Revolver's 25 Best Albums of 2022

Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge was in a Seattle bookstore in 2014 when he came across what would become the theme for the Swedish occult rockers’ fifth album, *IMPERA*. “I saw this book called *The Rule of Empires*,” he tells Apple Music. “I’ve always been quite interested in history and politics, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that every empire eventually ends. Right then and there, I knew that at some point I was going to make a record about the rise and fall of empires.” At the time, Forge was already planning to make a record about the bubonic plague, which became Ghost’s startlingly prescient 2018 album *Prequelle*. “I felt like those two subjects represented two completely different threats of annihilation,” he says. “One feels a little bit more divine, and the other a little more structured and fabricated. So I compartmentalized the two themes and made two different albums.” Below, Forge details some key tracks from *IMPERA*. **“Kaisarion”** “The story this song tells, or the perspective it shines light onto, is basically stupid people destroying something that they don\'t understand with a frantic smile on their face. This has happened many times and unfortunately will probably happen many times in the future, because unfortunately things that we don\'t understand or that we cannot control have a tendency to arouse those feelings. We want to kill it. We want to destroy it.” **“Spillways”** “In ‘Kaisarion,’ we have the en masse, frenetic, frantic buzz of being in a group. In ‘Spillways,’ we have a very internalized pressure that builds up to the next song, which is a distant call that ends up being a voice in your head—the insulated person who’s being communicated with from a higher power. That’s loosely how we move geographically between these three songs. If the leads remind you of Brian May, that’s because I like stacking solos and adding harmonies, which automatically puts you in Brian May territory.” **“Call Me Little Sunshine”** “This is similar to our song ‘Cirice’ in the sense that you have this betraying hand that leads you into the night pretending to have a torch in the other. Which is interesting, because we’ve placed ourselves in the devil’s corner, pop-culturally, so it becomes this paradox. Myself and other peddlers in the extreme metal world use a lot of biblical or diabolical references, and up until recently we felt we were doing it with a distance from history—like this was in the Old World, when people were stupid. But no—this is real. This is now.” **“Hunter’s Moon”** “This song was written specifically for the *Halloween Kills* soundtrack, which made it so much easier to write because I knew the context. If ‘Call Me Little Sunshine’ is a voice inside the head that’s actually coming from outside, ‘Hunter’s Moon’ is inside the empire of the brain of a maniac: ‘I’m coming to get you because you belong to me. Can’t you see I’m doing this as an act of love?’ It’s absolutely illogical, but if you place yourself inside the head of a maniac, it makes sense. It’s burning love.” **“Watcher in the Sky”** “This reverts back to the imperial world of Flat Earth Society members, basically. The narration is calling upon the scientific community to use whatever science we have here within this empire to stop looking at the stars and look for God instead. Can we reverse the tools that we have to watch the stars to communicate with the Lord? And is there any way to scientifically prove that the world is actually flat? Because it looks awfully flat from where we\'re standing. So it’s a song about regression.” **“Twenties”** “This is a machine disguised as a leader talking to liberal persons because we need their manpower, and without them there is no society. So it’s this cheer about the twenties, saying that it will lead to an even more hopeful thirties—but 1900s-style. It’s meant to give people hope, if you’re bent that way. It’s similar to our song ‘Mummy Dust’ in that both are more primally aggressive and have an element of greed.” **“Grift Wood”** “I love Hollywood rock like Van Halen and Mötley Crüe, and it just feels fitting to have an uplifting track towards the end of the record. Musically, one thing that inspired the more Sunset Strip elements of the song was knowing that it was going to throw you off with a really long curveball that felt like something no Sunset Strip band has ever done. And that enabled the more glossy bits to be even more in line with the traditional elements of an early-’80s Sunset Strip song.”

When Lorna Shore brought in Will Ramos to replace their previous vocalist in 2020, he had his work cut out for him. The New Jersey deathcore crew already had three albums and three EPs under their collective belt—not to mention a significant fanbase. Ramos made his studio debut with the band on their 2021 EP, *…And I Return to Nothingness*. “Writing the EP, I overthought the crap out of everything,” he tells Apple Music. “I had a million different ideas but wasn’t sure what to do. In the end, the band was like, ‘Do whatever feels most comfortable.’” Their advice paid off when the EP’s “To the Hellfire” went viral. So, Ramos trusted his instincts when it came time to write lyrics for *Pain Remains*. “I wanted to write an adventure that starts with the first song and ends almost back at the beginning with the last song,” he explains. Inspired by some of his favorite anime and manga, *Pain Remains* is a concept album that takes place in a dreamworld created by someone who wants to escape their reality. “A lot of deathcore albums are about anger and ‘fuck this, fuck that’—very monotone,” Ramos notes. “I wanted to do something that creates an emotion that, maybe, you haven’t felt in a long time.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Welcome Back, O’ Sleeping Dreamer”** “There’s a narrator explaining the potential of dreams and lucidity, the opportunity for exploration of the infinite, and a deeper dive into the human psyche. The whole song is about falling into this place that feels familiar, but it’s somehow not familiar at the same time. It’s a concept album, so this is the first chapter.” **“Into the Earth”** “This is where the character starts to realize that they’re lucid dreaming—and they’re able to control almost all of this world that’s around them. In the first song, they’re falling into place. In this one, they’re becoming aware of their abilities. Lucid dreaming—becoming aware of dreaming during the dream—is one of the hardest things to do. Usually, when you do that, you wake up immediately. But this person is realizing they can manipulate their dreamworld.” **“Sun//Eater”** “In this one, the character starts to realize that they’re almost like a god. When you start to lucid-dream, you become the god of your dreams. You can control everything. The chorus talks about being omnipotent: ‘I am the one/Icarus/I’ll touch the sun,’ whereas Icarus could not touch the sun. He tried so hard. In this song, the person is saying, ‘These are the things I’m going to do.’ It’s optimism. ‘I want to create. This is where I’m at.’” **“Cursed to Die”** “In this song, the character is fully immersed in a dreamlike state. After realizing that they’re a god in the last song, now the person who controls this dream universe ends up making people in his own image, so he’s not alone in this world. He’s creating man, essentially, from his memories. He’s basically just trying to fill a void inside that can’t be filled. At this point, he starts second-guessing everything. ‘Did I do this for fulfillment? Am I feeling fulfilled?’ He’s not exactly sure. But he’s learning that reality is whatever you make it to be.” **“Soulless Existence”** “This is where the main character, who has become the god of his own world, starts to realize that there is no point. ‘I’ve done all this shit, and I’m still not happy.’ His emptiness is filling up this world. He himself is nothingness. He’s lost his purpose. He’s found no significance in himself or anything that he has created. He’s lost. He starts to feel like he’s in an endless, almost inescapable purgatory. The lyrics are basically saying he’s in a place where nobody could ever find him.” **“Apotheosis”** “The character starts to see something in the distance that gives him a glimpse of hope. It may be a person or a thing, but he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. He’s like, ‘This is going to be fine. Everything is going to work out.’” **“Wrath”** “When we were putting the album together, this one got moved around. ‘Wrath’ was supposed to be before ‘Apotheosis’ in the story, but the songs flowed better sonically this way. The song is about being pissed and wanting to destroy everything. He’s basically at the point where he wants to see the world he’s created go down in flames. But, like I said, this was supposed to be before he finds any glimpse of hope. So, the story is a little jumbled here.” **“Pain Remains I: Dancing Like Flames”** “I used to have dreams where I would have this fantastic relationship with somebody, and I can’t even tell who this person is at all because that’s how dreams are. Unfortunately, you can’t make out a lot of things—dreams are so vague. But in your mind, it makes sense. You’re falling in love, and then you’ll wake up from the dream and be like, ‘Shit, that never really happened at all. This sucks.’ In the story, the character has a moment like this. They begin to love in their dreams, which returns meaning to their dreamworld. But they can’t quite find solace.” **“Pain Remains II: After All I’ve Done, I’ll Disappear”** “He’s beginning to realize that, after everything, he’s at the end of this whole world he made. It’s all a ghost in the breeze, like fading memories. He wants to disappear, to escape from this dreamworld.” **“Pain Remains III: In a Sea of Fire”** “This is the conclusion, but it’s also the part where he is most angry. He’s at the bottom of the barrel and desperate. The world he made, he’s going to burn it all down and disappear. He’s ready to go back to wherever it was that he came from. It’s the idea that God has left us and the world he made. He’s bored, he’s sad, and nothing he’s done has brought him any purpose. So, he leaves the world and goes back to the reality he came from. The ending is a bittersweet tragedy.”

