For Cult of Luna guitarist, vocalist, and co-founder Johannes Persson, the Swedish post-metal band’s 10th album is a personal reckoning. “Feelings and emotional states that were very tough for me up until I was in my twenties, I was very confident I had left them behind,” he tells Apple Music. “Then I hit 45, and all of a sudden, this scary stuff came back from nowhere. But it’s not from nowhere—it’s been hiding so deep within my person that I haven’t even noticed it. I tried to write the lyrics from that perspective, and to try and find a way to describe this adversary that is deep within myself.” On the pulsing, ominous “One More Day,” Persson wrote about his struggles with depression. To add an extra layer of gravitas, he and his bandmates brought in American folk legend David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower and Wovenhand. “I’ve been a fan for 25 years, maybe more,” Persson says. “We gave him some loose direction for what we wanted, and he came back and pretty much stole the song. I mean that in the sense that it’s impossible to play it without him now.” The thundering, Neurosis-like “Sadness Will Reign” features guest vocals from Joe Duplantier of French metal giants GOJIRA. “We’ve talked about doing something with Joe for a while,” Persson says. “We were just looking for something where we thought he could make a contribution. He didn’t steal the song in the same way David did, but he sure did elevate it.” Not every song on the album is rooted in Persson’s bout of deep introspection. Take “A Way Back,” a haunting tune based around a heavily treated acoustic guitar. It was written by fellow Cult of Luna guitarist/vocalist Fredrik Kihlberg. “We’ve experienced so much together and have seen each other go through so many changes in life,” Persson says. “Reading the lyrics, I definitely see how that could have maybe worked itself into the song.” Then there’s album closer “Burial,” a powerful contemplation of mortality that came out of a visit to a Swedish tombstone company. “They have this tombstone graveyard outside,” he says. “Some of them have been discarded because of errors in manufacturing, but some of them were once in real graveyards. Here in Sweden, when people stop paying for grave maintenance, they make room for other graves. They need to do something with those tombstones, and this is where they end up. And you can see the names of these people that have been forgotten. They’ve been completely erased from history. And that’s going to happen to me, too.”