Coming off the touring cycle behind their last album, 2021's Servant of the Mind, Volbeat took a rare year off.
Speaking with ABC Audio, frontman Michael Poulsen shares, "When it was time to get back to writing a new record for Volbeat, it kind of felt like we were starting all over again because of that one-year break."
In a sense, Volbeat really was starting over following the 2023 departure of longtime guitarist Rob Caggiano. But beyond that, the band members felt inspired to make a Volbeat record that felt like the band's debut.
"[We wanted to] use the experience that we have from many years of songwriting and touring, but still kind of going back to how we wrote songs from the very beginning, not overthink anything, pretty much just shoot from the hip," Poulsen explains.
That resulting album is God of Angels Trust, out now. The idea of how to approach the record officially crystalized with a song called — deep breath — "In the Barn of the Goat Giving Birth to Satan's Spawn in a Dying World of Doom," which Poulsen deliberately wrote without a chorus. Instead, he felt the climax of the song would be when he finally sang its long, elaborate title.
"That's gonna be the thing people are waiting for instead of the chorus," Poulsen says. "We had so much fun operating like that, that half of the songs were pretty much built like that. Just as you [would] expect a pre-chorus or a chorus, something different just happens in the song."
Volbeat will hit the road in support of God of Angels Trust with a Canadian tour alongside Three Days Grace beginning on Saturday. They'll launch a U.S. tour with Halestorm in July.