“If anybody paying attention to the state of the world over the last few years isn’t angry, I have nothing to say to them.” That’s the sum total of what Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe offers about the generally pissed-off tone of the Grammy-nominated metal band’s ninth album. And while songs like “Grayscale,” “Ditch,” and “Ill Designs” practically drip with sociopolitical venom, guitarist Mark Morton notes that one doesn’t have to be in personal turmoil to write vitriolic songs. “I wasn’t angry when I made this record at all,” Morton tells Apple Music. “I’m in a great place in my life. I love making music with my best friends. But there’s plenty of negative stuff in the world to write heavy metal songs about, and we certainly tapped into that—as we always have. We’re being marketed and sold falling skies, doom and gloom and all this end-of-days material. That stuff makes wonderful fodder for metal music.” Below, he and Blythe discuss the songs on *Omens*. **“Nevermore”** Blythe: “This song is very much about my hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Lyrically, it’s sort of scripted in the Southern gothic/horror-tinged tones that Edgar Allan Poe employed so well—and he’s from Richmond. The song is about the history of the city from pre-revolutionary days to now. It’s not seen through the eyes of Poe, exactly, but his metaphors—like in his poem ‘The Raven’—are definitely employed. There’s a lot of atrocity and inhumanity and dark history that happened in Richmond, and it’s all in the song.” **“Vanishing”** Morton: “No two songs on this album do exactly the same thing, and ‘Vanishing’ to me feels like a very heavy metal song in the classic sense. It\'s full of acrobatic riffs—that’s \[LOG guitarist\] Willie Adler at his riff-writing finest—and yet it manages to hold that signature Lamb of God groove that \[drummer\] Art \[Cruz\] is keeping us rooted in here. It’s very dark and minor-key, very heavy and foreboding, but it’s still a workout on the fretboard.” **“To the Grave”** Morton: “On an album full of very collaborative songs, this is one of the most collaborative songs. It went through so many changes along the way. It was originally written to be much faster, and we slowed it way down. Once the vocal was added, parts of the music were rewritten again. Even when we were in the studio, we were still debating about different parts of it. I know this is a really personal song for Randy. His lyrics always have a personal element, but this one in particular has a lot of meaning to him.” **“Ditch”** Morton: “I live outside of Richmond, Virginia, and on the edge of my property are Civil War earthworks from where Confederate soldiers dug trenches to defend the city. I was crossing over those one day, and it occurred to me that a lot of the dudes who dug those trenches died in them. They dug their own graves. I began to wonder if any of them considered that while they were doing it. From there, I started to think about these parallels between then and now as a nation that’s so divided. All this contentious ideological posturing we’re doing just feels really ill-fated.” **“Omens”** Blythe: “A buddy of mine named Ryan Holiday wrote a book called *The Obstacle Is the Way*, where he writes about how to apply Stoic philosophy to modern-day life. One of the things he points out is that all of the problems we’re facing today are exactly the same problems that occurred in the ancient Roman empire at the height of Stoic philosophy. We have corrupt politicians, social upheaval, economic upheaval. There was even a plague that lasted for most of Marcus Aurelius’ reign. These problems happen again and again throughout history, but we feel like this is the first time any of it has happened. But none of this is unprecedented. And people survived and got through it.” **“Gomorrah”** Morton: “This one starts out kind of atmospheric and moody and then just builds in tension and intensity. It ebbs and flows in places, but I feel like the anxiety in the song grows all the way through. That was totally unplanned from a writing perspective, but I think Josh Wilbur, our producer, keyed into it and really helped us hone it. These are all Randy’s lyrics, and I don’t like the idea of trying to interpret his lyrics, but to me, it seems like a kind of self-reflection in the dystopian landscape that we all felt like we were in for a period of time.” **“Ill Designs”** Morton: “This is a song about consequences. It’s about watching an individual or a group of individuals manipulating situations for their own gain—and then having that turn on them in the end. It was, in a sense, about wrestling with how to feel about that. You find compassion for people as human beings, but you can’t really argue with the universe. All you can do is just see what comes back around. You could attribute this to one specific person or group of people, but it’s really about the universal theme of karma and consequence.” **“Grayscale”** Morton: “This is a really cool song that came very, very late in the writing process. Willie had the music for this on the side, and I don’t think he had initially intended on presenting it as a Lamb of God song. But somehow it came across the table, and everyone really liked it. It’s tuned all the way down to drop B. It’s the only song on the album that’s in B, and it’s only the second time we’ve ever done that on a record. It’s very hardcore-influenced, and it’s another song based on a personal experience of Randy’s.” **“Denial Mechanism”** Morton: “This is very punk rock. Like ‘Grayscale,’ it came pretty late in the process. We had seven or eight songs that were on their way to being album-ready, and we started to consider what elements we were missing. So Willie came in with a hardcore thing on ‘Grayscale,’ and I came in with a more traditional punk rock song in ‘Denial Mechanism.’ But it’s actually the first one we recorded when we got to the studio. I’m pretty sure Art’s drums are a first take, too.” **“September Song”** Morton: “Traditionally, we stretch out a little bit on the last song. On our past albums, this spot has been occupied by songs like ‘Reclamation’ or ‘Vigil’ or ‘Remorse Is for the Dead.’ To me, the intro of ‘September Song’ has a very June of 44 /Slint/Fugazi kind of post-punk vibe to it. I instantly loved how it was sounding as it was coming together. Even as it was taking form, I felt like it was going to be a strong contender for the album closer, which is definitely a coveted spot. You know, we always want people to listen to our albums start to finish. If you don’t make it to the end, you haven’t had the complete experience.”

