“I think it’s time, experience, fire and brimstone.” That’s what Puscifer leader Maynard James Keenan says when asked why Puscifer’s fifth album might be their most accomplished yet. “Our first record was 2007, so it’s been about 20 years of finding our way with each other and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.” On Normal Isn’t, Keenan and his bandmates Carina Round (vocals/synths) and Mat Mitchell (guitar/bass/synths) join forces with bassist Greg Edwards (Failure, Autolux) and drummers Gunnar Olsen (Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus) and Sarah Jones (Harry Styles, Bloc Party) to create an album that’s part punk, part goth, and a full-throated commentary on the times we’re living in. “Humanity is losing touch with itself,” Keenan tells Apple Music. “The dopamine addiction is strong, and no solutions are presented. It’s just argument upon argument to the point of violence. Whoever said, ‘May you live in interesting times,’ well, fuck that guy. Give me back the boring times.” Below, he comments on each track. “Thrust” “My bandmates and I have a knack for being able to take an odd time signature and, as [TOOL guitarist] Adam [Jones] says, ‘taming it’. Once you dig in, you don’t even notice it’s not in 4/4. The way Mat laid down the initial set of sounds, it’s like Slint meets Massive Attack meets some of my favourite groovy hip-hop stuff where it’s almost going back to Motown and some of the cocaine-driven disco funk. The storyline is ‘please give me this trance because every time I pick up my phone it’s dragging me into this awful, polarised parallel universe of everybody screaming at each other’.” “Normal Isn’t” “Mat came up with an initial groove that transported me back to my youth with some of my favourite influences, and how I felt driving around in the car with friends. But when you’re back to driving around with your friends, you’re usually trying to get away from whatever’s happening in your life at home, the bullies at school and all these things that come with being a marginalised youth. So I was kind of connecting the joys of my youth with the not-so-joys of my youth.” “Bad Wolf” “I’m not even sure what Mat used to come up with that bassline. I want to say it’s a synth, but I could be wrong. It’s also one of those things where I didn’t want to get caught up in figuring out what it was. I just liked this lumbering groove that he laid down. I think I spent the least amount of time on this one, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s because I immediately found my place in it. It’s my favourite song on the album.” “Self Evident” “The lyrics on this were like a bucket list thing, like: I want to see the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the Great Pyramids—and I’d like to insert the word ‘bunghole’ into a song. I was dealing with someone that day who was being a fucking bunghole, and I just had to get it out. I had to write this song about this absurd situation, especially with everything that’s going on in the world. You can have these big things going the worst way, and then you have the people around you just bickering over the pettiest, silliest, disconnected things. It’s like they’re addicted to the fight, not the solution.” “A Public Stoning” “I was saying to Mat that I really miss that amazing stuff that came out of the kind of Texas-meets-Chicago-meets-D.C. punk scene—the post-punk scene and then the actual punk scene, like that lunge and aggression that goes from something to nothing back to something. I always think of Scratch Acid and The Jesus Lizard, but also the stuff that came before that, like the Bad Brains, Dag Nasty and Big Black. So, it’s that driving guitar and drums with that crunch you got from some of the early synth bands.” “The Quiet Parts” “A friend of mine said, ‘When somebody tells you or shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ I’ve had friends who, when things get tough or weird, you had to trust that. How does that person do under pressure? The other thing is, and this is something I heard Slash say in a conversation with somebody—maybe it was Bert Kreischer, I’m not sure—but it was basically, ‘Sometimes when people get money, it suddenly empowers the parts of them you didn’t know.’ Like, they were always that person, but they required a budget for them to be who they really are.” “Mantastic” “Nowadays we have this parade of alpha-male attitude, and it’s pretty amazing to watch, especially when one of the main venues for this, the UFC, has ads for manscaping. I want a time machine so we can go back to 1975 and you can explain to our wrestling coach why you’re shaving your balls and waxing your asshole. I wanna be there for the conversation when you talk about waxing your nipples, please. You’re an alpha male? Fuck off. They would kick you out of the school.” “Pendulum” “As soon as I heard that synth, the deep-rooted goth period I went through—and am still going through, I guess—back in the old days at the Iguana in Austin, Texas, and in Grand Rapids with my friends there, I knew this song was going to be different than the others. It’s that full-on Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Tones On Tail era. I’m singing down an octave and getting my goth on.” “ImpetuoUs” “Again, it’s just the groove that got me on this one. It’s mostly Gunnar Olsen playing drums on this album, and he’s so good. He’s also one of my favourite human beings, even though he’s from Brooklyn. But on this song, it’s Sarah Jones on drums. She’s just got this feel that’s hard to match. To me, it’s a very signature feel, like hearing Sean Kinney or Matt Chamberlain play a drum. You can tell it’s that guy. Sarah has that, and you can hear it on this song.” “Seven One” “This is one of those songs that we reinvented a million ways over time. We did many different versions of it with many different guests, but the final version has Danny Carey on drums, Tony Levin on bass and Atticus Ross’ father, Ian, doing the narration. We thought of Atticus first because we thought it’d be great in that posh British accent of his—and it was. But then he goes, ‘We need to have my dad do this.’” “The Algorithm” (Sessanta Live Mix) “We recorded this at Sessanta, which means 60. If you’re not aware, it’s this party that I threw for my 60th birthday. We did it again for my 61st, and it was a whole tour. It involved A Perfect Circle, Puscifer and Primus with three drum sets onstage with each band playing three songs and rotating like that for three hours. The song was picked up for the soundtrack to the American Psycho comic series. The tempo is all over the map, but it’s a fun song to play.”