Back To The Water Below

In 2021, Royal Blood’s third album, Typhoons, proved that Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher could fashion an entirely new musical chassis from the base materials that had powered their first two albums. Minting a sound they nicknamed AC Disco, the English duo brought new dance-floor swagger to their bass-and-drums assault. On their self-produced fourth album, the pair have blown the very notion of what constitutes a Royal Blood album wide open. The thumping, one-two wallop of lead single “Mountains at Midnight” might sound familiar, but much of Back to the Water Below finds them traversing entirely new musical terrain. From “The Firing Line”’s stripped-back, Smashing Pumpkins-like slink to the sumptuous Beatlesque melodies and wide-screen arrangements of “There Goes My Cool”, singer/bassist Mike Kerr’s songwriting has matured and reached places that few could have imagined while listening to the visceral thrills of their self-titled debut album back in 2014. “In the past, I might have worried about whether or not something was a Royal Blood song,” Kerr tells Apple Music. “At this point, we’ve stopped asking ourselves that because we realised that’s a crazy question. You just chase the song and chase the idea and see where you end up. I think that’s what the amazing process of this record has been. The palette was so much wider this time around, and we didn’t have to worry about how these songs wanted to present themselves. It was so freeing.” Steering the band down new musical vistas yet retaining the high-voltage energy and dynamism that comes whenever Kerr and Thatcher lock into a groove together, Royal Blood have thrown away the rule book and entered an entirely new phase. Here, Kerr takes us through it, track by track. “Mountains at Midnight” “In a way, it’s well-trodden ground for us. It’s not a song we go looking for anymore—but it’s hard to fight it when ideas like that come along. That riff came in a sound check, and I laughed it off and thought, ‘I don’t know ho