Revolver's 30 Best Albums of 2023

The third album from the masked, anonymous Brits of Sleep Token is also the third in a conceptual trilogy that began with their 2019 debut, *Sundowning*. Introduced with the stirring and dramatic leadoff single “Chokehold,” *Take Me Back to Eden* is another genre-defying exploration of music’s outer limits, incorporating elements of techno and tech-metal alongside R&B, post-rock, and pop—often in the same song. “Vore” spins out in Meshuggah djent-isms before swelling with the kind of strings that recall a battle scene from *Game of Thrones*. “Ascensionism” is an inventive and often bizarre mix of piano ballad, gospel, and ultra-modern metal. Closer “Euclid” sounds like a Lana Del Rey tune performed by an R&B singer and a chorus of aliens. Along the way, there are love songs (“The Apparition”), suicide ballads (“Are You Really Okay?”), and songs about loss (the title track). As always, mastermind Vessel’s vocals soar over the proceedings, offering lyrical mysteries in service to the nocturnal muse he calls Sleep. It’s as bewildering as it is impressive.

With their first album since 2016, Avenged Sevenfold takes an unexpected turn into existentialism. Written over a span of four years that included the pandemic, *Life Is But a Dream…* was inspired by the philosophy and writings of French author and Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus. The hypnotic lead single “Nobody” sets a reflective and pensive tone with orchestral strings as singer M. Shadows delivers snaky, overlapping vocal lines. Follow-up “We Love You” is an abrupt change of pace, with dissonant guitar bursts and a frenetic, Mr. Bungle-like arrangement that smashes dizzying old-school thrash into a slide guitar interlude. The entire album is all over the place—ragtime piano (title track), chamber music (part of “Game Over”), electro-pop (a few songs)—but for A7X, it’s a good place to be.

Veteran LA noise-rock trio HEALTH’s 2023 LP *RAT WARS* builds on their noise-centric industrial exercises, accentuating their hardcore tendencies with dance grooves, haunted synths, and wall-of-sound guitar lines. Taking influences from Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and contemporaries like A Place to Bury Strangers, HEALTH builds deeply twisted odes to sweaty nights on the club floor and long mornings trying to fend off the sun. Like its predecessor, 2019’s *VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR*, *RAT WARS* blends pain and catharsis, emptiness and ecstasy. On “UNLOVED,” the trio of Benjamin Miller, Jake Duzsik, and John Famiglietti cook up a track built around military-grade snare drums, gnarling synths, and hi-hats that slosh like boots in deep rain puddles. Duzsik takes the vocal lead, conjuring up a deeply dark tale as he croons in an almost-snarl, “And it was not my fault you were unloved when you were a child/I wasn\'t there.”

After a 10-year hiatus, animated death-metal band Dethklok has returned to crush skulls and ejaculate fire. *Dethalbum IV* sees vocalist Nathan Explosion, guitarists Toki Wartooth and Skwisgaar Skwigelf, bassist William Murderface, and drummer Pickles carving off tales of weed-wacker disembowelment (“Gardener of Vengeance”), food poisoning (“Poisoned by Food”), and PMS (“Bloodbath”) while scoring key moments in their new *Metalocalypse* movie, *Army of the Doomstar*. In the real world, all Dethklok songs are written and performed by *Metalocalypse* co-creator Brendon Small, who again enlisted heavy metal legend Gene Hoglan (Dark Angel, Testament, Death) to play drums. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done the Dethklok thing, and part of me thinks the metal community’s eyes will be on this,” Small tells Apple Music. “So, what am I going to do? Make something more radio-friendly or something more intense and brutal? I kind of felt like the project was telling me it needed to be heavier than everything we’ve done before.” Below, he details each song. **“Gardener of Vengeance”** “This is kind of a miniature horror film. There’s one line from the movie that really connects this to the project. It’s when Nathan Explosion is saying, ‘I’m not a guy that can write a song of salvation. I’m the guy you call if you need a song about having your guts liquified by a weed wacker.’ That meant I needed a weed wacker in the song somewhere, so I went to Home Depot and rented one. My studio smelled like gasoline for a week and a half.” **“Aortic Desecration”** “‘Aortic’ meaning the heart, ‘desecration’ meaning broken or destroyed: heartbreak. What if Cannibal Corpse wrote a song about heartbreak? That’s the idea. It’s a heavy metal tantrum where the wound is inflicted by the self, by your own heart. It’s also asking, ‘How could I have been so stupid to leave myself open and get hurt?’ It’s an angry heavy metal tantrum about the ego.” **“Poisoned by Food”** “At some point, when I was developing *Metalocalypse* with Tommy Blacha, the co-creator, he turned to me and said, ‘You look green, like one of those medieval paintings where someone’s dead.’ I was sweating and gross. The rest of the night, the poles were exploding, which is a lyric from the song. It’s like a thunderstorm just comes over your house. The gods are upset and punishing you. Putridity, vile, verminous—that was the kind of feeling I was trying to evoke.” **“Mutilation on a Saturday Night”** “This started as an ode to Metallica, but then it kept shape-shifting because I wanted to make it less Metallica-esque. The great thing about Metallica is that they start simple, but they keep building and mutating their riffs. It’s such a wonderful journey to hear. So, there’s a little bit of that on a shorter time frame here. Lyrically, it’s about the return of Dethklok and getting out of the pandemic at the same time, getting back into society and destroying it on a Saturday night, playing mailbox baseball with sledgehammers and then going to a party you’re not invited to and fucking the whole thing up.” **“Bloodbath”** “I’ve been married for 10 years now, and one of the things I’ve been privy to is the rage of PMS. This is a song about experiencing PMS from Nathan Explosion’s point of view. It starts out with a chorus of a million women screaming in pain, and then, ‘Why can’t I make up my mind? Is this your knife in my back? Why is my mood swinging around like an executioner swings an axe?’ It’s a warning—stay the fuck away from me. My mother-in-law always says, ‘How come you don’t write a song about my daughter?’ So, I did. They both have really good senses of humor, fortunately.” **“I Am the Beast”** “This is the most ridiculous song on the record. It’s very brutal, but it’s from the point of view of a dog. I don’t know that anybody would ever know that unless I said so. There’re lines like ‘Where are you taking me this time?’ and stuff about mites in ears. It’s one of the weirdest songs in the world, but, like ‘Bloodbath,’ it’s Nathan Explosion taking on a character. It’s like when Randy Newman tells a story from a character’s point of view. It doesn’t mean he feels that way.” **“Horse of Fire”** “Horses somehow keep creeping up in this world, and I don’t know why. I just feel like they need to be in song titles. Plus, I like the word ‘horse.’ It’s the funniest word in the world to me. The song is more of a mystical, world-building piece. It’s related to the movie in that it comes from a series of dreams that Nathan Explosion has in act two while he’s trying to mine material. It’s also from the point of view of the villain in the movie, almost like Nathan visited him in a dream.” **“DEADFACE”** “It’s all caps because those are the notes of the song. There\'s a moment in the movie where one of the characters can’t see or speak, but they can hold a guitar, and they have one of those little tuners where you can see the note. He’s trying to communicate a message, and he keeps playing these notes over and over—DEADFACE—and it means something to the band. I thought it would be really cool if you could have some kind of coding device in a guitar, like how many words can you spell from A to G? And DEADFACE is also a nickname for Murderface.” **“Satellite Bleeding”** “This is another world-building song. It’s Nathan in the dream state again where he’s trying to mine the world for songs. It’s a combination of the bad guy and the fate of the planet coming together. Again, a little more mystical. It gets a little proggy, too. With most of these songs, I can kind of walk you through the jokes and stuff, but with some—like this one—it’s the mood of the piece that we’re chasing.” **“SOS”** “This is the important song in the movie. There’s a theme in the movie and on this record, too, about the fist and the hand. Do you want to punch away at the world, or do you want to reach out? It’s the two poles, good and evil. That’s the crisis that Nathan is caught in. It’s also the two sides of the record—side-one songs like ‘Aortic Desecration’ are the angry-fist songs. The other side is more expansive, reaching out, going into the dream world. This song really has a purpose in the movie, but I don’t want to give too much away.” **“Murmaider III”** “This is what I call the ‘parallel parable’ that has been following Dethklok around since Episode 2. It’s the unconscious deep, the heart of the earth, the subterranean, the underwater world. This is a theme that I’ve never really been able to verbalize too well, but I feel very strongly about it. This underwater thing has a trilogy of songs that starts out with rage and goes to amassing power. The third song—this one—is a last-ditch effort to right the wrongs in your life. That parallels the movie’s theme, and it’s also the Viking funeral of the record, the descent into the water.”

It’s no coincidence that Code Orange’s fifth album is called *The Above*; as the follow-up to 2020’s *Underneath*, there’s a direct juxtaposition. “Where I feel *Underneath* and *The Above* coincide is like there’s almost this door between them,” vocalist and conceptual mastermind Jami Morgan tells Apple Music. “It’s the door of moment and choice. To me, it’s the thin, reflective line between things and feelings that feel very far apart but are often very close, like the inverse, the question and the answer, darkness and light. A lot of *The Above*’s themes are different ideas of light—the light of self versus the light of acceptance and want.” Musically, Morgan and his bandmates—guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers, keyboardist/programmer Eric “Shade” Balderose, bassist Joe Goldman, guitarist Dominic Landolina, and drummer Max Portnoy—gave priority to traditional rock instruments over electronics in this incarnation of their genre-defying style. “We wanted things to be a little bit more open and human but still have this digital backbone, whereas on *Underneath*, the digital element is to the front,” Morgan explains. “I feel like we also tightened up the songwriting and maybe painted within the lines a little bit more but challenged ourselves to be as avant-garde as possible within those lines.” Below, he comments on each song. **“Never Far Apart”** “I feel like this song really sets up the juxtaposition of the two opposing moods of the album. It’s like the verses are this dark, internal monologue of somebody that’s trapped in their own prison. It’s like this justification of failure and an exposing of your true nature, especially as the song explodes at the end. The chorus is, to me, almost the opposite. They’re in this almost cartoonish, faraway, unreachable, dreamlike voice, but it’s idyllically beautiful. It’s like a Disney musical or something. We felt like it was a good way to open because it exposes the different paintbrushes of the album all within one song.” **“Theatre of Cruelty”** “This continues to set up those two fields that are the through line of the record. It’s like the harder parts of the song introduce a looser but buggy and parasitic riff style that we utilize throughout the whole record. Then there’s these more ethereal parts that are kind of heavenly and smooth but still have this digital, glitchy backbone. The song is about drive. It’s about obsession. It’s about trying to present as one thing while the theater of the mind is always playing something a lot more sinister and a lot more cruel.” **“Take Shape” (feat. Billy Corgan)** “It was awesome working with Billy on this. He was obviously a big inspiration to us in general, and he almost plays a little bit of a narrator role in the song. ‘Take Shape’ is really about feeling like you’re being pushed through a stage play of your life that you really can’t control, like some *Truman Show* shit, like you’re just a puppet on strings being controlled by your own subconscious or your goals or whatever.” **“The Mask of Sanity Slips”** “Lyrically, this is a grungy, heavy take on somebody dealing with