After the release of their 2016 album *Dystopia*, metal masters Megadeth went through some drastic lineup changes. First, session drummer Chris Adler (formerly of Lamb of God) was replaced by longtime Soilwork drummer Dirk Verbeuren. Then, Megadeth ringleader Dave Mustaine fired longtime bassist Dave Ellefson and brought in Testament’s Steve DiGiorgio to play on *The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!* “Having a new rhythm section doesn’t affect how I approach things, but it certainly changes the way things are approached,” Mustaine tells Apple Music. “When you have different people involved, there’s going to be different recording techniques and different psychology involved. In that situation, communication is one of the most important things.” Below, he comments on each song. **“The Sick, the Dying ... and the Dead!”** “The lyrics are about the Black Plague and how critters on a boat brought the disease onshore. It\'s also about that really morbid child\'s nursery rhyme, ‘Ring Around the Rosie’: ‘Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies.’ The ‘rosies’ were the scars on your face from the disease, and the posies were to cover up the stench of all the dead bodies everywhere. The end of it, ‘Ashes, ashes, they all fall down’: Well, everybody\'s falling down because they have the plague, and you have to burn the bodies. So, that sweet little nursery rhyme isn\'t quite so innocuous.” **“Life in Hell”** “The title ‘Life in Hell’ was tongue-in-cheek about *To Live and Die in LA*. I liked that movie, which was about somebody who was so self-absorbed that all they think about is themselves. This song ended up not being even close to what the movie is about, but \[that was the initial inspiration\].” **“Night Stalkers” (feat. Ice-T)** “This song was written about the helicopter special ops forces up in Fort Campbell. Some friends of mine were pilots there—they have since retired, but they were really important in a lot of the rescue missions and famous raids. It\'s a great inspiration to see people who can endure life-threatening situations and basic training that’s basically a freckle away from torture. It’s a different breed of person that’s able to endure it. Ice-T is a part of the song because he was in the military, too. When I first met him, he told me he was a ranger. I thought that was pretty badass.” **“Dogs of Chernobyl”** “It\'s basically about a relationship that ends, and the person is going through the feeling of abandonment. One moment, he\'s in a relationship. The next moment, the significant other is gone out of his life forever and there\'s no explanation. Essentially, that\'s what I felt when I watched the specials they had on Chernobyl. One was a sci-fi movie about these four kids that go to see the nuclear meltdown site, and they come across these dogs. I just thought about how awful it must have been to be a dog in that situation, where your caretakers just leave them. What do they do? I wrote down, ‘You left me like the dogs of Chernobyl,’ and that was the germination for the whole song.” **“Sacrifice”** “Years ago, I went to an after-hours party in Los Angeles. There were some famous musicians there, and one of them was wearing these expensive sunglasses. I don’t know how they ended up on the ground, but I remember seeing another guy go over and step on them. I remember thinking, ‘That’s so uncool.’ And this guy who had the sunglasses was like the Michael Jordan of guitar players, so obviously the other guy felt threatened or intimidated. ‘Sacrifice’ was inspired by a song that the guy with the sunglasses wrote many years ago.” **“Junkie”** “This song is about somebody who has character traits that lead them to live their life in excess. When you\'re just starting out in life and you get around the wrong people, you start having some areas of your life ruined. When I was little, my mom would say, ‘Show me your friends and I\'ll show you who you are.’ I thought, ‘Mom, stop.’ But when I looked at that sage advice from my mom, there were a lot of friends I had that needed to go. Once you make some of the necessary changes that you need to make, it makes things way better.” **“Psychopathy”** “‘Psychopathy’ and ‘Killing Time’ are a one-two punch. The beginning of ‘Psychopathy’ is obviously about a psychiatrist talking about the dangers of mental illness and how often people will get misdiagnosed. I’ve had a lot of things said about me because of my health when I got cancer, when I got married, when I got saved, and I\'ve just grown accustomed to the fact that whatever I do, people are going to talk.” **“Killing Time”** “If I\'m in a relationship with somebody, they\'re always going to put their best face on when we first meet. But then when stuff starts to get a little sticky, you start to see who people really are. ‘Killing Time’ has nothing to do with killing—it’s about procrastination. It’s about people who are lackadaisical and waste their time. But time is the most valuable thing we have in this world. How many beats of the heart do I have left? How many breaths I am going to take before my last? How many times will I get to say ‘I love you’ again to my wife, to my kids, to my fans? I don’t know, but I’m going to cherish every moment.” **“Soldier On!”** “If you look at the lyrics on this, it clearly tells you who it is \[about\]. If you\'re part of the inner circle here, if you know what\'s been going on over the past 10 years, you\'ll be able to recognize some of the shenanigans that were taking place in the band and in our presence, and sometimes behind our backs, too. ‘Soldier On!’ was one of those things where I knew that in order for me to continue to experience any happiness in the world, I was going to have to walk away from the relationship that I had. It was much like ‘Tornado of Souls.’ If I told you ‘Tornado of Souls’ is a failed relationship song, most people would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t get that,’ but it’s the truth.” **“Célebutante”** “I had heard Yngwie \[Malmsteen\] when he first came over to the United States—he was an artist that Mike Varney had signed. Back in the Metallica days, James \[Hetfield\] and I went over to Varney’s house to go meet this Yngwie dude. He wasn’t there, but his cabinets were. He had ‘666’ painted all over his cabinets, and I thought, ‘Oh, boy.’ I ended up meeting him later, and I think he’s a brilliant guitar player.” **“Mission to Mars”** “This was inspired by all the sage wisdom from TED Talks and a lot of other discussions about space travel. I remember going down to NASA in Houston because the Japanese had sent a professor into space to blow bubbles to see if bubbles were capable of being blown in zero gravity. I said, ‘You\'re kidding. You\'re spending 15 million fucking dollars to send a scientist into space on our space shuttle to blow bubbles?’ One of the astronauts’ wives heard me on the air and took exception and invited me to come down there. I don’t really know much about what I saw, but it looked like there was a bunch of stuff going on that we couldn’t even fathom. It’s exciting, the space race.” **“We\'ll Be Back”** “This is about persevering in the end. You know you can\'t hold me down, and no matter what, I am not going to give up. The things you can count on in this world are death, taxes, and Dave Mustaine coming through any kind of hardship.”

