AFI – Silver Bleeds the Black Sun

For more than three decades, AFI has been in a nearly constant state of reinvention. The band have made it a point to evolve with every albumsometimes dramatically sonever allowing themselves to become too comfortable in one genre or rest on any of their impressive career laurels. Its an approach that has grown their audience but also challenged it with a sonic identity that can shift in wild, unexpected directions. Now with their twelfth album, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun, AFI are once again at the start of a bold new chapter, only this time theyve even managed to surprise themselves.

I realize this is something weve said about our records for years, but this record is starkly different from what weve done in the past, says frontman Davey Havok. In our 33 years together, weve covered so much, musically, that I found myself daunted at the prospect of doing something different, and questioning what that would be. So how does a band thats known for creative upheaval still find ways to push themselves out of their comfort zones? Typically, the group would start an album by immediately throwing themselves into writing and simply letting their intuitive musical shorthand guide the process, but for Silver Bleeds the Black Sun AFI set out to purposely change their creative approach all together. This time it started with a conversation: how could they break new ground?

The key to moving forward actually ended up coming from AFIs collective past. We started with something that sounded like Echo & the Bunnymen, explains guitarist Jade Puget, who produced and engineered the album. But eventually we ended up with this melange of death rock and post-punkall this stuff from the late 70s and early 80s that we grew up on, like Sisters of Mercy, and Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The goal became making an album with a singular mood, something dreamy and ethereal, and the band members found themselves diving headfirst into influences that had always been deeply embedded in AFIs musical core, but now were being brought to the forefront. We were leaning into that post-punk world and embracing that part of our DNA, but at the same time still sounding like AFI, says drummer Adam Carson. The result is an album that feels out of time, at once familiar and fresh, drawing on classic sounds and reinterpreting them through a modern lens. Silver Bleeds the Black Sun is dark and otherworldly, but also grandiose and stately, biting and beautiful in equal measurein other words, its very AFI, yet not quite like any version of the band youve ever heard before.