Skillet: After The Storm
Skillet embrace a heavier, yet vulnerable sound in their latest EP. Out today, After The Storm sports six new songs that take you on a journey of darkness and hope, shaking up your spirit to the very core in a bid to awaken its relentless power to a skyrocketing level.
The opening track, ‘Scream’, has already gained solid traction after its release some three months ago. Anthem-worthy, contagious and powerful, this song is an honest rebellion against the ways of the modern life and the anxieties it brings:
“I wanna scream, I wanna break something beautiful because
I can’t believe that I can be something beautiful I lost
Come pull me out from under the noise and thunder
What have I become?
I wanna scream, nobody’s listening, will I ever be enough?
I wanna scream”
After The Storm continues with the second single – a powerful story that is set to get crowds vigorously chanting, ‘Lift Me Up’ seems criminally underrated so far. What strikes the most here is the track’s charged determination for resilience, bringing it close to the legacy made by some of the best of the band’s masterpieces to date, including ‘Awake and Alive’, ‘Rise’ and ‘The Resistance’. With its pent-up power that erupts in raw screaming vocals towards the bridge, the song is bound to make you take a bold stance: “I’m breathing dragon fire, they’ll never drag me down/I won’t give up and I won’t give in”.
We then descend to just a notch more mellow atmosphere in ‘Grave Stomper’. Here, the plot explores the struggles of battling what seems to be the biggest enemy anyone can face – their own troubled mind which can be so damn hard to defeat. The culmination comes with an impressive guitar solo followed by intense screams that let out all the pain and anger away, one roar at a time.
The second half of the EP introduces us to the title track which opens with the relentless aim to get things alive and kicking – hard. Feeding off pounding drums, easy-to-sing-along-to chorus and a striking guitar solo in the bridge, ‘After The Storm’ has it all. The track is here to make a confession about the struggles experienced in the long, exhausting battle through the darkness and into the light.
A notion for a united, all-encompassing prayer is the pinnacle we’re finding in the penultimate song, ‘Heaven Help Us’. A call to “Love each other, listen harder/Help another, mend it longer” in the chorus is a welcome reminder to be more humanistic and empathetic – both being virtues long advocated for by Skillet’s music.
‘Come and Find Me’ brings this piece of work into full completion. It embraces a more intense and hard-hitting sound, similarly to the first few tracks off this EP, so finding it to be the closing song makes perfect sense. This is how you awaken a lost soul and call for an awakened state of faith and love – which just might be what the world needs now.
Produced by Korey Cooper (the band’s lead guitarist and keyboardist) and David Cowell (known for being a producer for Sleep Theory), After The Storm is a strong testament to Skillet’s effort to return to the harder, darker and more intense sound we’ve previously witnessed in the band’s Comatose era.