Comeback Kid have locked in their eighth studio album, with the Canadian hardcore veterans set to release ‘Chosen Hell’ on November 6th via SharpTone Records in the US and Dine Alone Records in Canada.
Alongside the announcement, the band have unleashed the album’s title track, ‘Chosen Hell’, giving the first proper look at where more than 25 years of hardcore has dragged them next.
Comeback Kid Enter ‘Chosen Hell’
Produced and engineered by Will Putney at Graphic Nature Audio in New Jersey, ‘Chosen Hell’ stretches across 11 tracks and finds Comeback Kid pulling from hardcore, punk and increasingly metallic territory without sanding away the aggression that has defined them since the early 2000s.
There are also some serious guests involved. Spiritbox vocalist Courtney LaPlante appears on ‘Shedding Season’, while Incendiary vocalist Brendan Garrone lends his voice to ‘Yesterday’s Gone’.
The title track itself digs into something considerably more internal than simply swinging at the world around you.
‘The theme of the title track ‘Chosen Hell’ on our new album touches on morality and ethics,’ vocalist Andrew Neufeld explains.
‘Something as simple as right or wrong. Good or evil. Healthy or unhealthy, and our ability to make a choice. Often, we are incapable of choosing the right thing, and we find ourselves in situations that we know hold us back, therefore affecting our own well being. The outcome is what we make of it.’
Interestingly, there’s an Australian connection buried inside the record too. The structure featured on the ‘Chosen Hell’ album cover was physically constructed by Melbourne artist and designer Callum Preston rather than being created purely as a digital piece.
Comeback Kid ‘Chosen Hell’ track list:
- ‘Target On My Back’
- ‘Vindication’
- ‘Shedding Season’ (Feat. Courtney LaPlante)
- ‘Lost And Found’
- ‘Underneath The Pressure’
- ‘Chosen Hell’
- ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ (Feat. Incendiary’s Brendan Garrone)
- ‘Tunnel Vision’
- ‘Becoming’
- ‘Heartland Elegy’
- ‘Too Late’
Pre order here
A More Collaborative Comeback Kid
The record also represents a slight shift in how Comeback Kid approached writing together.
‘Overall, I was able to let my guard down a little bit while writing for this one, and took more input from everybody else,’ Neufeld says. ‘It was really collaborative that way, which is also kind of new for us.’
For a band this deep into its lifespan, that willingness to mess with the machinery matters. Comeback Kid aren’t trying to cosplay their early records here. ‘Chosen Hell’ instead looks set to take the foundations that made them hardcore lifers and push them somewhere slightly less comfortable.
‘Chosen Hell’ arrives November 6th.
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