Revolver's 25 Best Albums of 2021

On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”

Taking its name from a computer virus developed by the NSA and leaked by hackers in 2017, the debut album from Canadian alt-metal trio Spiritbox has nothing to do with cyberattacks. Instead, vocalist Courtney LaPlante uses the term to describe the mood that permeates the record. “The story of the computer virus is fascinating—especially how it came into existence and how much it messed with people’s stuff,” she tells Apple Music. “But I latched onto it because of how cool the phrase is. Now, the words mean something completely different to me than when I first heard them.” Below, she describes each track on *Eternal Blue*. **“Sun Killer”** “We wrote this in January of 2020, and we instantly knew that it would be the intro of the album. This has the drama that I look for when I’m listening to an opening of an album—it’s like when the band is walking out onstage for a show. When I hear this, I’m surprised by the flexibility of my voice because I’ve had a vocal cord injury for a long time. It’s finally healed itself up in the last couple of years, so this performance is like a mini-celebration that I feel like myself again.” **“Hurt You”** “All of our songs have a narrative, but they’re more about the feeling of the song. To me, this feels like the ups and downs of a toxic relationship. We always write the music first in this band, but I think it’s fun when you can have the lyrical content mimic the vibe of the music. The working title of this was ‘Heavy Clown,’ like Clown from Slipknot, because a lot of our favorite nu-metal references made it into this song.” **“Yellowjacket” (feat. Sam Carter)** “This is one of my favorites on the record. I think it’s a double drop-D guitar tuning, so it’s inhumanly heavy. I don’t do a lot of screaming on this song, but it definitely has some of the lowest, scariest screams I’ve ever gotten out of me. The rest of the song is me talking, and my inspiration for that was a lot of the alternative music of the ’90s—bands like Butthole Surfers, that had all this weird spoken-word stuff in their songs. And then, we had Sam Carter from Architects do some vocals on it, which sound amazing.” **“The Summit”** “I have this fantasy in my mind where there’s this new genre of music that doesn’t make sense, but it’s almost like the parameters are pulled off some genres that I like. And that’s where ‘The Summit’ lives. It’s hard to classify it as a metal song, but the guitar is so low and clear. Vocally, I took a lot of inspiration from The Weeknd and Charli XCX, especially the way she lets the last line of a chorus descend in a really playful way.” **“Secret Garden”** “This is one of the first ones we wrote back in the summer of 2019, but it wasn’t quite ready back then. The working title was ‘Chino’ because it reminded us a little bit of Deftones, who we are very inspired by. I think the song has such a nice vibe to it—it feels romantically sorrowful. Lyrically, it’s me being introspective and advocating for myself. I think a lot of musicians fear losing who they are as their star rises, but I think anyone who’s in any transition period in their life can understand that feeling.” **“Silk in the Strings”** “A lot of the songs on this album are heavy and open and slow, but all the more intense songs—like this one—were written later. When \[guitarist\] Michael \[Stringer\] first showed me this one, I wasn’t sure what to do because I always feel like the vocals need to match the energy of the song. So, whenever there’s something bouncy, I try not to think about what a metal vocalist would do. I look more to what I think good rappers would do. For this song, I was like, ‘How would the Wu-Tang Clan do this song?’ I would absolutely never be able to rap, but I really admire how important the flow is.” **“Holy Roller”** “We don’t really have a lot of other music that sounds like this song, but we just wanted something selfishly heavy. The narrator in this song is clearly not a good person. A lot of times in metal music, a song about a bad person is very on the nose—very graphic and explicitly violent. I wanted to explore something more insidious, like the religious cultism of someone like Jim Jones. I find those kinds of people so much scarier than a song about cutting someone’s head off or something like that.” **“Eternal Blue”** “This is one of the first tracks we wrote, and I think it’s my favorite. Our producer, Dan \[Braunstein\], really helped us dig a little deeper with the synth part of it, taking a lot of reference from New Wave acts from the ’80s, like Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode. I just love how heavy and beautiful the song is, and it has a very rare Michael Stringer guitar solo in it, which I love. Lyrically, it’s about someone who is at rock bottom but is trying not to romanticize that. Many people seem to glamorize depression, but I think it’s important not to get caught up in that.” **“We Live in a Strange World”** “Every time I listen to this song, I feel different about it. We first wrote it before the pandemic, before the band started gaining success. When I recorded it in February 2021, I had a lot more to say about how weird the world is. It feels like I’m just watching this stuff happen to me like a viewer—rather than it actually happening to me—because I’m just sitting in my house watching all of these people online starting to know who the band is. It’s a bizarre feeling, and you worry about messing it up.” **“Halcyon”** “This one’s Michael’s favorite song. Like ‘Sun Killer,’ I just love how dramatic it is. It’s a big heavyweight of a song, and it gives me a lot of room with my singing range. Most of these songs are me thinking about not wanting to mess up and not wanting to get my little spirit crushed. This one is me looking at all those successful people and the version of me that’s going to compromise everything so that they can be one of those people.” **“Circle With Me”** “This is the newest song on the record, and it was written in the studio. Michael wrote it in an afternoon. Some of the darker and dramatic parts remind me of Evanescence, but on the chorus I took reference from Tears for Fears. So, it’s this weird little song, but it really kind of unlocked a lot of creativity in us to make all of our songs better. We ended up putting it out first because it really represents how we’re feeling about our band right now.” **“Constance”** “Just as ‘Sun Killer’ was always to be the opener and ‘Holy Roller’ was always meant as the middle point, followed by ‘Eternal Blue,’ ‘Constance’ was always meant to be the last song. But the lyrics didn’t really start to form until last year when my grandma passed away. Writing this song just helped me think about the feelings of losing someone, and it’s dedicated to her because she always wanted me to put out a song that doesn’t have screaming in it.”

“We decided to call it *Radical* because it cuts a couple of different ways,” Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley says about the title of the Buffalo metalcore band’s ninth album. “It’s radical as far as the personal beliefs I’m expressing as the lyricist of this band, but it’s also radical because it acknowledges that radical changes may need to be made in order for things to ever get better.” Of course, Buckley is aware that “radical” also means different things to different people in 2021. “I was trying to find things that most people in the world can agree on, and what I came up with was ‘fuck cancer’ and ‘I just want to feel good,’” he says. “I don’t think this record will help in the fight against cancer—although I wish it would—but we tried to write something that acknowledges the idea that human beings all long for goodness. But it’s going to require some big leaps of faith in order to make things good.” Below, he discusses some of the album’s key tracks. **“Dark Distance”** “I wrote this in 2019 or maybe even 2018, when I was realizing where I wanted the record to go. I knew that I had an obligation to use my platform for positive things because the world is not a pretty place right now. So, I just had this idea that the whole thing needs to be reset. Pull out the Nintendo game, blow on it, put it back in. And what resets civilization? Historically speaking, a plague does that. So, I started by summoning a plague and then COVID happened. I apologize for that.” **“Planet Shit”** “This is about a kind of old-style French Revolution of the upper-class elite and ruling class. About two months after we recorded the song, the Capitol building was stormed on January 6. I wrote the song to seem like a newscast, so I will say that, yes, I did have some sort of clairvoyant image of the Capitol building being rioted. My guide for the song was Mitch McConnell. He’s the only person I ever see when I’m talking about evil old white people. That’s two clairvoyant things in a row now, so I’m looking