They’ve never been the kinds of artists that go through the motions. Almost all of Lamb of God’s songs are examined, refined and redefined before they make it to the final recording sessions. Historically, that has left the band battling deadlines, demons and even each other, pushed by the pressure, unearthing the elemental chaos in their sound.
Now, 32 years into their career (including a five-year pre-Lamb stint as Burn the Priest), they’ve earned the right to take their time, they’re all clean and sober, and they’re getting along better than ever.
But all that positive stuff won’t stop them from making music for the apocalypse or swinging for the fences every time they step up to the plate. And if they don’t knock it out of the park right away, they’ll readjust their batting stances, re-examine the situation, and try again.
Article continues below“A lot of our best songs have come from us having about half a song written and not really knowing where we want to go next,” says Adler, sitting in his car in a parking lot a half mile from his country home in the hills of Virginia. “So, we'll mix the two demos together and build it from there. When we’re done, it often doesn’t sound anything like either of the songs we started with, but it’s better than both.”
Refusing to compromise can be frustrating and time-consuming. It’s even harder when you’re working on your 10th album, are intent on continuing a career arc of musical development yet have already been heralded as a legacy act with a characteristic New American Metal sound.
“We’d been playing a lot of the album for years, but we had never done some of it live before,” says Morton, sitting at his kitchen table and looking out the window overlooking his spacious, woodsy backyard. “Going back and learning those songs made me go, Hey, where was my head at back then? What was I trying to reference 20 years ago? And that carried over to the new record.”
The follow-up to 2022’s Omens, Into Oblivion isn’t exactly a reinvention. It’s more of a rediscovery of a time when every new adventure was a revelation and the band’s lack of experience fueled their chaotic invention.
“Back when we did the second Lamb record, As the Palaces Burn, and then Ashes, we didn’t have any box that we would adhere to,” Adler says. “We just took riffs we liked and attached them together without thinking about conventional structure. We just went, ‘Okay, let’s see where this goes.’ So, this time, we tried to get back to doing what we thought sounded super-cool regardless of whether it went verse, chorus, verse, chorus.”
Into Oblivion isn’t just structurally solid; it’s Lamb of God’s most musically diverse release in more than a decade. There’s the proggy, off-kilter, riff-saturated tech-thrash of The Killing Floor, the speedy hardcore exorcism of Parasocial Christ, the barreling, churn-n-burn ferocity of St. Catherine’s Wheel, and the mournful, melodic El Vacio. From start to finish, Into Oblivion is a blazing retrospective of Lamb of God’s catalog, meticulously crafted to provide diversity and balance.
“At this point, I think it’s hard to add to our body of work without thinking about the body of work,” Morton says. “With every addition we make at this point, we’re aware and respectful of what we’ve done before, and hoping it lives up to whatever level we previously achieved. This album does just that.”
During separate Zoom interviews, Morton and Adler discuss the paths of invention that led to Into Oblivion, the serenity of ripping metal, the advantages of recording at home, and how they finally made peace with being a legacy band.
You aren’t exactly living in oblivion right now. You’re both in rural Virginia in spacious homes and big yards.
Willie Adler: Three years ago, my wife and I found 10 acres out in the sticks and built a house here. We wanted a place where we could grow a garden, have animals, get an ATV and create our own trails.
How isolated are you?
Adler: I’m out in the woods and I literally have no cell service. I have to drive 15 to 20 minutes down the road to talk on the phone.
Are you pulled over by the side of the road right now?
Adler: I’m in my Jeep Rubicon parked in the lot of a sandwich shop my wife and I own. Right after this interview, I’ll go in there and get to work. My wife’s parents opened the place in 1981; she bought it from them about 15 years ago. We make any sandwich you can think of and we’re famous for our limeade.
Lamb of God aren’t exactly struggling. Why work in a sandwich shop?
Adler: I enjoy working there alongside my wife. I wouldn’t necessarily say it keeps me grounded, but I like to stay busy and it’s a nice change of pace.
What about you, Mark? Where are you living?
Mark Morton: We’ve got seven and a half acres in the woods. There are coyotes, but we don’t see them much, and there are bald eagles and all the local snakes. And then we have chickens and dogs.
Do those chickens provide your eggs?
