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Our recurring feature series Track by Track sees artists guiding readers through each song on their new release. Today, thrash metal troops Warbringer elaborate on their seventh studio album, Wrath and Ruin.
Warbringer are one of the forerunners of modern thrash metal, and they’ve built their name on delivering consistently excellent studio albums.
The California band’s seventh offering, Wrath and Ruin, comes after nearly a five-year gap following 2020’s Weapons of Tomorrow — a career benchmark in terms of songwriting and production. Wisely, Warbringer chose not to reinvent their sound during that lengthy span, instead tapping into a new level of extremity to enhance their well-established thrash assault.
“On Wrath and Ruin, we wanted to continue the style and quality of the last two records, Woe to the Vanquished and Weapons of Tomorrow,” singer-guitarist John Kevill told Consequence, “while having a darker sound, and having it be generally more extreme and ferocious than the previous record.”
He continued: “I wanted the record to have a theme of class power, and dystopian ‘techno-feudalism’ (a term I’ve heard being used to describe where the modern world is heading). This is reflected in the cover art, which shows a shining city in the clouds above the ruins and slums. The tone of the record overall is meant to be bleak, hopeless, and evil.”
Warbringer kick off a co-headlining North America tour with Allegaeon on March 18th. Grab tickets to see them in concert via Ticketmaster or StubHub.
Wrath by Ruin is now available to stream below, followed by an exclusive Track by Track breakdown by frontman John Kevill himself.
“The Sword and the Cross”:
This was the starting point to the record and the first thing we wrote. I had the end verse written before the rest of the song. It is a dark, epic thrashing number. I think the chorus sounds like getting trampled by heavy cavalry. The idea is a medieval lord explaining how he became the lord with violence (the sword) and how he legitimized himself with ideology (the cross). At the end, he does this cackling maniacal rant about how his children will own your children, and he will own you long after he is dead, worthless peasant. It expresses this theme that we still have de facto lords and peasants today, and that the scars of class power very much remain in our world.
English (US) · 