Rolling Stone's 15 Best Metal Albums of 2022

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

The legendary BORIS celebrate a 30 year career as one of experimental music's most forward-thinking, heavy, and innovative bands with the new album Heavy Rocks (2022). Continuing their series of Heavy Rocks records, BORIS once again channels the classic proto-metal sounds of the 70s into something all new. The album, 10 pulse-pounding tracks, highlight the very trajectory of BORIS and their storied career - from the driving, fuzzed out Rock N' Roll opener "She is Burning", to the punk, raucous "My Name is Blank", BORIS are heavier than ever before. "Question 1" is just kickass - D-beats give way to a doomed, spaced out and heavier-than-anything guitar wailing and feedback, before diving back into their Metal, sending the listener into a complete frenzy. This is unmistakably BORIS, and this is the band at the height of their powers. Elsewhere on the record, a more daring, "out there" side of the band begins to shine on tracks such as the aptly titled "Blah Blah Blah", the industrial "Ghostly Imagination" and the truly wild "Nosferatou". Noisy passages (not unlike prior collaborations with legendary artists like Merzbow,) collide with visceral vocal howls while a relentless, almost Zornian-saxophone shreds harder than any guitar solo ever could. In 2022, BORIS cement what Heavy Rock means to them, and release one of their most captivating records to date.

From the depths of the Adirondack wilderness comes Blackbraid, a solo Native American black metal project as raw and powerful as the mountains from whence it came...

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.”