internal resentment, loneliness, feeling like a square peg in a round hole—something, I think, we feel as a group a lot, something I definitely feel a lot, trying to hide behind either confidence or feebleness. I even created this mask of my own face that I was calling the Mask of Sanity. Sonically, our plan was quiet/loud grunge dynamics, but with some death-metal double kick, which I’ve never heard on a grunge song, and some electronics. There’s even a bouncy mosh drop that we thought would subvert genre rules a little bit and make it more our style.” **“Mirror”** “Dynamically, this is one of the softest songs we’ve ever done, but I think it’s really powerful. Reba’s amazingly powerful on it. It’s disparate, it’s kind of lush, it’s pretty, but it also has a little bit of a dark underbelly. It was definitely influenced by trip-hop, Björk, even Tori Amos, but it has our modern production and some Code Orange darkness in there. I also think it’s cool because me and Reba both wrote the song. It’s really reflective—pun intended—of what the song is. It’s like the same words but two points of view.” **“A Drone Opting Out of the Hive”** “I wanted this song to feel like a fucking David Fincher interrogation room scene. The album has these two battling aesthetics, and one of them is like that: noir, fucking serial killer, buggy crime. To me, that’s our heaviness, our hardness, and our darkness. Then there’s this brighter, almost poppier thing that has a little bit of this digital element to it, like an impressionist painting where something’s just a little bit off. But this is where the album gets darker and veers into the underbelly. The beat is made of teeth chattering and whispers and all kinds of weird shit. It was really fun to make.” **“I Fly”** “This is one of the first songs on the album that me and Reba go bar-for-bar on, going back and forth to tell the story together, which I think is really cool. We wanted it to feel dark and heavy but have a big, soaring chorus. We were thinking almost like Alice In Chains meets industrial. There’s this robotic voice that says, ‘This is real’ over and over again, and it’s a reminder that we’re in the real world and not a dream. I wrote the lyrics based on this book of old epitaphs, things that people wrote about their own deaths for their relatives to read at their funerals. There’s a real twisted humor to a lot of them.” **“Splinter the Soul”** “Musically, this is a little bit Nine Inch Nails, a little bit Pantera, with an Alice \[In Chains\] chorus. We thought that would be a cool hybrid, sonically. It’s about the struggle of always trying to get to the next lily pad, about how it might feel better to just splinter the soul to take back control, like death by suicide as opposed to getting killed. I think we all have that human impulse in us to take it away from ourselves so no one can take it away from us.” **“The Game”** “It’s definitely one of our most psychotic, heavier songs to date. I visualize the pinch harmonics as the buzzing needles of a lie detector test when they go up and down. To me, the lyrics are from the point of view of a character I call the Manipulator, the one prying at you to take the path of most resistance instead of least. It’s frustration bubbling up to a head. You hear all these sounds from earlier in the record, like ripped duct tape, laughter, knife scrapes. The end definitely gets the most *Underneath*-ish in the sense that it’s super controlled chaos.” **“Grooming My Replacement”** “People were like, ‘You sure you want to use the word “grooming”?’ But it’s not like that. Words can’t mean more than one fucking thing? I’m like, ‘I’m not changing that shit.’ The song is about feeling like you’re being used to train your successor. It’s definitely where we started to discover this album’s version of heavy and how it would distinguish from previous albums—looser, groovier, corrosive, kind of snarling, thick, not as outwardly calculated as *Underneath*, but precise, like the perfect fucking crime.” **“Snapshot”** “Stylistically, this almost feels like a heavier indie song or something. It’s definitely totally different than anything we’ve done. The metaphor of the first line is from the movie *One Hour Photo*, starring Robin Williams. He’s this lonely photo printer in a Walmart. I just like the metaphor of the snapshot—a brief moment in time that can last forever. It’s like shit that never goes away. The lyrics have the theme of the movie, as well as fantasizing about capturing your captor, turning your own predator into prey.” **“Circle Through”** “This is definitely one of the most poppy songs we’ve ever done. It’s where, in my opinion, the light starts to shine through, almost like the crack under the door. We start to get to the other side, get to where it is we’re going. It’s about your negative thoughts and your never-haves, and manifesting bad things, and just asking yourself to walk that circle through. Is this really what you want? Is this what you want to create? Is that the life that you want, or are you presenting yourself to it in this circle of desire and negative self-talk or talk about others?” **“But a Dream...”** “This is kind of like the final passageway. It’s a bit existential. It’s about choice, about free will, about things that have been talked about to death a million times. I visualize it as these two doors with two blinding lights—the door of being accepted, and the door of going wherever yourself leads you to go. That might be you by yourself forever. Can you live with that? Can you face that, or do you have to keep chasing desire and chasing adoration? That’s something I struggle with a lot.” **“The Above”** “This is definitely one of my favorite songs. It’s one of the most personal songs, for me, that I’ve ever written. When Shade first came up with this melody, and we started utilizing it in different ways, it really clicked for me as the melody that represents what the album is. The song itself is like the other side of the hill. It’s like the end of one journey and, hopefully, the beginning of another. It’s coming full circle with yourself. It’s about being able to live with who you are, and not just your accomplishments, your wins or losses, your friends, the car you drive, the money you have, or whatever. Can you live with who you really are as a person, how you’ve treated other people? To me, it’s one of the coolest, most emotional songs we’ve ever done.”

