After a 10-year hiatus, animated death-metal band Dethklok has returned to crush skulls and ejaculate fire. Dethalbum IV sees vocalist Nathan Explosion, guitarists Toki Wartooth and Skwisgaar Skwigelf, bassist William Murderface, and drummer Pickles carving off tales of weed-wacker disembowelment (“Gardener of Vengeance”), food poisoning (“Poisoned by Food”), and PMS (“Bloodbath”) while scoring key moments in their new Metalocalypse movie, Army of the Doomstar. In the real world, all Dethklok songs are written and performed by Metalocalypse co-creator Brendon Small, who again enlisted heavy metal legend Gene Hoglan (Dark Angel, Testament, Death) to play drums. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done the Dethklok thing, and part of me thinks the metal community’s eyes will be on this,” Small tells Apple Music. “So, what am I going to do? Make something more radio-friendly or something more intense and brutal? I kind of felt like the project was telling me it needed to be heavier than everything we’ve done before.” Below, he details each song. “Gardener of Vengeance” “This is kind of a miniature horror film. There’s one line from the movie that really connects this to the project. It’s when Nathan Explosion is saying, ‘I’m not a guy that can write a song of salvation. I’m the guy you call if you need a song about having your guts liquified by a weed wacker.’ That meant I needed a weed wacker in the song somewhere, so I went to Home Depot and rented one. My studio smelled like gasoline for a week and a half.” “Aortic Desecration” “‘Aortic’ meaning the heart, ‘desecration’ meaning broken or destroyed: heartbreak. What if Cannibal Corpse wrote a song about heartbreak? That’s the idea. It’s a heavy metal tantrum where the wound is inflicted by the self, by your own heart. It’s also asking, ‘How could I have been so stupid to leave myself open and get hurt?’ It’s an angry heavy metal tantrum about the ego.” “Poisoned by Food” “At some point, when I was developing Metalocalypse with Tommy Blacha, the co-creator, he turned to me and said, ‘You look green, like one of those medieval paintings where someone’s dead.’ I was sweating and gross. The rest of the night, the poles were exploding, which is a lyric from the song. It’s like a thunderstorm just comes over your house. The gods are upset and punishing you. Putridity, vile, verminous—that was the kind of feeling I was trying to evoke.” “Mutilation on a Saturday Night” “This started as an ode to Metallica, but then it kept shape-shifting because I wanted to make it less Metallica-esque. The great thing about Metallica is that they start simple, but they keep building and mutating their riffs. It’s such a wonderful journey to hear. So, there’s a little bit of that on a shorter time frame here. Lyrically, it’s about the return of Dethklok and getting out of the pandemic at the same time, getting back into society and destroying it on a Saturday night, playing mailbox baseball with sledgehammers and then going to a party you’re not invited to and fucking the whole thing up.” “Bloodbath” “I’ve been married for 10 years now, and one of the things I’ve been privy to is the rage of PMS. This is a song about experiencing PMS from Nathan Explosion’s point of view. It starts out with a chorus of a million women screaming in pain, and then, ‘Why can’t I make up my mind? Is this your knife in my back? Why is my mood swinging around like an executioner swings an axe?’ It’s a warning—stay the fuck away from me. My mother-in-law always says, ‘How come you don’t write a song about my daughter?’ So, I did. They both have really good senses of humor, fortunately.” “I Am the Beast” “This is the most ridiculous song on the record. It’s very brutal, but it’s from the point of view of a dog. I don’t know that anybody would ever know that unless I said so. There’re lines like ‘Where are you taking me this time?’ and stuff about mites in ears. It’s one of the weirdest songs in the world, but, like ‘Bloodbath,’ it’s Nathan Explosion taking on a character. It’s like when Randy Newman tells a story from a character’s point of view. It doesn’t mean he feels that way.” “Horse of Fire” “Horses somehow keep creeping up in this world, and I don’t know why. I just feel like they need to be in song titles. Plus, I like the word ‘horse.’ It’s the funniest word in the world to me. The song is more of a mystical, world-building piece. It’s related to the movie in that it comes from a series of dreams that Nathan Explosion has in act two while he’s trying to mine material. It’s also from the point of view of the villain in the movie, almost like Nathan visited him in a dream.” “DEADFACE” “It’s all caps because those are the notes of the song. There's a moment in the movie where one of the characters can’t see or speak, but they can hold a guitar, and they have one of those little tuners where you can see the note. He’s trying to communicate a message, and he keeps playing these notes over and over—DEADFACE—and it means something to the band. I thought it would be really cool if you could have some kind of coding device in a guitar, like how many words can you spell from A to G? And DEADFACE is also a nickname for Murderface.” “Satellite Bleeding” “This is another world-building song. It’s Nathan in the dream state again where he’s trying to mine the world for songs. It’s a combination of the bad guy and the fate of the planet coming together. Again, a little more mystical. It gets a little proggy, too. With most of these songs, I can kind of walk you through the jokes and stuff, but with some—like this one—it’s the mood of the piece that we’re chasing.” “SOS” “This is the important song in the movie. There’s a theme in the movie and on this record, too, about the fist and the hand. Do you want to punch away at the world, or do you want to reach out? It’s the two poles, good and evil. That’s the crisis that Nathan is caught in. It’s also the two sides of the record—side-one songs like ‘Aortic Desecration’ are the angry-fist songs. The other side is more expansive, reaching out, going into the dream world. This song really has a purpose in the movie, but I don’t want to give too much away.” “Murmaider III” “This is what I call the ‘parallel parable’ that has been following Dethklok around since Episode 2. It’s the unconscious deep, the heart of the earth, the subterranean, the underwater world. This is a theme that I’ve never really been able to verbalize too well, but I feel very strongly about it. This underwater thing has a trilogy of songs that starts out with rage and goes to amassing power. The third song—this one—is a last-ditch effort to right the wrongs in your life. That parallels the movie’s theme, and it’s also the Viking funeral of the record, the descent into the water.”