC. And then I put a sludge ending on it, like a nod to New Orleans to not make it too much of a hit, you know? Lyrically, it’s a ghost story, but the real issue I’m trying to address is grief and death and what it means when a loved one dies and how that haunts people.” **Harmony of the Spheres** “I like to do things that are heavier and faster than anything we\'ve done before, and I like to do things that are slower and more melodic and more psychedelic than we\'ve ever done before. Obviously, this one is more towards the aggressive end of the spectrum. The lyrical content was inspired by a book I was reading about John Dee, who was into chaos magic and influenced \[Aleister\] Crowley. So that sort of mystical creepiness kind of ties it back to our last album.” **Battle High** “On this song, again, I was trying to put myself in Rick Rubin\'s shoes and also returning to the Tony Iommi School of Riffs. But probably it’s more from the perspective of the Matt Pike School of Even Chunkier Riffs. I was listening to a podcast and I heard someone use the phrase ‘battle joy’ to describe someone that is completely euphoric and at peace only when they are in the heat of absolute chaos and physical violence. I started thinking about that concept and I thought ‘battle high’ sounded cooler, like somebody literally getting a high off of violence and war. But the song is more about how the military programs people to get to a place emotionally and psychologically where can they turn off their conscience and experience that battle high. But then, when they come back from war, there’s nothing to deprogram them and turn them back into human beings. So it ended up being an anti-war song, which I think is an important statement to be making.” **Stronger Than Your Pain** “Much like ‘Harmony of the Spheres,’ I wanted to write a song that was pushing the limits of what\'s expected from us in terms of aggression and heaviness and tempo. As for the lyrics, I was reading this book—*The Power of Now* by Eckhart Tolle. At first, I didn\'t think that sort of self-empowerment type of stuff was necessarily the most metal subject matter, but then I started thinking about all of my favorite metal albums—*Vulgar Display of Power*, *Powerslave*, *Screaming for Vengeance*, *Heaven and Hell*—they all kind of have this underdog mentality that it\'s us against the world. So I realized that self-empowerment is metal as fuck.” **Reunited in the Void** “This started off almost as an inside joke to myself, because I get such a kick out of people trying to force labels on us. First they said we\'re a doom band, which at the time was probably accurate. Then they said we\'re not a doom band. Some people still call us ‘stoner doom,’ which I completely don\'t understand. So I figured it would be funny to make a whole album of these pretty concise, aggressive, upbeat metal songs, and then hit them with a song that\'s ten and a half minutes long. It\'s super slow and downtrodden and melodic. Lyrically, it’s about the hope for the possibility of some sort of reconnection with everything that you love after death. Both of our dogs died around this time, so we put their collars on the last half of this song as alternate percussion. If you listen close enough, you can hear it.”

Spirit Adrift refuses to slow down. With ‘Enlightened In Eternity’, Nathan Garrett, alongside drummer Marcus Bryant, has created yet another monument to the timelessness of heavy metal. And while ‘Enlightened…’ builds on the sizable foundation established by previous albums, it also sets itself apart in formidable new ways, widening the scope of what Spirit Adrift can be. What Spirit Adrift have mastered, where others have failed, is the ability to invoke the power of metal’s past, whether it be the 70s, 80s or even the 90s as we hear on ‘Enlightened…’, without ever feeling throwback or ’retro’. Spirit Adrift urgently represent the sonic and emotional zeitgeist of 2020. “Enlightened In Eternity” carries the same enormous magnitude of the most significant metal records of every era, but Nathan Garrett has carved out his own place among the greatest of songwriters, by crafting uniquely classic and instantly recognizable songs. Vocally, Garrett again showcases an obvious evolution of his already high-level ability with more soaring soul and snarling venom injected into his classic metal form. The gorgeous guitar leads, melodies, harmonies and unforgettably heavy riffs benefit from a huge, timeless production quality. Drummer Marcus Bryant has elevated his playing to new levels of intensity and tasteful subtlety. And as always, the tracks remain imprinted on the mind long after the album has finished. Whether it’s the ever-expanding catalog of incredible albums and songs or the searing live performances, the dominance of Spirit Adrift upon the current Heavy Metal landscape is now undeniable. And while ‘Enlightened In Eternity’ already marks the band’s fourth album, Spirit Adrift have only just begun. credits

“We weren\'t like, ‘Let\'s create a metal supergroup,’” Greg Puciato tells Apple Music about what is, whether he likes it or not, a very impressive metal supergroup. “It just happened. That’s part of what makes it so fucking cool.” He’s one of *three* vocalists in Killer Be Killed—another thing that makes it cool. Having three singers allows for collaboration usually reserved for genres like hip-hop or jazz. Rather than trading fiery verses or spindly brass solos, Puciato, Max Cavalera, and Troy Sanders take turns singing, screaming, and harmonizing over songs they almost entirely wrote together. Puciato and Cavalera also play guitar and Sanders is on bass, while Ben Koller, the only non-singing member, provides drums. And they had a ton of fun doing it—perhaps the coolest part of all. *Reluctant Hero* comes six years after their self-titled debut. They only toured their debut album once, for the 2015 Soundwave Festival in Australia, where they realized they were loving it so much that they couldn’t just leave it at one album. It had all started with a casual conversation between Puciato—who has fronted The Dillinger Escape Plan and The Black Queen, and released his solo debut just weeks prior to this album—and Cavalera, founding vocalist of Sepultura, who went on to sing in Soulfly among other groups. “We got in a room like little 13-year-olds,” Puciato says. “We didn\'t use a computer, we put our phones aside, we were just riffing and playing for like a week.” Then, Dillinger was touring with Mastodon, for whom Troy Sanders sings and plays bass. He’d heard about the project by then. “He asked who was playing bass and I was like, ‘I think Max and I were both going to play bass and we’re just going to hire a drummer or something.’ He was like, ‘No, I\'m playing bass.’ I said, ‘Oh, all right. Well, I guess you\'re going to sing too, then. So we\'ll have three singers and that\'ll be fucking cool.’” The final addition was Koller—who plays with Converge, All Pigs Must Die, and more—who officially joined the band at the end of the Soundwave shows. “It’s easily the most fun I\'ve ever had in a band,” Puciato says. “Which is why we choose to live together when we’re working on it. We could easily get separate hotel rooms, but we got an Airbnb every time. The recording took two months, so we lived in a house that entire time together: We’d wake up, eat breakfast, go to the studio, get food, go to the bar. It was like summer vacation sleepover when you’re a kid and you just want to stay at your friend\'s house. That\'s the only other time I\'ve acted that way.” The constant vocal baton-passing is a genuine thrill to hear. “Troy and Max have really distinct character voices,” he says. “I\'m more of a free roamer, so I feel like I can shape-shift a bit.” You can hear him switch between light melodies and cataclysmic shrieking throughout. Tracks like “Dream Gone Bad” and “Comfort From Nothing” show off the full range of each vocalist, to almost dizzying effect, as they take turns leading verses and choruses, singing and screaming, solos and riffs. Elsewhere, such as on “Left of Center,” they’ll harmonize, creating some of the most exciting moments on the record. Those harmonies were directly inspired by Puciato’s 2019 work with Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell, but more than that, they allowed each singer to experiment with stuff they couldn’t usually do as the only one holding a mic. “It was like, ‘What can I do to embellish this thing that Troy\'s doing, or this other thing?’ It’s fun to *not* be the primary vocal. It was really nice after having my whole career as the guy that has to come up with all of it.” Sometimes, they didn’t even need to sing at all. “I really got off on a lot of the guitar playing on this record,” he says. “I’m really stoked on the solo in ‘Inner Calm From Outer Storms.’ It’s this fucking Pink Floyd-y type of thing in the middle of nowhere. Just because you\'re a singer doesn\'t mean that you want to be in the front of the goddamn picture the whole time. None of us are like that. I think we all really got off on being in the support role as often as we could.” “From a Crowded Wound” was one of the only tracks that wasn’t written together. Puciato first penned it in 2010, and considered keeping it for his solo work. “That\'s my baby, it was me the whole way through—everyone\'s vocals, all the guitars, the drum pattern. But I couldn\'t write the vocals and I didn\'t want to force it.” He eventually realized it wasn’t his voice he needed. “To be able to actually write with someone else\'s voice was really fucking cool,” he says. “The parts that Max and Troy sang, I heard in their voices. It’s like being a director and you know what actor is playing the role and you can write with them in mind.” Like the best hip-hop collaborations, there was healthy competition and admiration in each recording session, which, again, can be heard throughout. “Max would do one line and then I’d be like, ‘Oh shit, I want to double that.’ So then I would jump in and double it, and then Troy would be like, ‘Okay, cool. Now that you did that, I\'m going to go back and change this thing that I just did.’ It was really organic and exciting and competitive, but productive. You’re fanning out on one another and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, dude. Fuck, that was sick. Thanks, Troy. Now I need to fucking go back and redo that pile of garbage I laid down five minutes ago that I thought was shit hot.’ We just had a really good time with it.”

There’s nothing quite like a global pandemic to make a Marilyn Manson album feel, well, nice. Released during a year where practically everything feels upsetting and uncomfortable, it’s oddly cathartic to listen to an artist who once reveled in exactly those things. While the soaring title track sing-along may have been written in 2018, it feels like something of a 2020 anthem: “We are sick, fucked up and complicated/We are chaos, we can’t be cured.” *WE ARE CHAOS* was produced in collaboration with outlaw country artist Shooter Jennings, his influence immediate, obvious, and exciting. The album carries all the musical hallmarks of Manson’s twisted persona, forged over 25-plus years—huge riffs, heavily distorted vocals, industrial sound effects—and the controversial rocker’s long-favored themes of death, discord, Satan, etc. However, it’s all balanced out by tender acoustic guitars (“BROKEN NEEDLE”), glammy melodies (“DON’T CHASE THE DEAD”), and even the odd positive affirmation (“Don’t try changing someone else, you’ll just end up changing yourself,” he sings on the Brian Jonestown Massacre-goes-darkwave highlight “KEEP MY HEAD TOGETHER”). The album’s not without pounding drums and epic howls (particularly the one towards the end of “PAINT YOU WITH MY LOVE”) that’d give *Mechanical Animals*-era Manson a run for his money, but it’s the other, more surprising moments that stand out the most. It’s that perfect storm of old meets new, and diabolical meets rather lovely, that makes *WE ARE CHAOS* such an enjoyable ride amidst a definitively unenjoyable year.

“This is the new abnormal!” Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe screams on “Reality Bath,” a particularly ferocious track on the band’s long-awaited follow-up to 2015’s *VII: Sturm und Drang*. It’s a fitting sentiment for the Virginia metal squad’s first record without co-founder and drummer Chris Adler, who split in 2019. Propelled by the dexterous drumming of new member Arturo Cruz (Prong/Winds of Plague), venomous cuts like “Memento Mori,” “Checkmate,” and “New Colossal Hate” showcase the band’s groove metal mastery. “Art has brought a more youthful energy, which is something our old selves need, because I’m pushing 50 and I can get set in my curmudgeonly ways,” Blythe tells Apple Music. “But at the same time, there’s nothing at all new about the writing process. The same guys who always wrote the music wrote the music this time. So in a sense there’s absolutely nothing different.” Lyrically, Blythe spits sociopolitical epithets all over *Lamb of God*, even bringing in Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta and Testament’s Chuck Billy to join him on “Poison Dream” and “Routes,” respectively. “I wrote this record thinking about the mess that is modern-day life,” Blythe explains. “The information overload and the shallow pursuit of wealth and material goods as status symbols have led to an entirely false idea that having these things is going to bring you some sort of inner peace or well-being or happiness—and it\'s a load of bullshit.” Below, he unpacks some of the album’s key tracks. **Memento Mori** “I wrote this song as a reminder for myself to not get stuck in this crazy morass of digital doom and gloom—all the biased news and social media stuff—and get out and really make the most of today. Because when I’m laying on my deathbed, if I have regrets, if I have things I wanted to do that I did not do, I don\'t want to sit there and be like, ‘God, I wish I hadn\'t spent so much time on Twitter. That sucks. I could have gone to Africa or the jungle. I could have written another book or something. But no, I spent eight hours a day on Twitter.’ Which I don’t do, by the way.” **Checkmate** “This is about our subpar political system. The two-party system is just a nightmare, particularly given the divisiveness of— not just right now, but for years now. And it’s not just whoever’s in the Oval Office, but in Congress that really chaps my ass. When Congress manages to agree on something like a relief package to help people who are suffering right now economically in this pandemic, you’ll see news stories about how the bipartisan agreement is some huge victory—that two political parties agreed on something for the good of the American people. That shouldn’t be a special occasion for celebration. But it is now, because everybody politicizes everything. So the lyrics talk about how people are so entrenched ideologically now on one side or the other, but life is not that black and white. There’s shades of gray.” **Poison Dream (feat. Jamey Jasta)** “I was looking up stuff about water pollution one day and I realized that every single place I’ve ever lived has had horrific water pollution. Everywhere we need water to survive, but people are poisoning it in the name of commerce. And these companies can do this because they\'re making so much money. It\'s not that the EPA is not finding them—some of these places just have enough money to pay the fines. So that’s where I’m coming from in the song. Not far from where Jamey lives, there’s a plant that dumps all this pollution in the water too. We were talking about that, and I’ve wanted him to be on a Lamb of God record for a long time—he’s a dear friend of the band, and I just love him as a person. I thought he’d be perfect for this song, and luckily he agreed to do it.” **Routes (feat. Chuck Billy)** “I went to Standing Rock, North Dakota, during the NODAPL movement, which of course was held on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. It started with just a few women and children trying to protect their water source, and then soon people from other Indigenous nations joined them. I went there to support them and bring supplies. I was out there for about a week, and it was a very profound experience because of the way these people were being treated by both the government and the private security corporations that were hired to protect the interests of this freaking oil company. If that had happened anywhere in a city or even a suburb that wasn’t the middle of nowhere, North Dakota, and it wasn’t Native American land, there would’ve been massive riots. Naturally, I wanted to write a song about my experience there, but because it was an Indigenous-led movement it felt super important for me to have an Indigenous voice on it. Chuck Billy is a member of the Pomo Indian tribe, and he’s a dear friend. We’d talked about the situation before, so I reached out to him and he said yeah. It worked out really great, and this one’s for the Natives.”