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

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

Contemplation and self-awareness run throughout Celebrity Therapist. “The whole album is about history repeating itself and how we kind of move in circles. It’s two steps forward and three steps back with a bunch of people in my life. The album is me reflecting on these people but realizing I’m guilty of the same at the end of the record. There are a lot of ‘fuck you’ songs because every heavy band likes writing those. But overall, the lyrics are more introspective and quite loving.” The Callous Daoboys come from the school of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die, and The Chariot, with a heightened degree of theatricality as one of the methods to their madness. Think Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy getting slapped around good-naturedly by Glassjaw. Celebrity Therapist even indulges in a bit of drone and avant-garde post-rock a la Sigor Rós and Radiohead.

After punk supergroup Dead Cross recorded their 2017 debut, they enlisted Faith No More’s Mike Patton to replace departing vocalist Gabe Serbian. Patton rewrote an album’s worth of lyrics, rerecorded the vocals, and ultimately saved the day. When writing *II*, guitarist Michael Crain (Retox), bassist Justin Pearson (The Locust, Deaf Club), and drummer Dave Lombardo (ex-Slayer) already knew Patton would be at the helm. “On the first record, we wanted to be more old-school thrash, and that was because of Gabe’s vocal range,” Crain tells Apple Music. “When Patton came in, he completely took it another direction. I didn’t think those songs could sound like that, honestly. The guy’s musicality is otherworldly.” However, recording *II* with producer Ross Robinson had its own difficulties. Crain was recovering from cancer and chemotherapy during the sessions. “I had just finished treatments, but I was still really sick,” he says. “Obviously, it takes a while for all that stuff to wear off and get better. Chemo, the radiation, coming off painkillers—all that shit is a fucking nightmare.” (As if that weren’t bad enough, Serbian passed away suddenly after the album was finished.) Despite his painful ordeal, the band’s insane talent and sly sense of humor shine through. Below, Crain gives a hot take on each track. **“Love Without Love”** “With the riff, I was trying to make it sound like demented dinosaurs. I achieved that with a delay and a pitch shifter. But I love how that riff has its own cadence, its own beat. I really enjoy writing stuff like that. When the song picks up tempo, that’s super fun. It’s a fucking banger, and I love how Patton attacks the song. It’s spooky but romantic. It sounds like a knight riding off into the netherworld to rescue a maiden.” **“Animal Espionage”** “This is my favorite song on the record and the song I wanted to start the record with. But because we are a democratic society, I was outvoted. But I’m really proud of my guitar playing on this one. I had fun writing these riffs, and I love Patton’s vocal hook. I’d say this song is our Dear John letter to my cancer.” **“Heart Reformer”** “This song is a mosh pit stirrer. It’s definitely a beer-drinking, fist-pumping adrenaline ride. I like the ending on this one a lot. I’m not sure what Patton is talking about in the lyrics, but I think it’s his mental state at the time of writing this, which I think was during deep COVID isolation. Let’s say this is Mike Patton’s Dear John letter to COVID.” **“Strong and Wrong”** “For my guitar parts, I drew a lot of inspiration for this from our favorite Southern Californian punk forefathers—Drive Like Jehu, Black Flag, and Christian Death. There was such a big time span when Patton was writing lyrics for these songs—a lot of it was during COVID, the Black Lives Matter movement, the George Floyd riots, all that. So, I’m not sure exactly where he’s coming from in this one, but I feel like it’s somewhere in there.” **“Ants and Dragons”** “For me, this was really Daniel Ash-influenced, guitar-wise. I really drew on Bauhaus. I drew on that darkness. I went back into the shooting gallery for this one. You could say I went back to the ’90s, dyed my hair black, and got strung out on heroin again. That’s exactly what it sounds like.” **“Nightclub Canary”** “This is another banger. Ross definitely helped make that magic with the arrangements. I had the riff for a long time—I think we started working on that one in 2018. But then it completely changed, and Patton really spun it into another dimension—the fourth dimension. It’s like a fucking magic carpet ride through Mike Patton’s demented portals and possessed vocal cords.” **“Christian Missile Crisis”** “For me, this was like an homage to the first record, musically and riff-wise, at the time we wrote it. But now, hearing it finished with the lyrical content and the vocals, it sounds like something law enforcement would listen to on their way to execute a raid. If the song is about gun nuts, it sounds like something that the gun nuts would listen to on their way to use their guns.” **“Reign of Error”** “This song wrote itself. I had the riff written the night before, but when Dave and JP came in the room, \[former Slayer guitarist\] Jeff Hanneman’s hands wrote the song, not mine. I think it was actually a Slayer song. So, yeah, the ghost of Hanneman actually wrote this.” **“Imposter Syndrome”** “This song has some fucking good lyrics. Patton’s got a way with words, doesn’t he? He’s good at what he does. I think he’s established that by now. I feel like this song is about struggling still, despite your age. Still not knowing who you really are. It’s like a split personality disorder at its finest. Or maybe it’s about communication, emotions, and honesty. It’s couples counseling.”