The deskbound among us might first interpret the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album as a reference to the font, but a few minutes with the music and you’ll realize that what Josh Homme refers to is a sense of decadence so total it ends with the city on fire. They remain, as ever, the hardest hard-rock band for listeners who don’t necessarily subscribe to the culture or traditions of hard rock, channeling Bowie (“Emotion Sickness”), cabaret (“Made to Parade”), and the collars-up slickness of British synth-pop (“Time & Place”) alongside the motorcycle-ready stuff you might you might expect—which they still do with more style than most (“Obscenery”). And like ZZ Top, they can rip and wink at the same time. But *In Times New Roman...* plumbs deeper personal territory than prior records. Homme has weathered the deaths of friends, the dissolution of his marriage, and other painful developments since the release of 2017’s Villains, and the album touches on all that—but he also wants to be clear about assumptions listeners could make from his lyrics. “I would never say anything about the mother of my kids or anything like that,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also, by the same token, you must write about your life, and I think I\'m soundtracking my life. These songs and the words that go with them are an emotional snapshot where you stop the film, you pull out one frame. One song it\'s like, \'I\'m lost.\' And another one, \'I\'m angry.\' They need to be these distilled versions of that, because one drop of true reality is enough flavor. I think the hatred and adoration of strangers is like the flip side of a coin. But when you\'re not doing it for the money, that currency is worthless. I can\'t get involved in what the people say. In a way, it\'s none of my fucking business.” For Homme, the breakthrough of *In Times New Roman...* came *because* he was unflinchingly honest with himself while he was writing through some of his darkest moments. “At the end of the day, the record is completely about acceptance,” Homme says. “That\'s the key. My friends have passed. Relationships have ended. Difficult situations have arisen. I\'ve had my own physical and health things go on and things like that, but I\'m okay now. I\'m 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of what\'s going on, you know what I mean? But in the last seven years, I\'ve been through a lot of situations where it doesn\'t matter if you like it or not, it\'s happening to you. And so I\'ve been forced to say, yeah, I don\'t like this, I need to figure out where I\'m at fault here or I\'m responsible here or accountable here. And also, I need to also accept it for what it is. This is the reality. Even if I don\'t like it, it would be a shame to hold on too tight to something that\'s slipping through your hands and not just accept it for what it is.”

℗ 2023 BABYMETAL RECORDS / Amuse Inc. under exclusive licence to Cooking Vinyl America Inc. / 5B Records

After releasing records called *Red Album*, *Blue Record*, *Yellow & Green*, *Purple*, and *Gold & Grey*, Baroness has run out of colors. “The chromatic-themed sector of our existence was only ever going to have those iterations,” guitarist, vocalist, and founding member John Baizley tells Apple Music. “It was only ever going to be the color wheel, the rainbow. When we finished *Gold & Grey*, which was our stand-in for orange, we understood it was the end of the cycle.” Thus, *Stone* begins a new era for the band and their self-described style of “sneaky prog,” which combines elements of sludge metal, prog rock, and western-themed acoustic music. It’s also the first Baroness full-length in the band’s 20-year history that features the same lineup as the one before it. In this case: Baizley, guitarist/vocalist Gina Gleason, bassist Nick Jost, and drummer Sebastian Thomson. “I can’t even begin to overstate how critical that lineup stability was for us writing this record,” Baizley says. “What we’ve never been able to do before is take the chemistry of the band members and allow it to guide the songwriting as much as we have with *Stone*. There’s always been a new member coming in who has to learn what we are. But now I feel like we finally have a foundation.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Embers”** “After we recorded all the ‘loud’ songs, meaning anything with bass and drums, we realized the acoustic element which is on all our records was missing. So Gina and I rented a trailer in central Pennsylvania and spent a week working. We came out with ‘Bloom,’ the last track on the record, which has a closing-credits feel, and I wanted something with an opening-credits feel as well. So we took an outtake from the ‘Bloom’ session, a short piece that didn’t have any mistakes in it, and I added some low notes on my piano that I think give it a kind of menacing feel. It’s a nice bait and switch for the opening of ‘Last Word.’” **“Last Word”** “This song is by far our most collaborative recorded effort in our entire history. Everyone’s written a part for it. It also has a fucking shredder solo, which is something I’ve always had a very hard line against in this band. But that got harder and harder to do when Gina joined, because she has tremendous capability as a soloist. I really put her through the wringer on our last record, so this time she needed to be free. Importantly, it also has an improvised jam at the end of the song, which we began doing onstage years ago and felt, with this