\"This record\'s been such a strange, strange ordeal. I mean, every record we\'ve always done, it has some kind of tragic story with it,\" vocalist/guitarist Domenic Palermo tells Apple Music about his Philadelphia-based band Nothing\'s fourth album. \"And this one I wasn\'t expecting to kind of have that, but lo and behold, here we are: The globe is on fire right now.\" Inspired by a 2019 *New York Times* photo of a black hole, *The Great Dismal* is a 10-track odyssey set for the end of the world. \"You can\'t ignore what\'s going on anywhere,\" says Palermo. \"The world has this like apocalyptic vibe. There\'s not a lot of uplifting things to keep your eyes on at this point.\" It\'s a dominant theme throughout the record, whether in the Alex G-featuring \"April Ha Ha,\" which marvels at trying to escape the inescapable, or in \"Ask the Rust,\" a reminder that the past is never far behind. It\'s echoed in the album\'s sonics, which toggle between Nothing\'s eerie slowcore tendencies and a constant onslaught of shoegazey squall: Where the opening track\'s grim beauty is aided by cellist/violinist Shelley Weiss and harpist Mary Lattimore, Cloakroom\'s Doyle Martin adds atmospheric guitar layers to songs like the fuzzed-out \"Famine Asylum\" and sprawling \"In Blueberry Memories.\" Here, Palermo meditates on our existence while guiding us through each track of *The Great Dismal*. **A Fabricated Life** “I had that song written and I didn\'t really know exactly how I was going to approach it, whether I wanted to make it a heavier song or keep it more acoustic-sounding. I finally just leaned in on it—like the way it is now, kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting of guitar tones, like really abstract, wanting to create this wall of sound. Just this mixture of guitars and string sounds, and then adding Mary Lattimore\'s harp, and putting a weird treatment of delays and reverbs on it. And then adding Shelley Weiss is just unbelievable. It turned into more of a cinematic thing. Everyone fought with me about putting it as track one, but for me it was really important to set the pace of the record, because the whole record feels cinematic anyway.” **Say Less** “It\'s funny because \'Fabricated\' is about being born into a body that you had no control over and then dealing with those circumstances and everything that comes with that. It constitutes exactly what you\'re going to do in your life. It\'s everything. To go in with something like that to basically rolling into a song where it\'s like, ‘I don\'t really have anything to say about any of this, I don\'t really care to think about it anymore’—it\'s kind of a quick on/off switch between the two. The music kind of reflects that same thing.” **April Ha Ha** “I’m a big fan of Alex G. We had plans to have him come in the studio and do some guitar work with me and maybe even write a song together. He\'s so self-conscious. He\'s just like me about vocals. He hates the way he sounds just the same as I do. So he was like, \'Oh, man. I don\'t want to do a vocal thing.\' I was like, \'Look, man. You have to. I\'m not giving you a choice. I have this part for you and I think it\'s great; you have to hear you singing these words.\' And he did it and we were all really happy with it. I love it because it\'s just like it really just creeps up on you, and if you don\'t really understand what\'s there or don\'t know, it\'s a pleasant surprise.” **Catch a Fade** “It’s about dealing with the need to create and the need to do what you need to do to survive. This song is really special for me because it was the one song that was a demo that Doyle had, and that was our first attempt at writing together. To me, it really shows. He sent me this really lo-fi demo of this track, and it was real direct, a really beautiful vocal melody, and just a clean song all the way through. Me and Kyle \[Kimball, drummer\] flew to Indiana to kind of massage some of the stuff we had and then work on a couple of things that he had, and we were able to at least get the one track done. We just reworked it from the ground up.” **Famine Asylum** “This is our call to Nothing fans that we\'re writing the best version of Nothing songs yet still. The song is about what people are starting to see now, and just that humanity has really stacked the odds against itself. It\'s kind of getting easier to see now where the blame for everything that\'s happening is, and that there could be a peacefulness in extinction in some cases. And then, it\'s a fine line of sounding like a psychopath and just being realistic. But there\'s a lot of *Dr. Strangelove* tied up into that song, which really speaks to exactly what I\'m saying, just in a less poetic way.” **Bernie Sanders** “I wanted to show what this band is capable of doing—kind of let loose a little bit. Just not be so hung up on what I think I need to do and what I think people want me to do, which is kind of a cruel thing musicians go through that\'s not really ever spoken about. It\'s just there\'s this bar to clear and then there\'s these critics and there\'s a lot of the things that just weigh on your decisions on what you want to do. It\'s sad because I feel like we lose a lot of important things because of that. The OG \'Bernie Sanders\' demo was real strange. When I got the secondary demo down, people were just like, \'This is absolutely going to be the highlight of this record.\' I stuck with it, and when we were recording with Will \[Yip, producer\], I finally became a believer in it. It\'s just nice to take yourself out on that limb and not injure yourself fatally.” **In Blueberry Memories** “I\'ve never done anything as detailed as this and as precise. This thing just became like a symbiote, you know what I mean? Like, it attached itself to me. And, like I said, in the process of achieving this courage to get past the self-doubt. \[2018\'s\] *Dance on the Blacktop* did great, but it felt like a linear move to me in a lot of senses. I feel like we just got comfortable making what we thought was a Nothing record. And with that, there\'s just a lot of things that I was fighting against. Everything I\'m doing on this has just been so calculated so that at the end of the day, if this blew up in my face and it was just a complete disaster, then I could say to myself, \'Well, you did everything that you could, and you made the record that you wanted to make.