When Cave In released their 2019 album, *Final Transmission*, many thought it might be just that. The band’s beloved friend and bassist, Caleb Scofield, had passed suddenly during the recording’s early stages, and it seemed—understandably—that heartbreak might prevent them from carrying on. Instead, vocalist/guitarist Steve Brodsky, drummer J.R. Conners, and guitarist/vocalist Adam McGrath enlisted their old friend and Converge/Old Man Gloom/Doomriders member Nate Newton to help them play benefit shows for Scofield’s family. In doing so, they breathed new life into Cave In and soon wrote an album that combines the band’s killer metallic hardcore and breathtaking space-rock eras with new and exciting musical forays. The result is *Heavy Pendulum*, Cave In’s first album recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou since their 1998 classic, *Until Your Heart Stops*. Below, Brodsky discusses each track. **“New Reality”** “A song about the new reality of Cave In without Caleb on this earthly plane. The verse riff was something he wrote years ago during the *White Silence* days. I always remembered it, and ‘New Reality’ seemed like a good opportunity to give it a home. There’s mention of the Old Man of the Mountain, the face of New Hampshire, \[where Caleb is from\]. Even after its collapse, it’s still part of the state imagery. I thought this was a beautiful way to illustrate how we keep Caleb in our memory.” **“Blood Spiller”** “We’re all fans of Nate‘s band Channel from his pre-Converge days. This one goes there musically—channeling Channel with a member of the band. Lyrically, this relates to the heated political nature of 2020, but it’s not as direct as, for instance, the song ‘Searchers of Hell.’ This song is also a call to action against anyone in your life who throws around their weight in a way that’s disruptive or destructive to your well-being—basically, bullies and assholes who need to be confronted on their bullshit.” **“Floating Skulls”** “Musically, this one had a pretty wild trajectory. It was originally in a different key, different tuning, different time signature, with wildly different lyrics. It took several trial runs before we got into Deep Purple’s *Burn* territory and it finally started to click. Lyrically, this is probably one of the more lighthearted songs on the record. I had a whole concept for a music video using helium balloons printed with skulls attached to headless mannequins...could be a cool stage prop, actually.” **“Heavy Pendulum”** “This is the first song that materialized as a full band demo when writing the album. We demoed it remotely at a time during lockdown when people still didn’t feel comfortable getting together in a room. If AC/DC had jumped on the ’90s grunge bandwagon, they may have pulled this one out of the ether before we got it. Kurt thinks it sounds kinda like ‘Fever Dog,’ which is fine with me because who doesn’t like *Almost Famous*?” **“Pendulambient”** “J.R. took to the song ‘Heavy Pendulum’ so much, he insisted that we make it the title of the record. This Interlude takes the five dominant notes from that song and spins them into a kaleidoscopic foundation created by J.R. in his German synth lab man cave. Most of the overdubs are from the original remote demo recording, either flipped backwards or made into some audio mutation. I think it’s a nice return to the vibe of having segues between songs like we did on the *Until Your Heart Stops* album.” **“Careless Offering”** “I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, which I guess officially makes it a protest song. During the George Floyd protests, I was seeing people with significant reach on social media use these platforms to encourage excess violence, and I felt this was the last thing we needed. Their words were like careless offerings to an already fucked-up situation, just being thrown like raw meat to people for the sole purpose of creating destruction. On a lighter note, one of the bands that Cave In fully embraced as an influence on this album is Into Another, and here it really shows in the whole spacey midsection of the song—that’s totally us worshiping the *Ignaurus* album.” **“Blinded by a Blaze”** “Out of the five or six songs from my initial burst of writing, ‘Blinded by a Blaze’ was the one that got everyone in the band equally hyped. Later on, Nate wrote the heavy, chugging bridge part and Adam came up with the artificial harmonic guitar line that sounds kind of like the music you might hear coming from an ice cream truck on Mars. In just eight lines, I did my best to capture a picture of driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at golden hour several years ago, and what it felt like to share that moment with someone I was in love with at the time.” **“Amaranthine”** “One night at rehearsal, Nate turned on his bass amp and the main parts for this song seemed to just fly out of him. At some point, Caleb’s wife, Jen, gifted us a notebook that belonged to Caleb. It contained lyrics, writings, and drawings that she felt could be of some use to us. Lyrics to a song called ‘Amaranthine’ really stood out, and we didn’t recognize them to be associated with any music that Caleb had written. Combining his lyrics with the first bit of music that Nate ever wrote for the band made a really cool concoction.” **“Searchers of Hell”** “The main riff was inspired by a song from the first *Between or Beyond the Black Forest* compilation, which is a bunch of European off-the-grid jazz-fusion shit recorded in the ’70s. Aside from ‘Amaranthine,’ I think this is the only other song conceived entirely in the full-band stage of making demos for the album. Lyrically, I was inspired by some of the coded language being used by people with power in the world of politics addressing others through the media. The lines ‘You’re dropping a bombshell/You wish each other well’ is a specific example of this. I guess the takeaway here is that we should always question what the media is telling us, but also what the media is selling us.” **“Nightmare Eyes”** “Leading up to the summer of 2019, I was, like most Tool fans, anxious for the release of *Fear Inoculum*. I was so excited for a new album that I literally dreamed I was hearing it one night. I rarely dream about music, so when I woke up, the feeling of this really struck me. I grabbed an acoustic guitar and made a quick recording of the song I heard in my dream, transposed to the best of my ability. It took 10,000 days, but I finally combed through every song on every Tool album, trying to find some likeness to my recording from the night before. Thankfully, I came up empty-handed and realized it was fair game. So, thank you, Tool, for gifting me—in serotonin form—the best song you never wrote.” **“Days of Nothing”** “I think Adam was inspired to create this shortly after the Cave In/Old Man Gloom tour in 2020, which ended about a month before the pandemic hit. He came up with a bunch of cool segues for the band to use. When it came to sequencing the record, I felt that we needed a good palate cleanser after the sonic rubble left by the ending of ‘Nightmare Eyes,’ and this did the trick. It’s also the only track on the album recorded entirely outside of God City \[Studios\] and mixed by someone other than Kurt. If I remember correctly, the song title references the fact that our calendars were essentially wiped clean at the height of the pandemic.” **“Waiting for Love”** “The sound at the beginning of this track spawns from one of my favorite effects pedals ever—the DOD Envelope Filter. The use of this pedal dates back to bands that me and J.R. were in even before the formation of Cave In, so hearing it on a Cave In album is a nice little nostalgic trip for us. Maybe if Van Halen had successfully gone grunge in the ’90s, they would’ve done something like this. The song is meant to be comforting for anyone searching for love and coming up short. Remember that you’re not alone, and it might just be a matter of time.” **“Reckoning”** “I believe this to be one of Adam’s finest moments as both a songwriter and a vocalist. He and I have been doing acoustic/electric duo shows for a number of years, and it’s pretty thoughtful of him to construct a song that works especially well in that setting. The way we recorded the lead guitar part was inspired by ‘Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon,’ a song from what is easily my favorite Earth album. Overall, the production on this song was necessitated by the fact that J.R. was dealing with an issue with one of his wrists, so we had to make do with a drummer functioning at less than 100 percent. In hindsight, I think it’s pretty unique because of it. Lyrically, I think Adam really hit the nail on the head when it comes to accepting grief after losing someone close to you and doing our best to manage it.” **“Wavering Angel”** “We knew this would be the closing track on the record, so we made no bones about song length or pulling any punches when it came to throwing everything into the pot from all songs previous to it in the sequence. Led Zeppelin has ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ so this one’s our ‘Stairway to Methuen,’ the town in Massachusetts where me, J.R., and Adam grew up. I tried my best to be honest about wading through trenches of heartbreak while reaching for a song to guide me along. Sometimes that song has wings, and if you just hold on tightly enough, you can let yourself fly. I hope that feeling inspires others in a time of need.”