record, that we had earned the right to present to our audience.” **“Beneath the Rose”** “The opening riff was something I continually tried to make a song out of for *Gold & Grey*, but it just wasn’t working. In the early days of the pandemic, I pulled it out again and put it to a drum loop that Seb had recorded. I really wanted to do something that had a Nirvana-type riff, something with some pronounced chugging in it, a little bit of metal swagger, a little bit sort of rock. But whenever I say these things, I just turn it into a song that sounds exactly like us. It was fun to write, but one of the hardest to figure out what I was going to do with vocally. What I ended up with includes a relatively different vocal style for us, almost like an English poetic cadence. I think it kicked off the development of a new aesthetic that continues into the following track.” **“Choir”** “The idea with this, initially, was to take the tempo and the key from ‘Beneath the Rose’ and then start with the guitar sonata that ends that song. But we had no other plan beyond that. What we ended up with is like an extension of ‘Beneath the Rose,’ but fully improvised. We had no discussion about what we were going for or what we were going to do. Every single thing that happens in this song is accidental. I think we recorded three versions, but the first one was by far the best because of the musical conversation that’s happening.” **“The Dirge”** “This is the final and shortest piece of the musical trilogy that starts with ‘Beneath the Rose.’ Gina and I were really into this Amps for Christ song called ‘Edward,’ which has this very strange, disoriented, lo-fi feel to it. It’s really loose, but it’s like a beautiful little folk song. We wanted to capture something that had that feel. I was sitting in my room one night, watching a TV show, and there was a scene where two girls are singing a song at an open-mic night. It’s not a good song, not a good show, but I liked the chord progression. So I took those chords and wrote this in a minute and a half. I think it’s a weird, unique bow at the end of our trilogy.” **“Anodyne”** “This is the only song we\'ve ever written that has a four-on-the-floor kick pattern and a backbeat snare. It’s a tried-and-true classic in rock ’n’ roll, but we\'ve never done it. And then Gina and I are singing simultaneously into one mic, so we’re baking our harmonies into one another, making them inseparable. The lyrics are based on a recurring nightmare I’ve had for many years now. In the dream, I’m in a canoe on a lake in the middle of the night. I’m following another canoe that outdistances me, and then I start sinking. Sometimes I have entire dreams where I’m just drowning for what seems like eight hours. I felt like writing a song about it so that the dream doesn’t feel that horrible to me.” **“Shine”** “I was crossing over the Brooklyn Bridge on my way to see Seb or Nick, and the song ‘#3’ by Aphex Twin came on, and I had such an overwhelming moment. It’s a very beautiful song, and it’s simple—like four notes that just repeat. So I took those notes and made them into ‘Shine.’ Gina and I really like playing western-style guitars, like Ennio Morricone tones, so the end of this song is like us trying to find our own way through *Once Upon a Time in the West*. Every record of ours has to have a glockenspiel on it, so this is the song with the glock.” **“Magnolia”** “The main riff has what I call the human element in it, by which I mean the best technical riffing that we do as guitar players always has this implicant strum. Plus, every record I do has to have one Neurosis moment, and it’s always from ‘Stones From the Sky,’ which is by far my favorite Neurosis song. So we did that at the end of the song, where we layered all these crazy guitars. It’s called ‘Magnolia’ because the day I began writing it in 2020, the magnolia tree in front of my house was blooming. When we finished guitar overdubs a year later, it was blooming again. And when I finished vocals the year after that, it was blooming yet again.” **“Under the Wheel”** “This is a song that Nick wrote. And when Nick writes a song, I know that we’re going to have to work to decipher it, because the level of sophistication that he thinks at is insane. He’s a classically trained bass player, but his goal is never to sound like he\'s being showy. So he’ll write these simple-sounding things that are, in reality, almost impossible to follow until you’ve listened to it a hundred times or had him show it to you a hundred times. But that challenge was really cool. Then we did this thing where the song gets louder every few measures and the pressure we’re playing at increases. That was really fun to do.” **“Bloom”** “‘Bloom’ was recorded during one of the most difficult weeks of my life during this writing session. It was, in some ways, tied to what was going on then, which is that we had our whole record musically recorded but I was really struggling to find myself as a vocalist. That’s when Gina and I rented that trailer, ostensibly to start working on vocals, but I was just struggling. After a day or two of that, we picked up our acoustic guitars and wrote this song based off a piece that Gina had. Then we recorded it outside by the campfire, facing each other, into a single mic. You can hear dogs barking, the fire crackling, all kinds of birds chirping. And then we added all these crazy overdubs using mostly things that are not instruments. I think the song is kind of a strange triumph for us.”