\' For me, that would be like any way that this comes across is going to be a success to me, and myself, just knowing that I did what I wanted to do, being a person that wasn\'t really supposed to be in this position that I\'m in right now, making this music and stuff. Every day is a win for me because I don\'t feel like I was meant to be here at all.” **Blue Mecca** “This song really sets the tone. If you didn\'t feel like the record had a cinematic feel to it, I think that this one really nailed it. The song\'s about my dad and kind of going through this point in time when he was trying to rehabilitate himself and he chose the route of going through Christianity and it really not being the best way for him to deal with what he was dealing with inside, which was years of PTSD, two tours of Vietnam, drug addiction, bad DNA—a lot of things that religion wasn\'t just going to help. There needed to be some other help, and it wasn\'t there. It kind of created its own storm.” **Just a Story** “This song is literally just about the day that John Lennon was killed, essentially. For some reason, when we were in the studio, we were just sitting there and there was all these Beatles posters all over the wall, because Studio 4 \[outside of Philadelphia\] has done work with John Lennon and The Beatles before. Just being in those same walls for five weeks with all this, the ghost of all these people moving through the studio. It was just this reoccurring thing with John Lennon.” **Ask the Rust** “The song itself is about the readjustment factor of coming home from that time I spent \[in prison\] and to this day just still having dreams about being there. You kind of think that you\'re past something but your past isn\'t always done with you. I think that rings true in these dreams that I have, where I wake up and I did something wrong and I\'m back in prison again. I\'m saying goodbye to people, and there\'s this crushing feeling inside my stomach. Like I fucked everything up. And then, I\'m back again. To me, that\'s why this record is so important in general. That\'s what this whole thing entails. It wasn\'t about me 10 years ago writing *Guilty of Everything* and just seeing all these things that were such a potent factor in my life and how we\'ve addressed them and we\'re good to go. No, it doesn\'t work like that. And I see that now. It\'s how you use them to move forward that is the key. It\'s not about getting past them. It\'s about learning to live with them.”

*Tap* More *to read our track-by-track guide with Trevor Dunn.* It’s almost impossible to quantify the volume of music that’s come from Trevor Dunn, Mike Patton, and Trey Spruance since they founded Mr. Bungle in 1985 as high school metalheads in Eureka, California. It laid the foundation for the bands, collaborations, performances, and compositions across every imaginable corner of music that came after. And though they were known as experimental, avant-garde Frankensteins in their approach to metal, punk, ska, surf, jazz fusion, pop, and much, much more, it all comes back to *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny*, their insane thrash metal demo that for years has mostly been available as a shoddy YouTube stream. “For whatever reason, that demo was always close to our hearts,” bassist Trevor Dunn tells Apple Music. “It represents a really specific period of our life. We took the writing of that music really seriously, it just never had its proper representation.” Mr. Bungle disbanded in 2000. Reunion rumors popped up anytime members performed together in their many other groups, and eventually, Dunn, Patton, and Spruance found themselves backstage at a Dead Cross show (one of Patton’s other bands, which also includes ex-Slayer and Suicidal Tendencies drummer Dave Lombardo). It was here that Dunn floated the idea to re-record with Lombardo—Slayer had been a massive influence when they first wrote it. “He essentially invented that style of drumming,” he says. “That was the whole catalyst, because he was the guy we had in mind when we were writing it in the ’80s.” Patton later suggested adding Anthrax and Stormtroopers of Death guitarist Scott Ian, who, it turns out, was already a massive fan. “That blew our minds,” says Dunn. “The first Anthrax record was big for us, too.” Mr. Bungle’s first live shows since 2000 took place right before the pandemic hit, but it allowed them time to warm up and relearn the music. “It wasn\'t easy,” he says. “I could pick a lot faster when I was 17 and full of angst. But it was super fun.” All but one track from the original demo was rerecorded, alongside three extra songs written at the time and two covers. “In the studio, Trey, Mike, and I were looking at each other as we were recording, like, ‘Can you believe this? We got these guys to agree to do this?’” Below, Dunn talks through each track on *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo*. **Grizzly Adams** “‘Grizzly Adams’ was Trey\'s creation. It’s a song we\'ve never played live, ever. Initially we just decided the band needed an intro. So he went home and made this. It\'s still hilarious to me because it’s too long for an intro, but that\'s what\'s great about it. I think Mike came up with the title. We didn\'t have a title for it—and this is the typical Bungle attitude—it’s just the most inappropriate title we can think of. It has nothing to do with Grizzly Adams, but in a way it’s this kind of heroic, melancholy piece.” **Anarchy Up Your Anus** “It\'s hard to remember exactly why we decided to \[sample Disney\'s *Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House*\]. We always liked that ungodly scream after the narration. It\'s supposed to be a ghoul or something. And screaming at the top of the song, when the beat kicks in, is such a metal thing to do. We decided it was going to be too much trouble to get the rights to use the actual Walt Disney version. We happen to know Danny DeVito, so we asked Rhea \[Perlman\] if she would narrate it. I think the way she did was really great. She’s also one of the most un-metal people you can think of. That\'s part of our MO.” **Raping Your Mind** “I feel like songwriting-wise, and lyrically, I can definitely tell