Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Vocalist Randy Blythe of Richmond, Virginia metal band Lamb of God was asked how he and his bandmates went about creating their tenth studio album, “Into Oblivion,” which will be released on March 13 on Epic, in a recent interview with Hardlore, as per Blabbermouth.
Much in the same way we went about approaching album number nine, number eight, number seven. I think the biggest difference with us as a band, particularly over the last — I don’t know — five or six years, is we have consciously tried to shelve the ego individual members have and try and keep in mind the greater whole. ‘Cause when you’re a younger band — and we’re five very different people — when you’re a younger band, it’s, like, nobody hands you a handbook, ‘This is how you be a band.’ But you’re so passionate and it’s so important to you, and what you put into the music is so personal that when someone says, ‘Eh, I don’t know about that,’ in the band, then you’re, like, [hurt]. And we were very contentious for a long time — writing was very contentious.
Somehow in our old age, as we wander off into Alzheimer’s-riddled legacy territory, we’ve learned to get along better than we ever did. So we get along great now. And it’s because, I think, when we’re writing, we’re all, like… There’s a quote attributed to [American playwright and screenwriter] Tennessee Williams: ‘You must be willing to murder your darlings.’ Meaning your contribution, your art cannot be so precious that if someone else looks at it and is, like, ‘That doesn’t serve the greater whole,’ you gotta cut it. And it’s painful. So for us, we’ve kind of learned as a group to sort of shelve the individual egos and think more about the whole.
We have a saying: better is better. It sounds stupid, but it’s true. And me, just as much as any of the other dudes, have certainly been guilty of, like, ‘I love this, but this is how exactly it works.’ And then somebody [goes], ‘But what about this?’ And it’s a hard thing, when you care about something so much and you’ve put in so much time, to have someone be, like, ‘Eh. I don’t know.’ But better is better. So we try and say that to ourselves.
Randy responded as follows when asked why Lamb of God changed the band’s logo for the “Into Oblivion” cover for the first time in 27 years.
Well, our logo, to be perfectly honest, needed changing. It’s the papyrus font [that we used for the old Lamb Of God logo]. And had we known 20-however many years ago that we would wind up looking like a falafel restaurant menu, we wouldn’t have used that. But that was before papyrus font was ubiquitous.
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