“I couldn’t write a fucking heavy riff to save my life,” says Robb Flynn, vocalist and guitarist of groove metal powerhouse, Machine Head. “Alls I could write was these horrible Fiona Apple piano ballads.”
The band had gotten a solid start on writing their new album, Catharsis—set for release Jan. 26 via Nuclear Blast—but about a third of the way through the songwriting process, Flynn came up dry. To push through this creative block, Machine Head—who are all still based in Oakland, where the band was founded over two decades ago—just kept showing up to their jam room and writing. Eventually, they got over the hump and came up with perhaps the most eclectic record they’ve ever made.
“I feel like we challenged ourselves. We’re way out of our comfort zone on more than a few songs on this record,” Flynn admits. “I’ve been telling people, ‘You know, lower your expectations for the heaviness. It’s a very grooving, very melodic record. I can’t honestly sit here and tell you this is our heaviest record, and while it may freak you out a little bit now, I feel like come Jan. 26, you’ll appreciate that I was being straightforward with you.’ Doesn’t mean it’s not a great record. I think it’s a phenomenal record—maybe one of our best. But is it our heaviest? Nah.”
Machine Head may be exploring new terrain on Catharsis, but that in and of itself is nothing new for the band. “When we start writing, we never know where we’re gonna go,” Flynn explains. “That’s kind of the beauty of that journey. It’s a little bit scary, you know? You’re going to write a record, and you don’t really know where you’re going to end up—but that’s also the exciting part.”
Sometimes, the first song written for a Machine Head record ends up setting the tone for the entire album, Flynn adds. For instance, the first song the band wrote for 2011’s Unto the Locust was “This Is the End.” “We were like, ‘Holy shit, we’re fucking killing it!’” he says of the band’s response after that album’s first cut was complete.
But that’s not how it always works. “First song we wrote for [2007’s] The Blackening didn’t even end up on The Blackening,” he reveals. “It was early fucking bullshit that was horrible.”
The song Flynn credits for starting to tie everything together on Catharsis is “Bastards.” When he warns fans not to expect the heaviest Machine Head album to date, he is likely thinking of this song. He originally wrote it as a folky, four-chord acoustic number and released it online, but its lyrics kept appearing throughout the tracks the band were writing for the new album.
“There’s the line in there: ‘Stand your ground / Don’t let the bastards grind you down / Be bold, be strange / Don’t let their fears make you afraid,’” he recounts. “Those lyrics popped up in ‘Hope Begets Hope,’ they popped up in ‘Catharsis,’ they popped up in ‘Eulogy,’ they came up in ‘Grind You Down’”—and at that point, it was like, ‘You know what? Maybe we should do a band version of ‘Bastards.’”
The song still features an acoustic guitar and clean vocals, making it almost definitely the least heavy song Machine Head have ever put to tape. As soon as they were done writing it together, they realized, “‘Yeah, this is really out of our fucking wheelhouse here,’” Flynn remembers. “There was definitely no confusion about that. It opened up a discussion: ‘Can we do a song like this? Do we need to do a song like this? Can Machine Head say this?’”
Of course, in the end, the band decided that “Bastards” expresses something that Machine Head did indeed need to say. Many of the songs on the album express similar sentiments, but not all of them—again, it’s a pretty eclectic album. If there’s one thing tying all of the tracks on Catharsis together, it’s that they all express something the band felt needed to be said.
“I think music, in general, is always very cathartic, especially when it’s done right,” Flynn says. “I think with this record, there were just so many different emotions being expressed.” Both “Bastards” and lead-off track, “Volatile”—which Flynn wrote after seeing the news about a white supremacist running over a protester in Charlottesville, Virginia—have pretty clear sociopolitical points to make, but he describes “California Bleeding” as being “just like, ‘Let’s get fucked up!’ Which is its own catharsis.” Meanwhile, the album’s closer, “Eulogy,” is about depression, and “Heavy Lies the Crown” is a period piece about Louis XI, “the Spider King of France.”
If “Bastards” pulled the whole record together conceptually, it’s the title track, “Catharsis,” that “crystallized everything we were trying to say,” Flynn notes. He points especially to the lyrics: “The only thing keeping me sane / The music in my veins / And if these words are my fist / This is my catharsis.”
Top photo by Alan Snodgrass