When the pandemic forced In Flames to truncate the tour in support of their 2019 album, *I, the Mask*, the band went home to Sweden in a state of insecurity. Vocalist Anders Fridén began ruminating upon the nature of lost time—and how we deal with time in general. “What do we do with time?” he asks Apple Music. “If you know your time is up, how do you act? What do you say? What do you think? Do you regret a lot of things? If we know everything is going wrong, would we change? Would we act different?” Fridén and his bandmates—guitarist Björn Gelotte, bassist Bryce Paul Newman, drummer Tanner Wayne, and new guitarist Chris Broderick (ex-Megadeth)—ponder these questions and more on In Flames’ 14th album, *Foregone*. In combining the melodic death metal of their classic ’90s albums with the more modern metalcore approach of their recent output, In Flames have struck a delicate balance between two disparate musical eras. But it’s ultimately the lyrical content that proves most different from that of the band’s vast back catalog. “Most of our previous albums have been me looking inside and dealing with my own demons,” Fridén explains. “This one is more observational about the world around us.” Below, he comments on each song. **“The Beginning of All Things”** “The track ‘Foregone’ was going to be a three-parter at first. Our intention was to have a slow track first, then something really calm, then hit with an aggressive track at the end. But when Björn played this for me the first time, I knew it was an intro rather than a part of ‘Foregone.’ It sets the mood perfectly for the album. We used it for the intro on our previous tour, and it works really well. It has that Swedish melancholy and invites you into the album. Then, with the next track, all hell breaks loose.” **“State of Slow Decay”** “It’s like the DNA of In Flames, in a sense. It has the melody, the aggression, and then everything that we are known for. As soon as we wrote it, and I heard all the pieces together, I knew it was not something we would hide in the back of the album. This is where we set the pace. I think people will feel familiar with it because it has that In Flames sound. Whether you like it or not, we have a certain sound that is ours, and this is really ground zero for that.” **“Meet Your Maker”** “That was one of the first songs that we wrote, so it really set the vibe of the album with the double bass and the guitar upfront and the huge chorus that we have become known for in our later career. Going into this album, we talked about how we wanted to bring the guitars a little bit more in the front and have the drums a bit more punchy than in the past. I think this song is definitely telling that story. When we finished it, we felt we were on the right track.” **“Bleeding Out”** “We have so many faces and styles, but this one is a bit more open. I wanted something that was a little more calming after the assault of ‘State of Slow Decay’ and ‘Meet Your Maker.’ This is heavy, but it’s rooted in a Swedish folk-music tradition—but obviously reworked and done our way. It has a sad tone overall, but it’s big and groovy, and Chris’ solos are amazing.” **“Foregone Pt. 1”** “At first, part one was supposed to be part two and vice versa. But then I felt the heavier track had to be part one, especially coming out of ‘Bleeding Out.’ This is one of the heavier songs we’ve done, I think. There are similarities lyrically—and especially instrumentally—between the two parts of this song. Some of the riffs and melodies are in both songs, but they are reworked. I think people will feel the connection between the two.” **“Foregone Pt. 2”** “Part two is such a contrast to part one, which was super necessary, dynamically, for the album. This one is less heavy, but to me, it’s like listening back to albums like *The Jester Race* and *Whoracle* that we did in the ’90s. With \[the songs\] ‘Moonshield’ and ‘Gyroscope,’ we had that very—again—Swedish folk melody, which was an inspiration for us in the early days. This definitely has that and reminds me a lot of that time.” **“Pure Light of Mind”** “We’ve done a few ballads or slow songs in the past, and we really wanted something like that for this album. But it had to have a meaning—it had to have a place and still be heavy. To me, this is a celebration, but it has a sad undertone to it. I can really see this being a sing-along-type song live. Vocally, I approached it a different way because I’ve never really done that type of falsetto verse before. For me, it’s fun to do something that’s a little bit challenging because it’s so easy to go back to what you know. So, I did it, and it worked really well.” **“The Great Deceiver”** “This is the song that changed faces the most. It’s almost like punk-ish In Flames, but it started out kind of plain, to be honest. I’ve heard these riffs before again and again, so I told Björn that we have to attack this song in a different way. So, we changed a few things around—definitely the drums—and now I think it could be my favorite of the album. Tanner, our drummer, should get big props for being patient and listening to us. The way he executed this is amazing, and so are his drums all over the album.” **“In the Dark”** “This is another heavy song with a sad undertone. It’s got a big, open chorus that I’m looking forward to doing live. All these songs are meant to be played live, by the way. That’s how we approach music these days. Back in the day, it was more like, ‘Let’s see how many guitars we can add on top of each other!’ But now we write for two guitar players because that’s what we have onstage. A lot of people have told me this song is their favorite, so we might be onto something here.” **“A Dialogue in B Flat Minor”** “Lyrically, this is about mental health. It’s the talk we have with ourselves, and how easy it is to be locked up in that. So, there’s an inner dialogue going on between me, in this case, and whatever it might be. The song is written in B-flat minor, so that’s where the title comes from. We wrote it as an opening track for a live set, where you start off with the drummer and bass player, then one guitar player walks on, then the next guitar player walks on, and then I come in at the end.” **“Cynosure”** “This one is bass-heavy, like a tank rolling forward or something. The beginning really showcases Bryce and what he does on bass. And obviously, Tanner is showing off his skills on this one, too. It’s almost like a drum solo after the second chorus. Vocally, I just took a step back and followed the rhythm more than anything else. It has a different vibe, but I really like how this song turned out.” **“End the Transmission”** “The very last transmission after it’s over. That’s the lyrical concept: We’re done here. I say, ‘Hell is overcrowded, and heaven is full of sinners.’ Wherever we go in our afterlife, I don’t think it’s judged upon what we do. Whatever place is bad enough. I haven’t done a repetitive chorus for a while, but I wanted to repeat something almost like a mantra. So, I say, ‘End the transmission.’”