Morton: Yes. I’ve got some friends down the road who raise birds for meat, but we don’t kill ours. They’re probably the happiest chickens on earth. The worst thing that happens to them is they get chased a bit by one of my dogs. But he just likes to scare them.
Does living in the woods provide escape from modern society? Is it a calming respite while we head into oblivion, to quote the title of the new album?
Morton: To me, the album title has more of a psychological thriller vibe to it. I was thinking about the things that follow us around that are unseen, but they traumatize us, whether it’s mental illness, addiction or some event we feel shame about. At some point, we’re all haunted or possessed by these things.
Do current events fan your creative flames and inspire you to write brutal stuff? Is it therapeutic to make this wildly expressive and technical music?
Adler: It certainly is therapeutic to have a breakthrough and write riffs you love after being stuck for a while. But I don’t know if that relates to everything in the news.
Morton: Maybe it’s just survival, man. I’ve had to pay less attention to what’s happening out there because if I turn the screens off and look outside the window, I see the real world. Not that any of that other stuff isn’t real, but I can’t constantly be barraged by it.
Some might say I'm not living in the real world, but I’m not sure the converse isn’t true as well. When I turn off the screens and look out the front door or go for a walk in the woods, somehow it’s not quite as bad.
Were you unsure where you wanted to go musically with Into Oblivion before you played Ashes of the Wake on the Headbangers Boat cruise?
Morton: Before we started, I said that if we’re gonna make another Lamb of God record, it’s really gotta be worthy of being in the catalog we’ve created. That sets the bar high. Then, after I went back to listen to Ashes again, I started thinking even further back to what was going on when we did Palaces.
Then I went back and started listening to bands I discovered back then, like At the Gates, In Flames, Meshuggah and some of the Virginia bands I used to see and was inspired by. I guess I wanted to take a look back at the songwriter I was when I wasn’t at all guided by the music industry or whatever commercial success might come and just get back to the reasons we started doing this band.
Adler: We wanted it to be a scream of old-school Armageddon, but also to be fresh and modern. A good way to do that, we agreed, was to create a cross-section of everything we’ve done.
What was the first indication that you were on the right track?
Morton: We wrote Sepsis, which was very much a reference to a local ’90s hardcore band in Virginia called Slang Laos that were a big influence on us. There’s also a bit of the rhythmic pulse of Jesus Lizard in there. We knew that song was a different kind of thing for us.
When we went back and relearned Ashes of the Wake, it was scary. I had to psych myself back up and be like, “Man, you wrote it and did it for the album, so just play it”
Willie Adler
Adler: It was one of the first songs we really jumped into when we started writing, and that immediately set the tone for the record. I realized, okay, this is our record. We can do whatever we want. It’s funny because it’s the first song we dropped because we wanted to see how it was received, and it made some people worry. They went, “Huh. What is this?” But at the same time, a lot of people got it.
Sepsis has some of the rhythmic turbulence of Meshuggah, another great Swedish metal band.
Adler: I haven’t listened to Meshuggah in a long time, but back in the day they were a huge inspiration as the originators of those crazy, mathy, off-time-but-on-time riffs.
If you listen to our early records, a lot of the breakdowns have a Meshuggah vibe. On the new album, the whole breakdown of The Killing Floor is like that. So that probably crept back in there.
There’s no shortage of fast, technically complex songs, and many seem to staple various riffs together before you get to a chorus — if you even get there.
Adler: Parasocial Christ is very much like that. The chorus only happens once, and it doesn’t kick in until near the end of the song. It was so fun to do stuff like that again.
Morton: In its first incarnation, the song was very proggy, with crazy time signatures. We tussled back and forth with it to find a balance. We subtracted a few things, and it wound up being almost like a hardcore song.
You said you wanted to get back into the mindframe you had when early in your career when you were making crazy music just to make it. At the time, you were all partying like rock stars. Was it hard to revisit those skewed architecture years later as wiser, more sober musicians?
Adler: When we first played those kinds of songs, we were all buzzed up and just having a good time. We weren’t concerned about nailing them, and that, in and of itself, probably allowed us to get them right easier because we weren’t over-thinking anything.
When we went back and relearned Ashes of the Wake, it was scary. I had to psych myself back up and be like, “Man, you wrote it and did it for the album, so just play it.” But it involved wrestling with my mind to turn off any doubts that I had.