into what that means.” **“Post-Boredom”** “I wrote this about what would happen if I died and was reborn. If I had another chance at life, what would I do differently? What would I do the same? It was written during the pandemic, when everyone was bored, so I started thinking about what was going to happen next. And then I actually did get a separation from my wife during the pandemic, so that was a very real second shot for me. But all the songs were written before I was separated, so it ended up having a bigger meaning.” **“Colossal Wreck”** “This one is so fast and so short that I just thought it would be really good to have really memorable, punchy lyrics. Obviously, we’re being ignored by whatever higher power has been looking out for us since the dawn of time. It’s time to realize that we need to make some serious peace here with whatever is running the show because we really fucked it up. It kind of falls in line with ‘Dark Distance’ in that way.” **“Desperate Pleasures”** “Like ‘Colossal Wreck,’ I was just kind of having fun with the imagery here. We’re all lost, so fuck it. Let’s give it back, let nature take over, let’s just stop even trying. Let’s just live with the shit we’ve created and let nature fix it. The mental image I had was of a building on fire. While I’m just standing there, all these people are running past me to the exit. We can fend this off if we want to, but everyone is just running away. Who’s stupider here? Me for standing there, or everyone else for running away? I don’t know.” **“AWOL”** “I thought this song was about something, but then I realized it was about something else. When I was writing it, I thought of it as my vision for what my life would be like when this record is released. But that version of Keith Buckley is not currently in this situation. Maybe he’s happy; maybe he’s not. I don’t know how to reach him because he doesn’t exist yet. But it’s actually not about that. It ended up being about a very specific person and a very specific time. I don’t think anyone reading Apple Music cares about this, so I’ll just say it’s a message to my future self.” **“Sexsexsex”** “That song is about me realizing that I am a very submissive person. That’s a personality trait I have. When most people think of the whole dom-sub thing, they think of whips and leather and stuff like that. The only reference point they have is sexuality. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the power exchange of a dominant and submissive. So, I made this song seem like it’s about sexuality, but it’s not. It’s about an energy exchange.” **“We Go Together”** “Everyone is born into a very specific set of circumstances—a certain time, a certain place, a certain astrology that has never been replicated. Your experience on this earth has never happened before. In a way, you are the only one alive. Everything that you see is your set of conclusions. In a sense, that makes you the source of it all. So, the song is about feeling like you might be at the center of everything. How does that change you?”

Most Mastodon fans probably knew it was only a matter of time before the band dropped a double album. The Atlanta metal squad’s intricate songs and dazzling prog tendencies have been begging for the Pink Floyd treatment for years—and the pandemic’s enforced downtime provided them with the window to do it. “With the extra time to work on material, we just kept writing,” Mastodon drummer, co-vocalist, and lyricist Brann Dailor tells Apple Music. “When we got to the point where we had 20 ideas that were pretty fleshed out, we said, ‘We need to stop now.’ From there, it was hard even narrowing it down to 15 songs, so I’m not sure what we would’ve done if we’d needed to make a single album.” Thematically, *Hushed and Grim* largely deals with the death of Mastodon’s longtime friend and manager Nick John, who was taken by cancer in 2018. “It’s definitely a representation of the time period we went through,” Dailor says. “The pandemic, Nick John’s passing, and other things that transpired for us during that time.” Below, he details some key tracks from the record. **“Pain With an Anchor”** “I think that\'s probably one of the first songs that came about for the album. I strung a couple of riffs together, and then \[guitarist\] Bill \[Kelliher\] and I sat down in his basement and combined a few more. He came up with that big, heavy riff at the end and all that cool stuff in the bridge. I added these weird vocal swells—and