Periphery guitarist Mark Holcomb will be the first one to tell you that the band’s seventh album was difficult to make. “For a number of reasons,” he tells Apple Music. “The most obvious one is that we started it when things were at their boiling point with the pandemic. There was a lot we didn’t know, and everybody was erring on the side of caution—which no one regrets. I would also say we’ve become so much pickier as far as what makes the cut for a Periphery album or a Periphery song, or even just a riff. Everything just takes longer now because we hold ourselves to a higher standard.” What about that title, though? As often as Periphery are called “progressive metal” or “progressive metalcore,” they’re labeled as “djent,” the rhythmically complex, palm-muted-guitar-driven subgenre that Meshuggah are credited with spawning. “That’s just us having some fun with our fans,” Holcomb explains with a laugh. “When our first record came out, we started hearing people throwing around the term ‘djent,’ which we use to describe the sound of a palm-muted guitar, but they used to describe our style of music. We have no control over that, and if people want to classify us a djent band, well, the internet is undefeated. We can’t argue with it. We’ve tried. So, it really is 100 percent a genre.” Below, he discusses each track on the record. **“Wildfire”** “This was the first idea completed for the album. Our final night working on it, \[guitarist\] Misha \[Mansoor\] started writing the jazzy section, and we realized we had our first real song for the record. It felt like a defining sound for the album, and that held true in retrospect. I think this song was a great catalyst to point us in the right direction. It’s really adventurous and breaks all these rules of arrangement, but it was really important for us. And it’s got a great sax solo by Jørgen \[Munkeby\] from Shining.” **“Atropos”** “The title is a nod to one of our favorite video games from the last couple years called Returnal. It was a PlayStation 5 game that we were playing all the time. Pretty early on, we had a feeling this would be a single because it showcases a lot more straight-ahead melody, especially in the first half of the song. I think that’s what people expect when they think of Periphery—big seven-string grooves and melody with some adventurous chord changes. And then, the last half devolves into a really dark place, like a slow-sounding Darkthrone blast-beat section, which I adore.” **“Wax Wings”** “When COVID hit and no one was allowed to leave their houses, I decided to treat writing like a day job, starting in the morning and clocking out at 5 or 6 pm. I began writing the main riffs for this very early on, and then \[guitarist\] Jake \[Bowen\] and Misha helped me take it to a level that I could have never imagined. It has a very weird tuning that I stole from a Japanese band called Toe. Once our singer, Spencer \[Sotelo\], started doing his thing over it, it was like, ‘Wow, this song could be a real pillar on the record.’ And it has one of the most cinematic moments on *Periphery V* in that outro.” **“Everything Is Fine!”** “We were in love with this idea of having a song that just had a ton of what we call ‘laser sounds’—those whammy sounds. There’s a band called Car Bomb that we love, and if you see them live, you’ll notice them doing these laser effects. We picked their brains about it years ago on tour. They showed us what’s up, and we began experimenting with it. You can hear some on ‘Wildfire,’ too, but on this one, we went wild with it. It’s got some Dillinger Escape Plan worship in there, too.” **“Silhouette”** “We wanted to have a song that fell into the same category as Jake’s electronic side project. It’s very relaxing and chill and downtempo, and the sound design is incredible. So, we started writing in that style, but when Spencer started doing vocals, it became something very different—it became a full-on electro-pop song. I could easily envision a lot of metal purists hearing it and going, ‘What’s wrong with you guys?’ but I love how it came out.” **“Dying Star”** “That was based off a demo that Misha had like a year before we started writing. To me, it sounded like contemporary Thrice, which I love. Very straight-ahead, very rock, not metal at all, but still had this energy to it. I threw in an idea of my own, which I was working on independently of what Misha was doing, but it happened to be the same tempo, the same key, and it lined up perfectly. It was one of those happy accidents and a cool illustration of how useful it is to have everyone in the band contributing creative ideas.” **“Zagreus”** “The title is a nod to a video game called Hades that we were obsessed with during the writing and recording of the record. I had a rough demo of the song that I had worked on during the pandemic, but it got a mediocre response from the band. We ended up keeping one tiny bit of that idea, and it turned into this very different sounding thing with all this crazy rhythm stuff, off-kilter riffs, and an Opeth-sounding bridge section. It’s one of those songs that I would play for someone who wanted to know what Periphery sounds like.” **“Dracul Gras”** “We were messing with all these eight-string riffs that were super heavy, super low, and dark in tone. They made us envision a big old vampire, so we started calling it ‘Bat Dracula.’ One of the toughest tasks on the record was getting an arrangement for this one that served the epic direction of the song. So, this became another example of us passing the guitar back and forth—that’s why a lot of the riffs have very different tonalities to them. Spencer’s lyrics tell a story of a portly vampire and his trials and tribulations in his village. It’s a very special song, and I envision it being a live staple once people hear it.” **“Thanks Nobuo”** “The title is a reference to Nobuo Uematsu from Final Fantasy. He’s one of our biggest influences ever. Back when I met Misha and Jake in 2007, we talked about our love for Meshuggah and Deftones, but we also dorked down on our love for video games and the music from Final Fantasy. We’ve spent thousands of hours, collectively, listening to that music while playing those games. The reason it’s called ‘Thanks Nobuo’ is because there’s a vocal line in the chorus that is the theme from Final Fantasy VII, so it’s a tribute to him. We’re so respectful of his legacy and just perpetually in awe of everything he’s done.”