Morton: Thinking back to when I first got sober, writing was a bit of a challenge because I didn’t know how to self-edit. I couldn’t tell what I should be excited about and what wasn’t as good because my whole working process had been rooted in drugs and alcohol.
So when I took that away, I didn’t necessarily recognize things the same way. But that was years ago and I learned how to make music sober. It wasn’t too hard for me to play like we used to. My playing style hasn’t changed that much.
You’re both bringing piles of riffs to the table and figuring out what to use and what to discard. Do the two of you often argue?
Morton: We sometimes disagree. But I’ve learned over the years that if you’ve got five guys and a producer in the room, and you’re trying to make everybody happy, you’re going to wind up diluting a piece of music to the point where it’s not going to have an identity.
Somebody’s got to be willing to say, “I’m not directing this one.” And when that’s me, I fall back and let the people who are the most motivated and the most excited about that particular song steer it.
When I stopped trying to be in control of everything, I realized the strongest opinion in the room is often the right opinion. If I disagree with Willie about something, but he’s so dead set on doing it his way because he thinks it’s way better, then I will defer to him, and vice versa.
Conversely, if somebody’s clinging to something but everyone else thinks it’s the wrong thing, sometimes you've got to have that conversation and go, “You know what, man? The whole rest of the room disagrees with you so maybe you should just step away.”
Adler: Mark and I have such a long history together that we’ve learned how to read each other and work together. We feed off each other to such an extent that I’d feel very lost going into a writing session or writing songs without Mark.
I’d be nervous and uncomfortable. I can fuck up around Mark. I can woodshed something and sound terrible, but it’s alright because I know I’m going to get there. And Mark knows I’m going to get there. There’s a comfort level between us.
Did you alter your styles to be able to play some of the new riffs?
Adler: To a degree. When we did Palaces, I used a lot of alternate picking and string-skipping on the technical stuff, so I had to go back in my brain and pretend I was 25 again. The older you get, the more you naturally want to slow down. But we certainly did not let ourselves do that.
Morton: I haven’t changed technique in a long time. I’ve been more focused on songwriting. About 15 years ago, I realized everything needs to be about the song. If we’ve gotta play something technical, I’ll do it until I get it right. But it’s more important for me to determine if the song is saying something. Is it a guitar clinic or a song?
![🔥 Lamb of God – Full Bloodstock 2022 Set [HD] | Legendary Headline Show! 🤘🎥 - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/5ZYmTn6FvMs/maxresdefault.jpg)
El Vacio is ominous and atmospheric, and it builds from a whisper to a roar. It’s more subtle than most of your songs.
Morton: I wrote that at the request of Josh [Wilbur, producer] and Randy [Blythe, vocalist]. We got to a point where we had seven or eight songs, and we thought, What’s missing? What does this batch of songs need for balance? We already had Sepsis, which was abstract, and we had technical stuff, thrash and hardcore.
We wanted something else that stood out as different and added a new character to the record. I went upstairs to my studio and put together El Vacio. It was one of those things where I’m surprised that a piece I write gets used. I thought it was an interesting piece of music, and they loved it.
There are several screeching tremolo solos on the album that resemble vintage Slayer. There are also evil Slayer-esque riffs in Bully and Blunt Force Blues.
I grew up with Slayer, so they permanently take up residence in my brain somewhere
Willie Adler
Adler: That’s probably a testament to the amount of times we’ve toured with them. I grew up with Slayer, so they permanently take up residence in my brain somewhere. But we were not thinking about Slayer when we worked on this.
Morton: Our producer Josh had just been working with Kerry King, and every time I went to do a lead, he wanted me to use a tremolo. And I’m like, “Dude, the Kerry record is great, but this is a Lamb record.” He still wanted me to use a tremolo on a lot of the leads. It’s a different kind of spice for us. We haven’t done a ton of that before.
Did you face any major obstacles while working on Into Oblivion?
Morton: I don’t have any conflict-and-resolution stories for you. I don’t want to minimize the woes of the world. There are plenty. But back here in my little place, we got the chickens and the dogs, and there’s a fresh pot of coffee on.
We’re laughing and writing songs with old friends, and there are guitars lying around. We’re all having fun. So let’s go make a heavy metal record, man.
- Into Oblivion is out now via Century Media.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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