With the second installment of their *Vaxis* story arc, emo-prog wizards Coheed and Cambria continue the highly ambitious *Amory Wars* sci-fi epic that has defined their musical career. *Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind* is an intricate cinematic narrative following a couple on the run from tyrannical forces while trying to find a cure for their young son’s mysterious condition. For Coheed vocalist, guitarist, and conceptual mastermind Claudio Sanchez, the story is a highly personal one cloaked in futuristic fantasy. “That’s kind of why I created the concept 20 years ago,” he tells Apple Music. “As the singer, it’s really hard for me to be the center of attention, the one where the messages are coming from. So, it was easier for me to construct this thing to hide behind. That’s why Coheed has been primarily shrouded in a story called *The Amory Wars*.” Below, he discusses each song on the album. **“The Embers of Fire”** “This is the intro to the record, and it hearkens back to a theme that came on the record before it, which was a track called ‘Old Flames.’ The thing that I really enjoy about this piece is that my son got to sing on it—he was five at the time. The idea of the character of Vaxis is that he’s this omnipresent sort of being that lives in all states of his life. So, I thought it would be interesting to have the child voice as well as the adult singing on the same track, singing the same lines, kind of stretching across time in a way. I really love that piece.” **“Beautiful Losers”** “A lot of these songs are directly inspired by my life, but I utilize them to inform the fiction. ‘Beautiful Losers’ came from the idea that Coheed was coming into its 20th year, and for a long time, there’s been this sense of and feeling within the band of being the underdog, and I find that there’s kind of a beauty in that. Being able to put 20 years of history behind us, I made ‘Beautiful Losers’ as sort of an anthem and tribute to that. Of course, it has its place within the fiction, but truly I think the roots of the song are that.” **“Comatose”** “Some of these songs were written pre-pandemic and were then sort of given their identity during the pandemic. ‘Comatose’ is one of them. The music has been around for a moment, but when I started to pen the lyrics to it, we had been trapped in isolation. My wife and I may have gotten into an argument, and I think that fueled the identity of that song. The line about being comatose comes from something my mother would jokingly say about my father when he was relaxing on the couch after work—she’d say he was comatose.” **“Shoulders”** “‘Shoulders’ is kind of in the same department as ‘Beautiful Losers,’ where it’s feeling the pride of history behind us, but also the sense of feeling the weight of things that I might not have accomplished during that time. But it’s also about coming out of that tunnel and feeling empowered by it. It’s also a little bit of a play on my son’s name being Atlas. So, again, there are these very personal themes that I’m utilizing to inform the story of Vaxis.” **“A Disappearing Act”** “When I started to actually solidify what this song was about, I started thinking about losing all that time during the pandemic. I was living inside my own head during the lockdown period, and then came out at the other end realizing that all this time had disappeared. People have disappeared. I lost my grandfather at the top of the pandemic without the chance to say goodbye. My wife had the same thing with her grandmother. It felt strange to come out of this period where it felt like nothing changed, but a shit ton really has.” **“Love Murder One”** “This one falls into the department of ‘Comatose.’ My wife and I have been together now almost 20 years but not married the entire time. I think we’re pretty rock-solid, but when you get imprisoned in your own confines, like during lockdown, things happen and you can struggle. ‘Love Murder One’ was an opportunity for me to exercise an emotion that I was having and just leave it in the song and not take it into reality. I got to experiment on this one, too. I explored synths on this song and also played an eight-string guitar.” **“Blood”** “For me, this has a lot to do with feeling misunderstood most of my life—and seeing that maybe that might be the same for my son. So, it’s a message to my son, Atlas, really. I’ve written a lot of songs for him. Going back a couple of years, I wrote the song ‘Atlas’ in anticipation of his birth. But with ‘Blood,’ I just want him to understand that if you experience the things I have, you’re not alone in those experiences.” **“The Liars Club”** “Right after we finished the first *Vaxis* album, *The Unheavenly Creatures*, I wrote ‘The Liars Club.’ But like a lot of songs on this record, the lyrics took form during the pandemic. Life just felt a little uncertain and a little scary. It came from the idea that maybe a false reality would be better. Who doesn’t want to live the better side of everything we experienced, even if ignoring the rest is like living a lie? That was the loose theme when I wrote this one.” **“Bad Man”** “This is a funny one because I was high as shit when I wrote it. I’m a very paranoid, introverted person, so aside from having a few drinks, I don’t really participate in that kind of thing a whole lot. But when we were in lockdown, I figured, ‘Why not? It’s been a long time.’ I think the last time I wrote music and got high like that was probably for \[2003’s\] *In Keeping Secrets*. My wife had some stuff, so I got into a certain headspace and attacked the vocals in a way that I haven’t in a long time. That whole verse section, I’m under the influence and doing my best to imitate Michael Jackson.” **“Our Love”** “At the top of lockdown, I got a Korg ARP 2600 \[synth\] and started fooling around with it. ‘Our Love’ came out of one of those ideas, but I didn’t really do much with it at first. When I came back to it a few months later, I thought it would be a good segue piece because it’s this moment where our characters have decided to sort of enter the lion’s den to acquire the thing that they feel could help their son. In that moment, they have this sentimental moment of, ‘Our love will persevere. We will get through this.’ I felt the same way with my wife during lockdown.” **“Ladders of Supremacy”** “This song was originally going to open *The Unheavenly Creatures* album, so it’s been around for a while. I held onto it because, lyrically, it wasn’t there yet. But at this point on the album, our characters are entering the lion’s den. It’s maximum security. It’s fear. It’s chaos. That was the visual I had in my head when I started writing the lyrics. Then all the stuff happened around George Floyd, and it started giving me this perspective that I’ve never had before, so I started to explore that in the song as well.” **“Rise, Naianasha (Cut the Cord)”** “That’s another one in the ‘Blood’ sort of world, geared towards my son. It’s saying that I’ll always be there for him, regardless of if I’m here or not. I’m saying, ‘You’re going to have me forever, and I’ll do whatever I can to protect you.’” **“Window of the Waking Mind”** “Before I started working on the concept of the *Vaxis* records, I read a little bit of this book called *NeuroTribes*, which is about neurodiversity. When you have a child and they’re developing, there are all these milestones in place for what is the typical mind. I just found it fascinating because I saw so many connections to myself and my son. This idea of strict normality really helped create the character of Vaxis. In the album’s story, these two people are trying to find something that they think could help cure their child, but in actuality, their child is a higher consciousness—a being far beyond their comprehension. In later stories, that will be important for *The Amory Wars*.”