some thunderclaps—underneath to make it more evil and sinister. The drum intro didn’t come until much later, when we were about to cut it for real. I just had this idea to do this quads intro thing, which sort of cemented it as being the first song on the record.” **“More Than I Could Chew”** “That’s a big Bill riff. I really drove it straight on the drums and I didn’t deviate too much from that, which is a little bit different for me. I’m more of a frantic player, usually. The kick pattern also opened up a lane for me to sing over the top of it. I don’t think Bill was really expecting there to be this higher, soaring vocal over that. \[Bassist\] Troy \[Sanders\] came up with that last riff, the one that \[guitarist\] Brent \[Hinds\] solos over. I just love that part. Troy hasn’t really been a big writer in the band, but this time around he wrote four or five tracks.” **“The Beast”** “This is one of Brent’s, and I wrote some lyrics for him. It’s got that opening country guitar lick and then it goes into what seems like a blues shuffle to me. Brent’s voice is just awesome there—I think it’s really soulful and bluesy. And then it moves into sort of a proggy King Crimson-type part that leads into Marcus King’s solo, which I love. Brent and Marcus are good friends, so it was cool to bring Marcus in to do that. To me, it’s a real proggy-sounding solo and it really flexes Marcus’ talents as a masterful guitar player. And it’s cool for Brent to hand the reins over like that, being an amazing soloist himself.” **“Teardrinker”** “This is a simple two-part guitar thing I came up with on an acoustic. I’m not the most talented guitar player, so most of what I write is pretty simple—and then I turn it over to Bill to get the magic happening. I wrote this at a time when it wasn’t going well for me. I was in a dark place. I was actually living in this apartment that had no sofa, no TV—just an acoustic guitar and a bed. I was hijacking a bit of service off my phone so I could try to watch some shows on my iPad. It was a rough time, but I’m okay now. So it’s a big emotional song, but it turned out pretty catchy.” **“Pushing the Tides”** “There’s not a lot of rippers on this album, but this is a ripper that just feels good to play. It’s another one that came from sitting in Bill’s basement. The first riff reminds me of early AmRep stuff like Chokebore, Guzzard, or early-’90s Barkmarket maybe. There’s some prog influence there, some Killing Joke—all that stuff we’re into, being kids of the ’90s. We sort of came from that whole scene of underground, mathy stuff that was below the upper echelons of grunge. So it’s cool when that stuff pops up. It’s a fun song with a big chorus.” **“Dagger”** “Once you’ve decided that you’re making a double album, you can sprawl out a bit. I don’t know that this song would’ve been as cool as it ended up being if we didn’t go down the rabbit hole with it. We got a sarangi player, and my friend Dave Witte from Municipal Waste came in to do some percussion on these tribal drums and hunks of metal. Then we had our buddy come in and play some crazy Moog at the end. I’m stoked on it, but if it wasn’t for Troy’s voice, you’d have a hard time convincing even a Mastodon fan that this was a Mastodon song.” **“Had It All”** “This is an important song, and very Nick John-centric. He probably shows up in the lyrics of every song, but this one is specifically aimed at his situation. To have Kim Thayil do the solo was amazing, because Soundgarden was one of Nick’s favorite bands. And what a cool turn of events that Troy’s mom got to virtually jam on French horn with Kim on this one. Kim did a really beautiful, heart-wrenching solo, and then Troy’s mom added another beautiful texture with a nice little horn arrangement. This is the closest I think we’ve come to a ballad, I think, but it’s an emotional song for us. The only bummer is that Nick isn’t here to hear it.” **“Gigantium”** “This is another one I wrote when I was in that apartment. I call it the Sadness Hole. I don’t want to get into why I was there, but just to be clear, I wasn’t strung out on drugs or anything like that. It was a personal time. But the last riff really sounded like the end of something. It’s sad-sounding, but there’s also some hope there. So we put some string arrangements on it and Brent did this really beautiful guitar solo. The last line is for Nick John: ‘The mountains we made in the distance will be with us forever.’ I think it’s a beautiful farewell.”