it was written by a 17-year-old. At a pretty young age I definitely liked to mess around lyrically with the figurative and the literal. That\'s why I\'m using this sort of like a brainwashing metaphor—the idea of the brain being something that can actually be ‘raped.’” **Hypocrites / Habla Español O Muere** “‘Hypocrites’ on the original demo is a bit of a joke song. It was premeditating the direction we started to go in later, which is why we chopped off the second part—it didn\'t really fit with the rest. The lyrics are acknowledging our own hypocrisy. Now that I\'m a little bit wiser, I feel like it could be a mantra for human beings in general, if they\'re willing to self-reflect. With adding the Stormtroopers \[of Death\] song on there, well, we did a Slayer cover in the live set, and we wanted to do either Anthrax or Stormtroopers. It just became part of ‘Hypocrites,’ and plays into that because the original is a big, sarcastic joke that a lot of people might not get. So to redo it but then flip it around with the Spanish seemed to make sense.” **Bungle Grind** “That\'s Trey\'s song. When Bungle started, me and Mike were 17, and Trey was 15. Trey was sort of this guitar whiz kid who I met in a music class in high school, and he already had a really developed ear. That was always my favorite song on the demo because it\'s got this really interesting harmonic movement to it. It\'s unusual, almost leaning towards prog in a way. Trey wrote the lyrics too. I don\'t even know if he knows what it\'s about. Who knows what the Bungle Grind is? We\'re not sure.” **Methematics** “This one has complicated history. I think I wrote it after we recorded the demo, thinking we would eventually record more songs. At that point, we changed drummers, added a horn section, and totally started going in different directions. We never even learned those songs. They only existed as guitar demos I made at home. Then, as we were relearning this stuff, I started thinking it would be cool to ‘pay tribute’ to our hometown—I mean, there is some tribute in the lyrics that Mike wrote, but there\'s also some references to things that were kind of dark up in this part of north California. I sent Trey an email, asking for some stories. He sent me some ideas, and I had some other ideas, and then we gave it to Mike, who went with it and wrote these great lyrics. I think there are some definitely some references to meth addicts, and that\'s when we thought of the title, which totally worked.” **Eracist** “It’s almost a brand-new song, except for the main riff that was written in the ’80s. Mike had those two main riffs. I don\'t even know if there was a recording of it, but for some reason Trey remembered the riffs. So Mike arranged it and wrote a bridge for it, which is that double-time section in the middle, and he wrote the lyrics. We had the other \[previously unreleased\] songs on a cassette at my parents\' house. I’m a bit of a hoarder, and I have this box of tapes from my youth. Rehearsals, or riffs I was working on, songwriting stuff. So I had them in there and I knew where to find them. I had to digitize those from a cassette tape to send to the other guys. Keep all your crap. We\'re like the anti-Marie Kondo.” **Spreading the Thighs of Death** “The whole song is based on specific intervals. I was treating it like a composition, like, ‘What can I do with this one scale?’ The lyrics are somewhat existentialist in a way. I can\'t remember what it\'s called now, but there was some movie from the early ’80s where some geek kid keeps being harassed, being bullied by other people, and then he turns to the occult and conjures up evil spirits. Then it all goes haywire, of course, because he can\'t control him. It’s also making fun of Satanism in metal. And obviously the title has this sexual reference—I won\'t go into detail, but as a teenager there were some personal references there. Like, don\'t mess around with something you don\'t know about. Being horrified by the opposite sex at a young age is probably a better way to describe it.” **Loss for Words** “We used to play it in the ’90s with Bungle ‘proper,’ with Danny \[Heifetz, drummer\] and Bär \[Clinton McKinnon, saxophonist\]. That record, *Animosity* \[by Corrosion of Conformity\], was big for all of us in high school. We were rehearsing for the live shows when we found out that Reed \[Mullin\] had died. But that song was already in the set list. The slower section played into the sequencing for the record, especially after a song like ‘Spreading’ which is really intense.” **Glutton for Punishment** “It’s another one of the songs I dug out of my archives. The songs were so unclear from the YouTube feed, which is the only way we had access to them. So me and Trey went back and sort of re-demoed them so they were clear for everyone else, especially for Dave and Scott. The lyrics were complete; they\'re typical of where my mind was as a 17-year-old. Totally indecisive about how to deal socially with people, what I was going to do with the rest of my life, all that sort of stuff.” **Sudden Death** “The lyrics are so ’80s. It\'s essentially about fear of nuclear war. The heartfelt fear, the Cold War, worrying about whether the Russians are going to blow us up or not. For me, it\'s probably one of the hardest songs. Mike wrote it—aside from the main parts of ‘Hypocrites,’ it was his one contribution to the original demo. It\'s funny because he\'s the one guy who didn\'t have any musical training. He writes everything by ear. It rarely goes back to any previous idea. It’s hard to remember. You just have to keep playing it over and over again.”

Known for creating works of stark beauty and slow-motion sprawl, singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and her longtime bandmate and drummer Jess Gowrie take scalpels to their usual style with Mrs. Piss. Cramming eight songs into just 19 minutes, *Self-Surgery* propels swirling, caustic punk (“Downer Surrounded by Uppers”), dark rock gallops (“Mrs. Piss”), and early PJ Harvey-isms (“Knelt”) through occasional washes of bubbling electronics (“Nobody Wants to Party With Us”) and acidic screams (“You Took Everything”). While some songs wouldn’t sound totally out of place on one of Wolfe’s own records, Mrs. Piss shows the more visceral side of both women.

