Pop Evil brings the heavy on their latest record, What Remains.
“We’re super stoked about this album and just the future of getting into more of that evil side of Pop Evil, man,” frontman Leigh Kakaty tells ABC Audio. “More of that metal and that hard rock influence sound.”
The heavier sound provides a fitting soundtrack to Kakaty’s lyrics about healing and survival, which find him getting more specifically and explicitly personal than he’s been on previous Pop Evil releases.
“It just seemed like the more I started to write … it was almost therapeutic, man,” Kakaty says. “Just every song after another just seemed like it had a little more of myself in it.”
“In years past, I might’ve shied away from that,” he continues. “But this album, it just felt like I needed this one for me.”
In exploring those personal feelings, Kakaty found himself writing more in first-person.
“In order to heal and find myself at a better place off the stage, there had to be a lot of ‘I’ perspective: ‘I’m on my deathwalk,’ ‘I am what remains,'” Kakaty says. “I can’t control what you do, I can’t control what my band brothers do, but I can control what I do.”
He adds, “I wanted to start there for healing [for] things that have needed to be healed from the first album.”
What Remains is out now. Pop Evil will launch a U.S. tour in support of the album in April.