“What do you think about a samurai Eddie?” That was the question Iron Maiden bassist, co-lyricist, and all-around mastermind Steve Harris posed to his bandmates when he came up with the Japanese theme for the imagery and title track of the band’s 17th studio album, *Senjutsu*. Roughly translated, the term means “tactics and strategy,” but the idea of Maiden’s shape-shifting mascot, Eddie, in full samurai regalia was immediately appealing. “Let\'s face it, we\'ve plundered a few cultures over the years with Eddie,” Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson tells Apple Music. “We had a Mayan Eddie and we\'ve had a sci-fi one. We\'ve had a space monster Eddie, an Egyptian Eddie, a mummy Eddie. We actually did have Eddie with a samurai sword on the *Maiden Japan* EP, but that was years and years ago. The band has always been quite popular in Japan, which is a pretty exotic place with a very rich samurai history. But most of the songs are unrelated.” Below, Dickinson comments on some of the album\'s highlights. **“Senjutsu”** “This starts out with some ominous drumbeats from what is intended to sound like those big Japanese taiko drums. Then Nicko \[McBrain\] comes in with this beat which is not the Keystone Cops, because I think we\'ve got to the point where we feel confident enough that we can be dramatic without being in a hurry about it. And ‘Senjutsu’ has got drama all over it. To me, it builds and builds and builds. There’s a vocal fugue in the middle with echoes going over the top and then another vocal line. It resolves beautifully into this really magisterial vocal line as you get towards the latter half of the tune. Does it have a chorus? No. There\'s millions of different ones, all strung together. For the most part, the vocal is done in a two-part harmony. It\'s one of my favorite tracks, and it\'s going to be a great way to open a set live.” **“Stratego”** “Stratego is a board game. I’ve never played it, but it’s kind of similar to chess. I was doing a little bit of searching and discovered that Stratego was based on a French board game from the 19th century. That game was based on something called military chess. Japanese military chess, in turn, is a game called shogi. The characters are basically flat stones with Japanese calligraphy on them, each denoting a warrior of some description. You’ve got a black side and a white side, but it’s entirely possible for characters to change sides. Not only that, but they can also transform into a different character. It’s a game of strategy and tactics, but also betrayal and intrigue.” **“The Writing on the Wall”** “The song is basically in two parts, and the intro sets the scene. When I first heard it, I was thinking, ‘This is a bit Tarantino here. It’s a little bit desert.’ I could see a Mad Max scenario opening up. I think \[guitarist\] Adrian \[Smith\] already had the title and a great riff, so we worked the body of the song around that. I thought it was a great title for what’s going on in the world now. There\'s lots of things coming up like objects in the rearview mirror—they may be closer than they appear. There’s a lot of choices people need to make about what kind of world they want to live in. I wrote the song without trying to preach, but to say, ‘You can’t bury your head in the sand. This stuff will bite you if you don’t do something about it.’” **“Lost in a Lost World”** “At the beginning, you would believe that you accidentally wandered into The Moody Blues or Pink Floyd doing something in about 1973, with the layered vocals and things like that. We’ve never done anything as explicitly detailed as that before. But it doesn\'t last for that long before some fiend comes out and hits you over the head with a mallet and the track kicks in. And then it takes you on a journey to a fantastical world that has ceased to exist.” **“Days of Future Past** “This track is as close as you\'re going to get to *Piece of Mind* or *Powerslave*-era Maiden. Four minutes, super high-energy riff, big anthemic chorus, big vocals—all that. Incredible riff from Adrian, and basically no guitar solo. The lyric is a reimagining of the graphic novel *Constantine*, particularly the movie version with Keanu Reeves. It’s kind of an interesting setup, because there’s always the assumption that God is the good guy. In this scenario, God seems to be a manipulative narcissist. He’s almost like a psychopath: ‘I\'m going to do all this horrible stuff to you, and then you just have to love me.’ How does that work? That’s what the song asks.” **“Darkest Hour”** “‘Darkest Hour’ refers not to just the movie about Winston Churchill—it’s about him as a person as well. A lot of people criticize Churchill because he made a lot of mistakes and did things people didn’t approve of. He was almost certainly a full-blown alcoholic, but a functioning one. He said horrible things about women. He did all these things that he would aptly be condemned for. But the bit that people forgive all that for—certainly, I do—is that he stood up to the Nazis and said, ‘No, these are barbarians. Even though the odds are stacked against us, we as a nation are going to resist.’ Half of his cabinet and government would’ve sided with the Nazis and done a deal. But he inspired the nation to do the right thing.” **“The Parchment”** “You really have to be careful about this one if you’re one of these people who likes flotation tanks and you’re going to put this one on in the headphones. It’s a processional, really. The end sounds like the emperor coming back, the prodigal son returning home after a long journey. But the whole middle section is absolutely hypnotic. It’s a monster track, but it\'s layer upon layer upon layer of different iterations and repetitions. If you get under the skin of it, it\'s really complex. I think Steve locked himself away for days to come up with this one. We had to learn it in pieces because it was the only way possible.” **“Hell on Earth”** “Steve is quite an unconventional personality. He\'s not an extroverted person—except onstage when he goes raving mad with a bass. But I think he feels a lot of things really deeply about the world he\'s in. The English band Blur had an album called *Modern Life Is Rubbish*, and I think Steve would concur with that sentiment and say, ‘What kind of world are we creating? Maybe I should just go to sleep. And then if I pass into the next life, maybe I\'ll come back and it\'s going to be better—because this place is hell on earth.’ But I don’t think he’s recommending accelerating your passage into the next world, because we’ve got a tour to do. But he’s genuinely concerned about stuff.”