With the hotly anticipated follow-up to their 2017 debut *Blood Offerings*, Oakland power trio Necrot has delivered a master class in old-school death metal, underpinned by the mother of all existential themes: mortality. “For us, talking about mortality and impermanency is a positive message, because you can’t get sad about something that is inevitable and is a shared destiny,” Italian-born vocalist/bassist Luca Indrio tells Apple Music. Musically speaking, Indrio and his bandmates—guitarist Sonny Reinhardt and drummer Chad Gailey—somehow created an even more impressive album than their highly regarded debut. “There was definitely more pressure to do something really good because *Blood Offerings* was super well-received, but we were also so much more prepared,” Indrio explains. “For us, it was never a question that this album was going to be better.” Below, he breaks down each song on *Mortal*. **Your Hell** “This track talks about how trauma creates more trauma; the effects that any negative or violent action will have on the person that is the victim is eventually going to create the next perpetrator of trauma and violence. ‘My hell will be yours’—that’s what the lyrics say—it’s a cycle of pain that gets perpetuated by marking people and creating more trauma. It’s like contagious hate. Fixing things now will benefit future generations more than ourselves, but the way we are conducting our lives is creating more pain in the future for people that are born right now.” **Dying Life** “This song talks about the mortal human condition. It talks about taking off your skin—like taking off your mask that you created to live in society. It’s about being more conscious of what you really are, which is a struggling body holding together a mortal life that is every day getting closer to the end. People forget that they’re going to have to die—and not only in the physical sense of dying, but also we often lose so much in terms of people, situations, or a job or a house or a family—things you thought you were going to have forever. But it’s important to be able to let things go instead of living in this facade of being here forever or maintaining the things that you have.” **Stench of Decay** “‘Stench of Decay’ talks of human greed and how money drives 90 percent of everybody’s actions and thoughts, even on an artistic level. So many things we do are related to money and success, and lots of times it’s like we get influenced by the results. We are driven by wanting more for ourselves rather than the bettering of everybody. We are living by a standard that is destroying pretty much everything. And that’s why lots of people feel empty in society and out of place—because not everybody wants to be driven by these things. But we live in a world that teaches you that if you’re not producing and making money, you’re pretty much wasting your time and you’re a loser.” **Asleep Forever** “This goes back to the mortal theme of the album and of ‘Dying Life,’ which is acknowledging that you’re dying, acknowledging that everything is going to end. You’re going to be asleep forever. Most people don’t want to think about that, but other people can find comfort in it, because the truth is that you get to let go and suffer less. When you accept that idea, you can live more fully rather than hiding behind thinking that things are meant to be forever.” **Sinister Will** “‘Sinister Will’ talks about soldiers going to war. I’ve met a lot of veterans at our shows and heard a lot of stories, so I felt driven to write a song about war from the perspective of the person who is there before they become a soldier. Because once you become a soldier, you’re just following orders and you’re completely expendable. Often people go to war driven by bigger ideals but after you’ve been there—if you survive—you kind of wonder why you went. So it’s about people deciding to go to war and then having the realization that they’ve been used and that actually this greater purpose didn’t exist.” **Malevolent Intention** “This kind of goes back to \[the theme of\] ‘Stench of Decay,’ but it focuses on power more than money. If your goal is being more powerful, the things you’re going to have to do often have a malevolent connotation. Because when your actions are driven by the goal of gaining more power, you’re not trying to make things better. You’re not doing things to help anybody. Your actions are not for your spiritual growth or growth as a person. You’re forced into a game where there is not much space for morality or anything else.” **Mortal** “‘Mortal’ is the ultimate reminder that you’re going to die. A lot of our songs talk about this, like ‘Shadows and Light’ on *Blood Offerings*. And it’s not just your physical body that dies—your memory is going to disappear along with everybody else’s. Everything is 100 percent impermanent, but you believe differently because you don’t understand time or you have a limited way of seeing time that only goes like a hundred years after your death or something. So this is about acknowledging that you’re a mortal being on a place where everything disappears if you wait long enough.”

“Honesty keeps getting refined with each album,” Avatar vocalist Johannes Eckerström tells Apple Music. “Each one peels away another layer of bullshit from us.” It’s that incremental truth-seeking that propels the Swedish metal band’s eighth full-length, *Hunter Gatherer*. While album cuts like “A Secret Door” and “Wormhole” feature contributions from Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor, lead singles “Colossus” and “Silence in the Age of Apes” stand as propulsive anthems concerning humanity’s struggles with the relentless march of technology. “For the most part of our existence as a species, we lived as hunter-gatherers,” Eckerström observes. “That seems to have been what we were hardwired to be by nature. But as we have evolved, we have slowly made our civilization more and more complex. We’ve created a way of life that is completely detached from where we came from. This album very much tries to deal with what it means to be human right here and now, with all our shortcomings and all the damage that we do.” Below, Eckerström takes us through the keenly observed dystopia of *Hunter Gatherer*. **Silence in the Age of Apes** “It’s definitely one of the songs that is thematically closest to the title of the album. We can\'t go climb trees and call ourselves monkeys and think things will be fine again. There\'s only forward. The future is coming and things are speeding up. Our imminent destruction is accelerating. We now have to start outrunning the clock to reach a better future before everything collapses. That sense of urgency and that need to accelerate and trying to outrun destruction—lots of the emotion of the song comes from there.” **Colossus** “I read about this project where some scientist wants to recreate a fully functioning human brain inside of a computer—like a simulation. That\'s fascinating. Then I start to think that if we are to succeed with that, if something behaves exactly like a human brain, well, it must be a human. We must have created life as we know it, as we perceive it within ourselves. There\'s a sense of existential dread that came with that realization. We’ve named the song after the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven World Wonders. This would be our world wonder—this Frankenstein\'s monster Colossus that we tell to arise. It\'s one of those scary things in the murky waters of ethically questionable science.” **A Secret Door** “This song has a whistling melody that was inspired in part by Ennio Morricone and in part by a Swedish guy called Björn Olsson, who is basically an indie-pop fellow that has done a lot of light, pleasant summery tunes with whistling on them. And we got Corey Taylor from Slipknot to do the whistling. Thematically, it’s about all hope being lost. It does move more in the plane of relationships, when things might look really dark but you try until the bitter end and see something crash and burn completely instead of giving up along the way. Or like going out to the front line of battle knowing you’re going to die there. But you’ve chosen your hill to die on, which would be the secret door that