As Lamb Of God prepares to unleash their tenth studio album, Into Oblivion, on March 13 via Epic Records, guitarist Mark Morton is shedding some light on the creative process. According to the riff-master, the band looked to their own past—and the classic Swedish extreme metal that originally inspired them—to help shape their newest material.
Appearing on “The Downbeat Podcast” hosted by Stray From The Path drummer Craig Reynolds, Morton discussed how the band organically decided to revisit their musical roots for the new record.
He said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “So I’ll tell you, and we all come into these things with our own perspective and mindset. Lamb Of God is very collaborative, and there’s no meeting before we get going about what our premise is gonna be or anything like that. But I do think collectively we were having conversations about, ‘Well, what is it that we’ve gotten away from?’ Not because anything was necessarily wrong, because some of the more recent work we were feel really excited about — “Ditch” is a monster, from the last album; we play that almost every night. And “Resurrection Man” — those are all new songs that are big in the live show and we’re into. “Memento Mori” was massive. But it’s, like. what have we gotten away from that was really at the genesis of this thing that was really the cornerstones that we built it on?”
Morton explained that the recent 20th-anniversary tour for their landmark album Ashes Of The Wake forced him to relearn old guitar patterns he hadn’t played in decades. This deep dive into the band’s history prompted him to revisit the legendary albums he was heavily listening to during that formative era:
“So two things happened for me. And I don’t remember exactly where we were in the writing process, but we did a tour that was the Ashes Of The Wake 20-year tour. So that had us, and me, going into those songs and learning them inside out. Some of those songs — I think a couple of the songs we’d never played live. I don’t know the stats on that, but certainly most of them we hadn’t played in a long time. So I was digging into those songs. So when you learn something like that and rehearse it so much, you start to understand the patterns that you’re not really… ‘Oh, I don’t really do that move anymore.’ You know what I mean? ‘But I’m doing it now ’cause I’m learning this thing that’s 20 years old.’ And kind of jumping off of that, I also — rather than go back and listen to [As The] Palaces [Burn] or go listen to [New American] Gospel, which I’ve listened to this records from time to time, just [for] nostalgic [reasons]… So, for me, I decided to kind of start going back to the music that I was listening to when we wrote those records. So I started going back and listening to The Haunted and to At The Gates and to early Meshuggah and all that kind of Swedish stuff that I was so excited about at that point in time. That The Haunted Made Me Do It record, I was burning that thing down. It’s so good. And Slaughter Of The Soul [by] At The Gates, that’s just an absolute classic record. So [I was] just kind of going back there and re-tapping back into my excitement around those bodies of work and then allowing that to inspire what I was doing when I was picking up the guitar again.”
He also highlighted exactly what it was about early Meshuggah that helped drive his riffs for Into Oblivion:
“Destroy Erase Improve, that’s one of my favorite metal records, for sure. Some of the stuff, they get so abstract that I don’t… I’m probably impatient as a listener for some of the stuff that they’ve evolved into. And that’s not a criticism. It just means for me, the sort of essence of the basic groove that Destroy Erase Improve has, that weird groove with an extra angle but it still grooves, that was a big influence.”
Into Oblivion marks the third studio album featuring drummer Art Cruz, who officially replaced founding member Chris Adler in July 2019 after stints with Prong and Winds Of Plague. Addressing the drummer’s evolution within the band since joining for their 2020 self-titled album Lamb Of God and 2022’s Omens, Morton noted that Cruz has fully grown into his role:
“I think he felt more comfortable. This is Art‘s third record [with Lamb Of God]. So, the self-titled record, I think there was probably a little bit of more intense focus on the drum parts, just because we had such a large body of work with Chris, and that sound, it’s the Lamb Of God sound. So to change drummers and have the drums be drastically different didn’t feel — it didn’t feel right for us, it didn’t feel fair to anybody, including the listeners.”
He elaborated on how Cruz‘s background as a massive fan of the band gives him a unique and highly valuable perspective during the songwriting process:
“The beauty of Art being our drummer is he is such a big fan of the body of work of Lamb Of God,” Morton explained. “And that’s become a resource for us when we’re songwriting, because we can get a perspective from Art that we don’t have ourselves. He can say things like, ‘Well, Lamb Of God in 2009 would’ve done this.’ And we trust that perspective, because we know how important the band’s music was to him coming up and how formative it was for him. So he’s in a unique position to be able to honor that sound and also run with it, which he has done. So I think on the self-titled record, the drums were treated a little more conservative in terms of making big sweeping changes stylistically. And then over the course of the Omens record and now Into Oblivion, you see that sort of evolving, as it should.”
Into Oblivion tracklisting:
- “Into Oblivion“
- “Parasocial Christ“
- “Sepsis“
- “The Killing Floor“
- “El Vacío“
- “St. Catherine’s Wheel“
- “Blunt Force Blues“
- “Bully“
- “A Thousand Years“
- “Devise/Destroy“