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

With their follow-up to 2019’s *We Are Not Your Kind*, masked metal battalion Slipknot keeps pushing the limits of what the mainstream can withstand. You can hear bristling chunks of death metal, black metal, and funk metal on singles “The Chapeltown Rag,” “The Dying Song (Time to Sing),” and “Yen” as the band continues to transcend the nu-metal genre they’re often lumped in with. “After *We Are Not Your Kind*, we looked at each other like, ‘Man, did we push too far? Did we not push it far enough?’” vocalist Corey Taylor tells Apple Music. “So this album is another extension of boundaries, into territory the listener has never been before. How much further can we take them, but that we feel totally comfortable doing?” As for the album’s semi-apocalyptic title? “There\'s nothing I hate worse than a typical clichéd album title,” Taylor says. “For me it was like, ‘Where are we right now? What\'s happening?’ It felt like this was the second stage of our career and we were coming to the end of the tone of the albums that took us out of the original run.”

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

The year 2022 marks a new beginning for Machine Head. Not only is *ØF KINGDØM AND CRØWN* the Bay Area metal band’s first LP with new guitarist Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka (also of Polish tech-death blasters Decapitated), but it’s also their first concept album. “The story is set in a futuristic, crime-ridden wasteland where the sky is stained crimson,” Machine Head vocalist, guitarist, and main songwriter Robb Flynn tells Apple Music. “It revolves around two characters, Ares and Eros. Ares loses the love of his life, Amethyst, and goes on a murderous rampage to avenge her death. Eros loses his mother to a drug overdose, spirals into a depression, and becomes radicalized by a charismatic leader. He goes on his own murderous rampage, which ends up killing Amethyst. The lyrics detail how their lives intertwine.” Inspired by sprawling concept albums like Pink Floyd’s *The Wall* and My Chemical Romance’s *The Black Parade*, along with the manga comics favored by his kids, Flynn decided to fuse his story with the type of songwriting he did back on Machine Head’s 1994 debut, *Burn My Eyes*. “One of the things I really focused on was simplifying vocal cadences,” he says. “We did the *Burn My Eyes* 25th anniversary tour in the lead-up to the writing of this record, and one of the things I realized was that I used a lot less words back then, and it worked really well. So, I took the same approach with this one.” Below, he details each track. **“SLAUGHTER THE MARTYR”** “This was the only song that could open the album. It’s the impetus of everything. I was trying to imagine it like a movie. My kids were really into manga, so I was reading manga and kind of storyboarding things in my mind like a manga—top to bottom. And this was such an epic opening. It’s so lonely and cinematic that it just seemed that the beginning was the only place it could go. And then, it goes into a classic Machine Head riff, double-bass groove, and sick fucking breakdown.” **“CHØKE ØN THE ASHES ØF YØUR HATE”** “Lyrically, this continues in a vengeful, violent mood. Exodus’ *Bonded by Blood* is such a part of my DNA at this point. Gary Holt’s solo in ‘Bonded by Blood’ is the first guitar solo I ever learned to play all the way through, so whenever I’m channeling thrash, it’s always through the eye of, ‘What would Gary Holt do?’ So, this is just a full-on Bay Area thrash metal song—and probably the second-fastest song on the record.” **“BECØME THE FIRESTØRM”** “Another absolute face-melter. We wanted to have the first three songs be just a murderer’s row punching you in the face. I think this might be the fastest song we’ve ever written. There’s kind of like a black metal-style riff going on in there, but with classic Machine Head grooves in it as well. Lyrically, it’s just about conquering all and fucking smashing through obstacles, but it’s told in this violent, futuristic, crime-ridden landscape.” **“ØVERDØSE”** “The first three songs are about character number one, and now we’re switching over to character number two. ‘Overdose’ is an interlude that captures his mother overdosing and him freaking out.” **“MY HANDS ARE EMPTY”** “After his mother overdoses, he starts down this path trying to heal, trying to find redemption. This song is his tipping point in the story. We had already written a lot of songs when we came up with this one, but I remember thinking this was really something different and special—that we could build the whole album around this one song. It became an anchor for the record and became this wild turning point for us in writing the storyline.” **“UNHALLØWED”** “Character two is in the darkest depression of his life. He’s wandering through this crime-ridden wasteland trying to figure out his lot in life and what he’s going to do. He’s lost, he’s suicidal, and he’s feeling guilt. He’s just trying to process all of it and get through this moment. Musically, it’s a very midtempo song, and our guitar player, Vogg, wrote a bunch of sick riffs for this. I felt like we’ve got a bunch of fucking ragers at the beginning, but I wanted to have more of a head-banger.” **“ASSIMILATE”/”KILL THY ENEMIES”** “‘ASSIMILATE’ is an interlude that’s basically the intro to ‘KILL THY ENEMIES.’ We’re still going down character number two’s path. Here, he meets this charismatic leader and becomes radicalized by this person. And this is kind of the beginning of his dark path. Musically, my bass player, Jared \[MacEachern\], wrote the main riff. He’s really the unsung hero of the record—he wrote a lot of awesome riffs, cool vocal melodies, and some great lyrics. This one has that pounding, tribal, ’90s Machine Head kind of groove, for sure.” **“NØ GØDS, NØ MASTERS”** “This is the two characters coming together. I think it’s one of the most melodic tracks on the record—it’s got a really haunting melody. This one was the result of these Electric Happy Hours we did during the pandemic, where we did 130 live streams just playing cover songs, and a lot of them were way outside of our box—like Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, and Bob Marley. That process opened up these new avenues for what we could do and got our harmonizing really locked in, and I feel like we really brought that to the forefront on this song.” **“BLØØDSHØT”** “This is another full-on rager. There’s no clean singing, and it’s just a killer uptempo groove. This is another song that Vogg contributed to. He brought some awesome riffs to the table and some sick leads, so this was definitely a collab between him and I.” **“RØTTEN”** “This is a song that I feel really came out of the *Burn My Eyes* anniversary tour. When I was coming up with these riffs, I just wanted to have one of those fucking old-school, early-’90s chugs. In my mind, it’s got a kind of *Fabulous Disaster*-era Exodus feel. I don’t wanna say anything about this one lyrically—I’d rather let people figure that out for themselves.” **“TERMINUS”** “I wanted the storyline to kind of go into an area where the listener is like, ‘Wait, what happened?’ I wanted this last interlude to put the listener in a place where, if they hadn’t been engaged in the story up ’til now, they’ve really gotta listen to the words and engage.” **“ARRØWS IN WØRDS FRØM THE SKY”** “This is arguably the most melodic song we’ve ever written. It’s all harmonies, nearly all clean singing, and maybe one of the most epic songs we’ve ever done. I also think it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written—I’m really proud of this song. I feel like it ends the record on a little bit of a hopeful note. It’s weird because I’ve never wanted to do that in my life. I always want to end records on fury and anger or depression and death and sadness because that’s where our lyrical topics kind of hang. But I’ve never written about love and how it makes you do crazy things.”