you keep hoping for, the way out of the situation.” **God of Sick Dreams** “I had a string of very vivid apocalyptic nightmares for a while. In the dream, I\'m in an apartment and I look through the window at a city, and purple lightning starts to strike the ground and these weird glowing spheres are coming up, and there’s the sound of an explosion and poof—everything that was within the sphere is just gone, like the world is going away bit by bit. I’m there with my niece and I pick her up in my arms to run away, thinking I have to find someplace safe. I run downstairs in the apartment building but there’s no place to go—and then I wake up. More than anything, I think it’s a song about facing yourself, because ultimately, those images were created by me. I am the god of my own sick dreams.” **Scream Until You Wake** “This one deals with a sense of being lost. In the verses I\'m spitting out all kinds of questions and being desperate. So I guess it\'s about that feeling of being completely lost in your life, in the grand scheme of things but also in this smaller perspective, and desperately looking for a way out and begging for help. Again, it goes into the realm of nightmares, and then hoping that the cure will be that if you scream loud enough maybe you\'ll wake up.” **Child** “This is a bit more out of left field for a metal song, but the story that came into my head when I heard the instrumental for the chorus was about an affluent family in the late 1800s or early 1900s, a time when a woman speaking up or being upset or being depressed—being anything except obedient—would be deemed hysterical. And the treatment for this at the time would have been lobotomy. So it’s a story about the slow destruction and suffocation of this woman. Her child is the witness to all of this and deals with it in the way that children deal with and process life—through play. The child understands that what is happening to the mother is deeply wrong, but its pain is never acknowledged, its questions are never answered.” **Justice** “‘Justice’ deals with certain thoughts and feelings you have when you end up doing this kind of angry and aggressive album as an adult. Having lived from teens to young adulthood into what I guess would be considered adulthood, somewhere along the way there have been attempts to maybe want to fit in, to face the world with good intentions. But you feel it backfire and now you’re spitting at conformity again, finding your own voice and acknowledging there’s no need to conform. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to fit in, and there is no reason to be quiet about the ugliness, because that is not how change will come to the ugly side of things.” **Gun** “This song took seven years to write. Most of it existed seven years ago—the main piano part and the four lines of lyrics starting with ‘You give a boy a gun.’ But finishing it was a big challenge, because through various attempts you suddenly would hear drums coming in and an electric guitar and it would turn into a power ballad, like, ‘Oh, it’s Bon Jovi now. Let’s throw it away again.’ So it took us seven years to understand something that you learn over and over again when working on music: Just let it be what it is. So it’s a vulnerable song *about* vulnerability, and as such it was the hardest song to sing on the album, because there’s the musical challenge of wanting things to sound nice and then there is the conveying of the emotion that sadness is. And we are ugly when we cry.” **When All But Force Has Failed** “This is the biggest case of finger-pointing that I\'ve done in lyrics ever, probably. If I’m going to express anger over certain things wrong in the world—if I\'m going to put that out there—then I have to be willing to hold myself accountable as well, and us accountable as a band. Because if you want change in the world, you have to deal with the ways you participate in the things that are right and the things that are wrong. So hence the two initial lines are ‘Bird carcass with a belly full of plastic, one more year and I\'ll be a millionaire.’ It’s about how we participate in the destruction while at the same time allowing ourselves to be pissed off at people who participate even more. But you have to hold yourself accountable.” **Wormhole** “When I first heard the riff for this, I thought, ‘Oh wow, this is exactly what I feel like if I wake up in the middle of the night and have to go puke.’ So this song called for a certain type of release, but not too pretty. Lyrically, it is about facing the truth and how we hope to not do it alone. We were not quite finished with the song when we entered the studio, so we sent it to Corey Taylor—a metal icon and one of the great voices of our generation—who offered to lay down a track or two. He came up with the pre-chorus melody, which helped us flesh out the song.”

AVATAR returns in 2020 with a bold manifesto called Hunter Gatherer. The band’s eighth album is an unflinchingly ruthless study of a clueless humankind’s ever-increasing velocity into an uncertain future, furthering the reach of the band’s always expanding dark roots. Songs like “A Secret Door,” “Colossus,” and “Silence In The Age of Apes” are ready-made anthems for the modern age, each struggling for a collective meaning amidst the savagery of technology.

“I’m 71 and I don’t fuckin’ understand how I got there,” Ozzy Osbourne tells Apple Music. “I can remember times when I\'ve fuckin’ woken up, puke down me. I’ve fuckin’ woken up with a bed full of blood, when I’ve fallen down and banged my head.” It’s not like Ozzy Osbourne hasn’t tackled the subject of death before. Fifty years and one week prior to the release of this album, on the very first song on Black Sabbath’s debut LP, he asked Satan: “Is it the end?” Here, though, on his 12th solo album, and first in a decade, he’s thinking about it a little more seriously. On “Holy for Tonight,” he ponders: “What will I think of when I speak my final words? … What will I think of when I take my final breath?” On the title track, a soaring ballad featuring Elton John, live strings, and a choir, he admits, “Don’t know why I’m still alive/Yes, the truth is I don’t wanna die an ordinary man.” Let’s get one thing straight: There is zero chance of Ozzy Osbourne dying an ordinary man. Nor Elton, for that matter—or anybody else involved in making this record. At the helm is Andrew Watt, a guitarist who got to know Osbourne while working on Post Malone’s track “Take What You Want” (which you’ll also find at the end of this record). Watt enlisted some famous friends to help, and the first call was to Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. “I was like, ‘Ozzy wants us to make an album,’ and he was like, ‘When? When are we doing it? Let\'s do it. Let\'s do it. Let\'s do it,’” Watt says. “I was like, ‘Wow, okay. He really wants to do it, and we need a bass player.’ So I called Duff \[McKagan\] up, from Guns N\' Roses…and Duff was like, ‘When? When? When? When?’ Same thing, same enthusiasm.” The result is an epic release that stares time and mortality squarely in the face, but still has time for toilet humor, aliens, cannibals, and that time in 1972 when Osbourne did so much cocaine he accidentally called the police on himself. (“I thought it was an air conditioning button,” said Osbourne of the story behind the punky “It’s a Raid.” “It was a fucking Bel Air patrol.”) Considering Osbourne has publicly battled health issues for decades, and in 2019 was diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s disease, the mere existence of *Ordinary Man* is quite extraordinary. Watt, Smith, and McKagan have nailed the balance of heavy-as-hell riffs (notably opener “Straight to Hell”) and heartstring-tugging rock ballads (“Under the Graveyard” and the title track in particular), while “Today Is the End” hits like a snarling Metallica/Alice in Chains hybrid—both bands he inspired. Meanwhile, the massive drums and pitch-shifted voice intro on “Goodbye” are a clear nod to “Iron Man.” After singing, “Sitting here in purgatory, not afraid to burn in hell/All my friends are waiting for me, I can hear them crying out for help,” the Prince of Darkness ends the song with a crucial question: “Do they sell tea in heaven?”

