Robb Flynn of Machine Head opens up about collaborating with Jordan Fish

Through his numerous endeavors as a producer and songwriter, keyboardist/programmer Jordan Fish has maintained an active presence on the contemporary heavy music world, even after splitting from Bring Me The Horizon in 2023. He has maintained a partnership with Machine Head for more than ten years, in addition to collaborating with Architects, BABYMETAL, and Poppy, among others. Beginning in 2014, he contributed keyboards, arrangements, and other post-production elements to the Bay Area bruisers’ album “Bloodstone & Diamonds.” Since then, the partnership has persisted, most notably on Machine Head‘s recently released eleventh studio album, “UNATØNED.”

I really feel like we’ve got a record that’s got a lot of layers. I’m really stoked because I have about four collaborators that I work with and they kind of handle all like the keyboards and the piano stuff that I can hear and I play on guitar and I just say, ‘Hey, turn this into this sound or whatever.’ I’m fortunate enough to work with Jordan from Bring Me the Horizon. He’s been a decade long collaborator of mine. I started working with him on the ‘Bloodstone and Diamonds‘ record. And on this record I said, ‘Hey, I really want you to be part of every song and even if you don’t end up on any of the songs, I just want you to be able to collaborate with me and try some stuff and see where it goes.’ And it turned out really, really cool having him be a part of it because he really just brought this depth and this dimension that I don’t think we’ve had before in a couple songs. But to hear it all throughout an album just really ties the album together more so. Yeah, I’m very stoked.

Flynn continued:

I’ve worked with him for 10 years now, so it doesn’t feel like a new collaboration. It might sound like a new collaboration to people, but we’re four albums deep with him. I just feel like he’s part of the team at this point. He’s kind of a genius. He just brings in this killer [mentality]. Sometimes that guy, I’d be like, ‘Hey, do your ideas and put it on,’ and he’d send me like 70 tracks of stuff. Then me and my producer Zack would just go through everything and determine what is what. Sometimes it was just like a hi hat or something or just like a shaker or whatever, but then other times it’s a layers of strings and layers of piano and layers of sub stuff and cool textures. We didn’t use it for every song. It wasn’t needed for every song. But to me a thrash song doesn’t need stuff like that. It just needs thrash and guitars really loud. Let’s turn those guitars up. But for other moments, it really just brought to life the song.