We’re just 10 days away from the release of Marilyn Manson‘s 11th studio album We Are Chaos. Revolver recently caught up with the shock-rocker to discuss the concept for it, and he explained that there are essentially two sides to the story.
We Are Chaos is a name that seems to hit a little too close to home for what people are experiencing right now, but the album was actually finished prior to the pandemic. Manson worked with producer Shooter Jennings on the album, so you can certainly expect a slight country twang in the record’s sound.
As for the idea behind the album, Manson did not go into detail about a concept because he wants listeners to interpret their own version of the story, just as he and Jennings each did on their own.
“So I began it with the intro prose to try to set the tone for what was to come on the record,” he said. “And we made it 10 songs so it would be treated, in the traditional sense, of how an LP works. How there’s a Side A and a Side B, because it changes. Just like in a movie or a play, there’s three acts. And we were very particular about how we pieced it all together, but it was not difficult. There were no extra songs that we left off.”
The vocalist compared the way he changes his aesthetic and sound with each of his albums to a tarantula shedding its exoskeleton. “It’s almost like a cleansing or a rebirth, or something,” he clarified.
While Manson was painting on his knees for the cover art, he wound up covered in black paint and had stains on his legs. “And that then spawned Side Two of the record, Infinite Darkness, because that’s what I called the painting. And that’s the second side of the record.”
We Are Chaos will be out Sept. 11 on Loma Vista Recordings. Pre-order it here now.
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