\"I think it might be a relief to listeners to be like, ‘Oh good, this song isn\'t sad,’\" Jeremy Bolm tells Apple Music about Touché Amoré\'s fifth record *Lament*. \"Or not even sad, like, \'Oh, this is a song that I don\'t have to be afraid to listen to or be concerned to listen to because it might make me feel a certain way.\'\" After tackling the death of his mother on 2016\'s *Stage Four*, Bolm felt it would be best for his mental health to simply write about what\'s been going on in his life since that moment. He expresses his vulnerabilities both good and bad throughout, ranging from an appreciation for his partner (\"Come Heroine\") to the panic of shouldering other people\'s grief (\"I\'ll Be Your Host\") and feeling abandoned by those closest to him (\"A Broadcast\"). The Los Angeles quintet linked up with producer Ross Robinson to push forward their boundaries, as the album implements pedal steel guitar (\"A Broadcast\"), pop structures (\"Reminders\"), and post-punk (\"Feign\") into the band\'s relentless blend of emo and hardcore. \"I\'m so proud of it, and I know that\'s not unique, but in my heart of hearts, I feel like this is our best record,\" Bolm says. Below, he takes us track by track through *Lament*. **Come Heroine** “This one immediately felt like an opening track. I think it also does a pretty good job of setting you up for some of the context of the record, just in terms of how it\'s, in a way, part appreciation. It’s about my partner\'s incredible ability to be supportive and there. And just how, even when things seem to be as bad as they could be or as crazy as could be after the loss of my mom and all that sort of stuff, just that sort of reassuring presence from someone who also hasn\'t exactly had the happiest life. I think that kind of a person deserves a million songs written about them.” **Lament** “I just sort of had to take a step back, and I looked at the track titles, and I was like, \'Honestly, I feel like even just the word *lament* sort of ties up a lot of what we\'re going for here.\' So it became the title track, and for me, this song is just about how, for lack of a better term, something that\'s triggering can just throw your day off completely. The big part toward the end of the song—\'So I lament, then I forget/So I lament, till I reset\'— I think that just feels like the cycle that a lot of us go through.” **Feign** “This song is completely about impostor syndrome. I think when anyone is struggling with their art form in general, the first thing they do is find themselves to be a fraud. I\'ve always done my best to not take all the accolades that people have been kind enough to give me since I started making music with this band. And I\'ve come to realize that the times where I\'m sort of feeling the most free, the most carefree about what I\'m writing, some of those lines that get written end up being the ones that I think people connect to the most, and I can\'t help it. I always feel like it was accidental.” **Reminders** “Arguably the poppiest song in our band\'s catalog. The song was pretty inspired by the early-2000s Bright Eyes records, between *LIFTED* and *I\'m Wide Awake, It\'s Morning*, where he has a few songs that have a really good juxtaposition between a verse that\'s hyper-political and then the next verse that\'s deeply personal. I always looked at that ability that Conor Oberst had in a very envious light. So this was me sort of trying my hand at that, and it was written the day that Trump was exonerated from being impeached. We can\'t rely on the system to make our days better, we have to rely on what\'s around us. To keep our heads up, to keep ourselves going.” **Limelight** “We’re all made to believe that a loving relationship is one where it\'s consistent PDA or you\'re consistently romantic, or you have a passionate kiss every single day, and things like that. Which, I think, once you\'re with someone long enough, I don\'t think that\'s true. I think passion for me is the ability to just be around each other and love each other\'s company. And then also having heavy, heavy experiences together. Like the people in her family that have passed since our relationship, people in my family that have passed since our relationship. We\'ve now had three, four pets die. And every one of those was a very devastating situation, but brought us even closer together. So a lot of that was sort of on my mind when writing this song. And sort of not letting any outsiders have any sort of idea of what my kind of love is.” **Exit Row** “We put this song as the first song on Side B because I feel like it\'s a good energy boost situation. I feel like, at this point, every one of our records has this kind of song on it. I love the half-time drop in it; I feel like it makes me want to fucking kick a bunch of boxes over.” **Savoring** “After the shutdown happened, we were getting the mixes of the songs, and the opening lyrics just cracked me up: ‘Savoring the days that we spent inside as if tomorrow will be different, whatever we decide.’ But the part that makes you realize that it wasn\'t written for this is when I say it\'s nurturing, because this shit is not nurturing. I think any musician or any person who travels will tell you that when you\'re on the road, you\'re thinking about being home; when you\'re home, you wish you were on the road.” **A Broadcast** “\[Guitarist\] Nick \[Steinhardt\] had started learning how to play the pedal steel. Less than a year before we did this record, he wrote that song on it. Every one of our records has what I call the ‘weirdo track.’ I was a little nervous with it, because it started coming together and I started freaking out, like, ‘What am I going to do on this thing?’ So when I was out in the desert writing the song, I was freaking out about that. I read probably like 50 Leonard Cohen poems, listened to a few of the songs, and one of the things that I think Leonard is so amazing at is his ability to write the four-line stanzas. I wrote probably 12 different stanzas, if you want to call them that. And then I just sort of cherry-picked the ones that I think connected the best with how I was feeling. So this is me just sort of paying homage to the people that have inspired me and influenced me in so many different ways.” **I\'ll Be Your Host** “This is my panic of the countless messages and conversations that I\'ve endured about people losing people in their life, and how that\'s had a dramatic effect on my personal life. It\'s really, really difficult to navigate other people\'s tragedies on a consistent basis. I\'ll be approached, and someone will let me know the person in their life that recently died, or whatever. And the thing is I understand completely why people are doing this. I would do the exact same thing. I completely get it. But I can\'t deny what it\'s done to me. It\'s a really hard thing to take on, and I do feel guilty that I don\'t respond to fans about it.” **Deflector** “Being such a fan of Glassjaw and the records that Ross did, I found myself hearing a lot of those elements in the ideas that he had for this song. The last chorus where the kick drum is just consistent, that was an idea from him. The chorus, for me, deals with situational anxiety, conversations that I\'m uncomfortable having, and also the impostor syndrome as well, sort of all tied together with not being comfortable with a lot of situations. So that was me trying to try my best to be a John K. Samson, with painting an image of two trapeze artists doing their act and missing the connection and falling to the ground. And what that means for the trapeze artist, and what that means for myself in a more literary sense.” **A Forecast** “I lost some family because of Facebook. It\'s the social platform that allows your family to comfortably, openly speak about things that you really wish they hadn\'t. So for me, the first big section of this opening song, it\'s really heavy, and it\'s really uncomfortable. And it\'s not an easy first couple lines here. I\'m in this extreme, insane jazz phase where I\'m obsessed with discovering new records constantly with it. And I never had the patience before. I\'ve always respected jazz to an extreme level, but it\'s just never connected to me.”

With 'Alphaville', the enigmatic New York City Extreme Metal trio has successfully broken with all genre conventions and elevated into a realm of Avantgarde Metal that is as fascinating as it is scary. Not that conventions ever held back Imperial Triumphant, but this album is certainly their most obscure and experimental yet. The good news is that it's not at the cost of intensity. The demanding, yet always intriguing clash of jarring atonality and gloomy Jazz fusion ('City Swine') finds its match only in the city it is so openly inspired by. There is plenty of both ends of the spectrum - and everything in between - on 'Alphaville', which will undoubtedly go down in history as the band's magnum opus. For fans of: Ved Buens Ende, Portal, Oranssi Pazuzu Under exclusive license from Century Media. TDW023