In a genre that can be unkind towards too much change, Architects\' ninth album aims to challenge that mindset. \"We can do whatever we want,\" drummer and primary songwriter Dan Searle tells Apple Music. \"The ultimate question is, do we like it? And the answer is yes.\" *For Those That Wish to Exist* showcases the British quintet taking new risks, such as incorporating an orchestral approach into their abrasive sound (\"Dead Butterflies\" and \"An Ordinary Extinction\"), expanding vocalist Sam Carter\'s range beyond just screaming (\"Flight Without Feathers\" and \"Demi God\"), and focusing more on accountability and less on nihilism. \"I just realize that there might be a universe that prevents us from having control, taking the reins to see what\'s going on in the world,\" explains Searle. \"I wanted it to be something a little bit more responsible. I began to question why I was so passive in my role in making the world a better place.\" Below, Searle walks us through *For Those That Wish to Exist*\'s 15 tracks. **Do You Dream of Armageddon?** “It\'s lyrically alluding to a sense that we\'re all in the same boat, and we\'re heading in that direction. And it doesn\'t feature anyone in the band except Sam.” **Black Lungs** “I really felt like it was the only way to open the record. I love the chorus. It really is like a showcase of every style. It\'s easing you into the record, because we stray from the usual path a number of times.” **Giving Blood** “When the song originally came together, it was just drums and synth. The guitars came later. Obviously, a lot of it is still a heavy rock song. But this is sort of your first taste of the band moving into new water, so to speak.” **Discourse Is Dead** “This is a good song to make enemies with because it\'s kind of a critique of just not speaking to each other and trying to move forward. But I know that compromise is not popular at the moment. People are more polarized than ever. And it\'s leading us further away from creating a better world.” **Dead Butterflies** “It starts just with the strings and the bass. We planned around those ideas and developed it into something that worked for the band. It sat around for ages on the shelf, and eventually we sat down with it and worked it out. I think it\'s one of the best songs on the record.” **An Ordinary Extinction** “Probably the heaviest part of the record despite the trippy nature of this song. It\'s still very Architects, but then you get tossed into the verse straight away and it\'s something completely different again. It\'s super heavy and it\'s in a key that fits Sam\'s voice.” **Impermanence** “It just felt like a stompy end-of-the-world song. And kind of thematically leading on from where we left off in \[2018\'s\] *Holy Hell*, a little bit more concentration about mortality and the nature of our existence.” **Flight Without Feathers** “This is like the pit stop on the record almost. I wanted to write a song that was just basslines, so I wrote all the vocals and built the rest of the song around it. It’s one of three songs on the record without any drums—without me actually performing on it at all. So it\'s really got to shine just on the quality of the basic parts in it.” **Little Wonder** “We all see what is wrong with the world, but at the same time we avoid wanting to see it because we all want an easy life. I think the lyrics are a little bit of a cheeky nod to the fact that this song is so stylistically different for us.” **Animals** “This song went from text message to done in about 48 hours, and it was just one of those magical moments. And if we tried to make an 11-track record, we would have never gotten to this song. I\'m so glad that we did, because I think it is probably the best Architects song.” **Libertine** “We thought the record needed something like this—something big and aggressive, something with a little bit of space in it. And in the end, it\'s an absolutely cool album track.” **Goliath** “I thought this sounded just like a metal Biffy Clyro song and we\'ve got to try to get Simon \[Neil\] on it. We just thought it\'d be cool to have the singer of one of UK\'s biggest rock bands singing over one of the heaviest parts of the record. It\'s kind of all over the place.” **Demi God** “It\'s really dark and it\'s a bit of a late jam on the record that I\'m really proud of. I felt like I didn\'t want to create a long record that just fizzles out, I wanted it to stay stronger and still be providing interesting surprises throughout.” **Meteor** “There\'s no point in pretending that this song isn\'t an arena rock song, because it is an arena rock song. We typically play in a genre where arena rock is forbidden and taboo. So this song is probably the boldest track on the record. And yes, this song is very much about us knowing that we\'re heading for disaster.” **Dying Is Absolutely Safe** “I decided that it should be an acoustic track because it felt like something that the record hadn\'t stepped into. But I think fans will get it. I think there\'s something in there that\'s pretty special.”