Kim Dracula built their staggering TikTok following on the back of abrasive, aggressive metal cover songs going viral, becoming one of the platform’s most-followed Australian names. And their debut album, consisting mostly original music, might just be the loudest word in the perpetually online artist’s penchant for pastiche. Split into three acts—The Pledge, The Turn, The Prestige—each track brings chaotic bombast together in a symposium of styles, vibes, and homages to established acts (even their name has been lifted from a 2006 Deftones cut). Over its 20 songs, *A Gradual Decline in Morale* perfectly asserts the identity of a generation besotted by instant, boundary-free access to the full gamut of genres, artists, and eras. Amidst it all, you’ll hear Red Hot Chili Peppers-brand slap funk (“My Confession”), anthemic mid-2000s club punk (single “Drown”), shuffling synthwave (“Are You?”), crushing deathcore with a touch of Elvis (“Land of the Sun”), maudlin desert crooning (“Rosé”), dank trap (“Seventy Thorns,” featuring Korn’s Jonathan Davis), and a grimdark cover of The Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris.”

When Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge originally conceived this covers collection, it was meant to be a full-length rather than an EP. In fact, he recorded five more songs in addition to the Genesis, Iron Maiden, Television, Stranglers, and Tina Turner covers that appear here. “I had just come off making the *IMPERA* album, and I just didn’t have the energy to go through another full-length album process,” he tells Apple Music. “That deflated me a little, but as soon as I split the list in half, I saw there was a rock connection in these five songs. It just felt like a more cohesive and attractive solution. As with so many things in life, you just have to rethink your idea and all of a sudden it feels so much more doable.” What hasn’t changed is that *Phantomime* is a companion piece to Ghost’s aforementioned 2022 album. “It’s the same way that Iron Maiden’s *Live After Death* is obviously very connected to *Powerslave*,” Forge explains. “When *Phantomime* comes out, we’ll still be on the *IMPERA* tour. And even the artwork between the two releases is connected. But we used different artists because it was interesting to see someone else’s take on almost the same thing.” Below, he discusses each track. **“See No Evil”** “For those of you who know Television, even when they played upbeat music, they played so soft. They sound like they’re playing in front of 10 people at CBGB’s, which they probably did at the time. That doesn’t say anything about the quality of the writing. I love the first two records they made, *Marquee Moon* and *Adventure*—it’s really good songwriting, but the delivery is very subdued. I felt if we did a Ghost version of this, it’s going to feel more like a very tight Rolling Stones in 1982, playing on cocaine. So, this is like a hyperbole-steroids version of the song.” **“Jesus He Knows Me”** “Had it not been for Disturbed, I would say that ‘Land of Confusion’ would’ve been on the list as well, because it’s a really, really good song. But the reason I’m choosing these rather than an older Genesis track has nothing to do with me preferring the newer Genesis, when they became more of a pop band. It’s simply because those songs are a little bit more up for interpretation, whereas a lot of their old prog songs are not easy to interpret because of the grandiosity of the arrangements. And ‘Jesus He Knows Me’ felt like such a given. It felt super relevant, and it translated really well.” **“Hanging Around”** “I chose this very much for the main riff, which is very swinging. It has a cool swagger that I’ve always liked, that I think in many ways has influenced my writing before. And like The Stranglers, we definitely use keyboards as a lead instrument in a way that most hard rock or metal bands do not—I definitely think our common denominator is The Doors. This is probably one of The Stranglers’ more famous songs, at least among fans, that’s based on a certain groove like that. There are other very good, strong Stranglers songs, but this one also has the lyric about Jesus ‘hanging around’ on the cross.” **“Phantom of the Opera”** “This is probably the song on the EP that, at least musically, is truest to the original. But when it came to the lyrics, I got the thumbs-up from \[Iron Maiden bassist/lyricist\] Steve Harris to alter them a bit because the character Papa needs to be, in this case, the Phantom character. Whereas in the original, the way Paul Di’Anno sings it, he’s slaloming between being Christine and the Phantom and then this third-person perspective. So the original lyrics are a little confusing, which I hadn’t noticed before, despite hearing the Iron Maiden song many, many times. When you start breaking these songs down, you hear them in a new light with a new ear.” **“We Don’t Need Another Hero”** “As a songwriter who learned by listening, I can’t read music. I don’t know almost any of the scholastic part of music. But if I can remember the melody of a song, like I did this one, I can usually decipher from memory what the chord sequence is—because there’s usually not too many to choose from. But with this Tina Turner song, I couldn’t really decipher what the third chord was in the chorus. And that’s because it’s actually just two. That’s why it sounds like it does. When I figured it out, I was like, ‘Motherfucker! So smart.’ And that was the push for me. I wanted to formulate this into a bigger, more hard-rocking song because it’s so good and so well-written.”