Mark Morton picks 2003’s As The Palaces Burn as his favorite Lamb Of God album, praising its raw sound and character.
Mark Morton has singled out As The Palaces Burn as the Lamb Of God album he rates above the rest, describing the 2003 record as the sound of a band figuring itself out in real time. The guitarist made the pick during a new interview with U.K. retailer Gear4music, conducted while the band tour behind their tenth studio album, Into Oblivion.
Asked to name one album he likes more than the others, Morton chose the band’s second full-length under the Lamb Of God name, released 6 May 2003 through Prosthetic Records.
“As The Palaces Burn [which came out in May 2003 via Prosthetic Records]. Because I just think there’s something really unique about that record. It’s really the sound of the band just kind of getting its legs up under ourselves as songwriters, just barely. And it’s naive and abstract at the same time, and the way it sounds, it doesn’t particularly sound very good, but it sounds on fire. It sounds sonically like… Someone told me very recently that, a good friend of mine said, ‘That record sounds like the colors that are on the cover.’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, it’s like really burning bright red and yellow.’ And these are all very abstract reasons to pick this thing, but that’s why. I just think it’s just a very early representation of the elements of what Lamb Of God would eventually develop and refine. You can really listen top to bottom on that, and every song kind of has its own character, and it’s an interesting — kind of simple, the instrumentation and the production [are] very simple, but real cool, man,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
As The Palaces Burn was produced by Devin Townsend with the band and recorded at Montana, Inc. in Richmond, Virginia. Townsend also contributed backing vocals and guitar to “A Devil In God’s Country“, while former Megadeth guitarist Chris Poland played on “Purified” and Today Is The Day‘s Steve Austin added backing vocals to “11th Hour“. The album ran 38 minutes across ten tracks, spawned the singles “11th Hour“, “Ruin” and the title track, and was named Album of the Year by Revolver. It had sold roughly 270,000 copies in the United States by 2013, the year the band issued a remixed and remastered tenth-anniversary edition with three bonus demos.
The lineup on that album was Randy Blythe, Morton, Willie Adler, John Campbell and drummer Chris Adler, who parted ways with the band in 2019 and was replaced by Art Cruz.
Morton‘s affection for the band’s early catalog is not incidental to Into Oblivion. Asked whether the album’s shift in approach was organic or planned, he said the change was fully intended, and traced part of it to what he had been listening to while writing.
Morton replied: “Yeah, there’s so many ways to answer that. Of course, it’s deliberate. Everything we do is very intentional. There’s not a lot of accidents. I mean, there are, but it’s, like, you hear something, you develop it. So there’s so many stages to writing and recording a project like that. So, it’s certainly very deliberate and intentional.
He continued: “I think we really rallied around this notion of re-engaging into — being willing to step out of comfort zones and that kind of thing a little bit compositionally and maybe creatively,” he explained. “And for my part, and I’ve said this in other interviews and it got picked up, but it’s really true, I went back and kind of started listening again to the things that I was listening to when I was helping to write those first few albums. So a lot of early 2000s metal was just kind of making it back into my ears and just sort of revisiting that stuff and remembering what inspired me about it and that kind of thing. So maybe some of that showed up.”
Morton also laid out how Lamb Of God songs get built, a process he said has not changed across three decades.
Songs “always [start] with the riff. It starts with guitar riffs. Willie [Adler] and I are pretty much always writing, collecting riffs just on our own, and then we’ll get together and start comparing notes and that kind of thing. So it’s always and forever has been, starts with guitar riffs, and then we start building songs around that.”
Into Oblivion arrived on 13 March 2026 through Epic in the United States and Century Media in Europe, produced by longtime collaborator Josh Wilbur. It is the band’s tenth studio album under the Lamb Of God banner, their first full-length in four years following 2022’s Omens, and the third to feature Cruz behind the kit. At just over 39 minutes across ten tracks, it is the leanest record the band have made since As The Palaces Burn itself, a detail that sits neatly alongside Morton‘s stated return to the material that shaped those early sessions.