“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”

On their first album in eight years, Liverpool death metal titans Carcass double down on the infectious harmonized riffage and medical-atrocity lyrics of their 2013 comeback album, *Surgical Steel*. To say that *Torn Arteries* is long-awaited is an understatement: The album was originally supposed to be out in early 2020. In fact, Carcass released the first single, “Under the Scalpel Blade,” in late 2019. When the pandemic hit, the band decided to delay the record’s release until they could safely tour. To tide fans over, they released the four-song *Despicable* EP in October 2020. But now, the moment of truth has arrived, and Carcass vocalist/bassist Jeff Walker isn’t giving any spoilers. “I don’t want to talk about the lyrics because you’re giving the game away,” he tells Apple Music. “It defeats the object of me not wanting them on the album, and you’re kind of instilling in people how they should be thinking.” Still, we managed to extract some comments from him on some key tracks. **“Dance of Ixtab”** “Ixtab is the Mayan goddess of suicide by hanging. I’ve no idea how I stumbled across it, honestly. I could say I was on an alien peninsula or something, but that’s bullshit. Maybe I was watching *From Dusk Till Dawn*. I was probably doing some ‘research,’ and we all know what that means these days: Google. But it’s not glorifying suicide or dwelling on people being depressed. It’s a bit more sleazy than that.” **“Eleanor Rigor Mortis”** “If there’s anything that we dusted off from the old days for this album, it’s this song title. We joked about using it way back on the first album. It falls into this Kinks/Beatles quintessential Englishness that we’ve always incorporated into Carcass. That was the vibe I was going for. I’m sure \[Carcass guitarist\] Bill \[Steer\] cringes over the fact that I bothered to use it.” **“Under the Scalpel Blade”** “We’ve managed to release this song three times now. With every album, you have a song that kind of becomes a single. So, we released this at the end of 2019 as a flexi single with *Decibel* when the album was supposed to be out in 2020. But then, of course, that didn’t happen. When we decided to do the EP, we had three songs that are not on the album, so we brought out one album track as well. And, of course, the song has to be on the album itself.” **“The Devil Rides Out”** “This is a movie title I’ve always loved, but the song has nothing to do with that. There’s always been anti-religious songs, but this is an anti-Satanic song. Satanism is just as fucking stupid as Christianity or every other ‘ism,’ you know? I really fancied the idea of doing a song that could be picked up by Christians and then they run to town thinking it’s a pro-Christian song. I love the idea of the label servicing some Christian radio stations with this track, but it never happened.” **“Kelly’s Meat Emporium”** “This was a real shop in Liverpool, but it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s somewhere I’d pass occasionally, and I just thought it was quaint because one minute it was open and then for years it was kind of derelict. To me, it was just a sign of the times. But the title is totally disconnected from the lyrics. It’s like ‘The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue’ from the EP: It’s not like I watched the movie and wrote a song about it. I just liked the title. Like ‘Eleanor Rigor Mortis,’ it feels quintessentially British.”