Lamb of God Break Down New Album ‘VII: Sturm und Drang’ Track by Track

“I figure we’re about eight records deep at this point so if I wanna try my hand at some clean singing, I can,” Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe says bluntly of “Overlord,” a moody new track the group premiered today on its website; its video is streaming below. “There are a lot of people that are gonna be mad about it, but fuck them.”

The Virginia-based metal pummelers are less than a month away from releasing their upcoming record, VII: Sturm und Drang, so they’re showing off all the ways they explored new sides of the group —most notably pointing out that Blythe can actually sing. Although the record contains plenty of the thrashing wallop that first turned headbangers’ noggins 15 years ago, it finds the band experimenting with murky doom riffs, talk-box guitar solos and guests. Deftones frontman Chino Moreno lends his distinctive pipes to the trudging steamrolling riffage of “Embers,” while Dillinger Escape Plan vocalist Greg Puciato offers de facto screams on jittery LP closer “Torches,” and both guest spots add a new element to the group’s sound.

Blythe met with Rolling Stone at a hotel in lower Manhattan in late April to discuss the new album as well as his upcoming book, Dark Days: A Memoir, which is due out next month and chronicles his experience going to prison in the Czech Republic on charges of manslaughter for killing a fan. He was later found not guilty in that incident but, as his stories suggest, those events weighed heavily on VII: Sturm und Drang. Here, Blythe and guitarist Mark Morton, take Rolling Stone track by track through the most dynamic – and emotional – record of their career.

1. “Still Echoes”
“It is a history of Pankrác Prison and of the people who have been in control of that prison,” Blythe says of the rigid, breakneck-paced metal grinder, which he began writing while incarcerated. “The first line is, ‘A thousand heads cut clean across their necks right down the hall from me.’ There was a guillotine right down the hall from me from when the Nazis had the prison. From 1943 to ’45, they executed almost 2,000 people by the guillotine ’cause it’s cheaper than shooting and quicker than hanging. At the end of the war, the Nazis threw the guillotine into the river in order to hide what they had done at Pankrác because the SS moved in there and set up headquarters. The head of the Gestapo unit there went under intense interrogation and revealed where they had thrown it in the river. So the Czechs dredged it up and now it still sits in there, in the room where they executed all these people. They call it the Pankrác ‘saw room’ or ‘ax room.’ So there are a few different references to the history of the prison in there.”