For the last 15 years, Ryan Kirby has been the voice of Fit For A King. And for 15 years—barring the pandemic— he has been touring religiously. So, the band has a couple of essentials on tour, and one of them is a good cup of coffee.
“We have rules,” vocalist Ryan Kirby smiles when talking about the band’s routine for finding a good coffee shop. “We have things we look for which are: no whipped cream. If there’s whipped cream in pictures, it’ll probably be bad… And if the art on the lattés is good, it’s a skill people have to learn, so (the café) probably have baristas that care,” he says over a fresh cup of coffee, brewed in his home, while he sits at his desk.
Kirby is in the midst of preparing for the band’s upcoming tour, kicking off the same day as the release of their eighth studio record, Lonely God, out August 1 via Solid State Records. He sips his cup again, “It’s the routine… we’re gone for five to six months a year, with four to six tours a year,” so “it’s nice to find somewhere to sit and reply to emails and drink coffee.”
With their third tour of the year impending, all they can do is bookmark coffee shops on Google Maps, rehearse and prepare for the release of Lonely God. And their impending new material straddles a line of black metal-core, teetering in directions of the heavier genre before rebounding into more melodic territories, promising something quite different than what Fit For A King have delivered before.
It’s due partly to vocalist and lyricist Ryan Kirby pushing himself even further on Lonely God, than he had before. “I wanted there to be a theme to the record, but maybe it’s more (to do with) the different angles of how everything is going, from different points of view, versus just a general ‘fuck the system.’”
And that’s exactly what Kirby did. While he did indeed write one track that was on the nose as it gets, he found himself branching into different narratives and storylines, focusing on people and the relationships they form despite global chaos. Not only was it important for Kirby to explore these avenues, but for Fit For A King’s longevity to try things differently than their peers. “I’m in a metalcore band that is generic at times, I’ll acknowledge that,” Kirby lowers his voice, with a small chuckle at the end. “So, I try really hard to not do the generic metalcore tropes because [to me], we’re already going to get crap because there are ‘haters’ that will say it’s generic anyways. It’s kind of like how every band has songs that are like ‘God’s not real!,” he exclaims, “I feel like it’s the same with a lot of political songs, so I try to find different ways of talking about it in a way that maybe is symbolic of what’s going on, rather than directly talking about it. Whereas ‘Lonely God’ is very direct.”
And Kirby’s right—the title track of the record, the band’s most recent single is as blunt as it comes from Fit For A King, but for literally any other track on the record? It’s buried underneath the surface: “There’s a lot of political undertones on the record,” Kirby says, thinking about it for a moment, “(Lonely God) is definitely the most on the nose, political song on the record.” And the reason for the subliminal political messaging was rather simple: “We almost have to take creative angles to (these) things ‘cause we’re on album eight, and it gets really easy to start writing the same song over and over again. We’ve already had political songs in the past. Obviously, politics have changed a lot, because I think the last super political songs we did were on Dark Skies and that was seven years ago.” So, with eight years—and two presidencies between the last of their political material, it was time. However, he knew he had to get creative with it.
Branching farther into the fictional in order to explore the world all but falling apart around us, Kirby detailed the story of a couple focusing on themselves in their last moments on “No Tomorrow,” and an upcoming four-part music video series explores another theme even further, “The whole theme (is about) a broken person, who’s made a lot of mistakes, who tries to find a new cause to believe in because they’re depressed. They find something, and it ends up not being what they thought, and they face consequences.”
Kirby holds back nothing as he explores how “a lot of individuals, how they find identities through different things, and everybody’s trying to find a group to be a part of, whether it’s religious, whether it’s political… Lonely God talks about how this was all planned to be this way.” And the fact that now, it’ll take more than just a chat over a cup of coffee for anything real to change.
Lonely God is out on Friday and you can preorder it from Solid State Records. Follow Fit For a King on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok for future updates.
Photos by Anthony Scanga