Now well into his seventies, Ozzy Osbourne is metal’s unlikeliest survivor. After decades of hard living, tragic band member deaths, and numerous health scares, the Prince of Darkness delivers his 13th solo album fast on the heels of his 2020 mainstream smash *Ordinary Man*. Like its predecessor, *Patient Number 9* was produced by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Watt and boasts a head-spinning array of guest stars—including return appearances from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith alongside Metallica bassist (and Ozzy’s former sideman) Robert Trujillo and late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins (in one of his last recording sessions). But it’s stellar guitar cameos from the likes of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, and Ozzy’s longtime collaborators Tony Iommi and Zakk Wylde that really give the record a varied, multigenerational feel, as each guitarist lends his signature sound to the respective tracks. “Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck are megastars,” Ozzy tells Apple Music. “I didn’t think they’d want to play on my album. But they both did.” The tasteful tonal differences between singles “Degradation Rules” (featuring Iommi), “Nothing Feels Right” (featuring Wylde), and the title track (featuring Jeff Beck) help make *Patient Number 9* one of Ozzy’s most diverse albums yet. “I’ve been doing it 54 years,” he says. “If I don’t know what I’m doing now, I shouldn’t be doing it.”

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

Degradation and disappointment are the themes that permeate the eighth album from metalcore stars The Devil Wears Prada. “There’s certainly many notions of letdown throughout the record,” vocalist Mike Hranica tells Apple Music. “I thought the visual of something losing its color was apt for this collection of songs.” As it turns out, Hranica and TDWP keyboardist/co-lyricist Jonathan Gering drew from the singer’s recent personal life to write the lyrics. “I went through the breakup of a long-term relationship last year, and it was a situation where I needed to get out,” Hranica explains. “But there’s that feeling of defeatism because you’ve done everything you can, and there’s nothing else you can do.” Musically, TDWP continue to expand the parameters of their genre, as heard on the electronics-and-synth-fueled singles “Salt,” “Watchtower,” and “Time.” “We’re not a metalcore band trying to *not* be a metalcore band or write a *not* metalcore record,” Hranica says. “We’re trying to bring as many elements into metalcore as possible and push it out from there via the vehicle that is Prada.” Below, he comments on each track. **“Exhibition”** “The idea I wanted for the lyrics was basically just the over-capitalism and over-consumption of everything. The way I’ve explained it is basically the metalcore version of ‘Bleed American’ \[by Jimmy Eat World\]. We are selling a product here, so I understand we’re involved in consumption and capitalism as well. But that was the kind of vibe that I went with lyrically.” **“Salt”** “Most of the song is Jon’s, but really it just plays to defeatism and basically the kind of surrender of being so fed up with something and just battling it or getting beat up and then eventually just giving into it.” **“Watchtower”** “We came up with this one pretty early in the process. The idea of ‘Watchtower’ is basically needing help but not seeking it—and pushing away all that’s good. And instead of participating in something, or a relationship, you hide yourself from it and make the wrong sort of choices.” **“Noise”** “The idea of ‘Noise’ is basically the striving for success, or maybe striving for popularity, or to see a goal through. But it’s also about the anxiety that comes with the vulnerability of putting yourself out there, and just all of life’s complications. Or really, I think, when it comes to doing much of anything, especially in the creative world.” **“Broken”** “This one was Jon’s as well. Not to get too much into his business, but basically years and years ago, when he first started touring with us, his 21st birthday was just a big shit-show night. There was a lot of alcohol, and he experienced a panic attack with that. But it was just a bit of a carried-away rager that night—of throwing bottles and shattering glass and whatnot—while also in the midst of serious anxiety. I think it was just something that stuck with him.” **“Sacrifice”** “Lyrically, this is the same as ‘Salt’ in terms of defeatism or giving in. Jon wrote most of the verses and the chorus, and I just peppered in here and there on the verses and the bridge. What’s funny about the song is that the breakdown at the end has gone off really well live, but I think Jon created it almost as a joke. It’s the most obnoxious, obvious breakdown you could have, but it’s actually been amazing. It’s a really fun song to play live too.” **“Trapped”** “This has my favorite chorus that Prada has ever put out there. Obviously, a lot of the album comes across as being the victim. But in this song, the idea I played into was getting over the honeymoon phase of a relationship, when things are starting to get more real, and the mental health qualms that we all face and whatnot, and basically just trying to be there for someone that’s having a bad sort of attack.” **“Time”** “This one plays to the elasticity of time—how fast it can move, and then, of course, how slow it can move. I can remember the years from ’05 through 2011, 2012, in terms of what tours we were doing and where I was living—what my life looked like. From there, it’s totally blurred. I can’t tell you the last year we did Warped Tour, what year we did a certain record, or anything like that. Even in a smaller situation, there are weeks where the days fly by and then weeks where the days feel like they’re 100 hours long.” **“Twenty-Five”** “When I heard the music for this, I felt like it was obvious that it was my kind of breakup song. I had a number of them back on *Dead Throne*, one of our earlier records. The other guys quite like this one, but it’s a song I never wish to hear again. With a song like ‘Broken,’ there could be some kind of release or getting something off your chest. But for me, there’s never been a song closer to me or harder for me to get through. I hope to god I never have to play it live for an entire tour.” **“Fire”** “This came out of an instrumental that Jon and \[guitarist\] Jeremy \[DePoyster\] have been playing for quite a while. I think Jon came up with most of the lyrics. There’s a lot of different pop elements that he implied, and it definitely speaks to his taste and range as a musician. We’ve had slower, jammier tunes like ‘Fire’ throughout our career, but I think this one is more of a standout.” **“Hallucinate”** “I was reading a book called *The Morning Star* by Karl Knausgaard. The premise is a number of different characters’ perspectives and viewpoints on the same event. One of the characters is a nurse, and she’s dealing with a patient that has a brain tumor. When the tumor expands, it presses against the brain and causes hallucinations. The music was an instrumental left over from *ZII*, our last EP. It felt very industrial, and it seemed to fit with lyrics about a victim of these terrible hallucinations.” **“Cancer”** “Jon wrote the chorus when a hero of his passed away. When he heard that he had died, Jon’s initial reaction was that he hoped it was cancer, rather than something like suicide or an overdose. Then, upon that realization, he thought, ‘How could you think such a thing? Why was that my immediate reaction?’ Hoping for cancer is the most horrible thing you could hope for, really. But it speaks to the notion of degradation, the idea of *Color Decay*. The chorus is asking, ‘What does my reaction say about myself?’ For most of us, it’s our favorite song on the album.”

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