Spirit Adrift mastermind Nate Garrett moved from Arizona to Texas on March 1, 2020. Two weeks later, the country went into lockdown due to the pandemic. He’d already begun work on a follow-up to the band’s fourth album, Enlightened in Eternity (which came out in October 2020, but was recorded the previous year), when his label suggested a stopgap EP to tide fans over between LPs. The result is Forge Your Future, which features soaring heavy metal anthems directly inspired by the pandemic. “I don’t know if the song ‘Forge Your Future’ is connected to the pandemic at all, but the other two songs, yes—100%,” Garrett tells Apple Music. “And musically, I probably wrote the title track and ‘Wake Up’ within the first week of lockdown.” Below, he takes us through the songs. “Forge Your Future” “A lot of metal bands write songs as narratives. It can be a realistic narrative or a completely fantastical one about dragons and magic—which is something I’ll never do. But I did find it to be a new and exciting experience to write lyrics as a story. When I went back and read it, I realized it’s a pretty heavy-handed metaphor for overcoming adversity, which a lot of our stuff is about, but I focused more on imagery—a cool story that you could picture in your mind’s eye. And inadvertently, it does apply to the times we find ourselves in.” “Wake Up” “For this one, I had the chorus riff first. I think most people would compare it to some ’80s Randy Rhoads-type stuff, but actually Symbolic-era Death was a big touchstone for that riff. I wrote the rest of the song around that chorus riff, and it’s an open-fifth string-based song, which is kinda hard to fuck up. Lyrically, I was just watching everybody buy up all the toilet paper and felt frustrated and disgusted to my very core. I just wanted to smack people in the face and scream at ’em to wake the fuck up and start acting right.” “Invisible Enemy” “This is actually a combination of three different songs I was working on that I combined into one big Frankenstein’s monster, Diamond Head-style new wave of British heavy metal song. But there are also sections where we were going for the Suspiria soundtrack, almost. There’s some Mercyful Fate in there, too. Lyrically, it’s not the first song I’ve written about trying and executing crooked politicians. The title is a phrase that our former President was tossing around at press conferences, which is funny because that’s exactly what he is, and a lot of people like him are: toxic enemies of humanity, basically.”