Decades is already being hailed as one of Motionless In White's finest hours. Having already launched the album with K!, Chris Motionless reflects on the Penn-state ghouls' new one now it's out, and explains how the "trial by fire" never goes away
“We picked a hell of a time to go on a headlining tour,” chuckles Chris Motionless.
There’s no hint of irony to naming Motionless In White’s current run of shows in the U.S. the Sweat & Blood tour, given it’s been sweltering every single day, hardly ideal for a band of black-clad night creatures like themselves. Chris is backstage at tonight’s venue in Albuquerque, a state that’s currently seeing temperatures in makeup-melting temperatures of the mid-to-high 30s.
This has been their opportunity to give their home country some overdue love. In the UK, we’ve been lucky enough to have them here two Februarys on the bounce, and Chris adds they’ll be coming back for one show next year, “but not the show I think most people would assume”. But this is their first US headline run in almost three years. It’s serving as the victory lap for their hot-off-the-press album Decades, an emboldened collection of some of MIW’s strongest songs to date that itself celebrates the band’s survival for 20 years.
“The record wasn’t even out when the tour started, so people being excited to come see us play is always the most fun part of doing this,” says Chris. “The live show is the reason why every one of us work as hard as we do, so we can get out there and and play live and have that that moment.”
Decades has only been out for two weeks, but it was met with both hunger and love. It may be Motionless’ seventh album, but already, it’s shattering their own frontiers and creating success that Chris describes as “crazy”.
Just that day, the band found out that Fight Like Hell, a song they hadn’t even pushed as a single, had clawed its way to the top of the Billboard Hard Rock Singles Chart. Then again, he did have a sneaking suspicion that fans could latch onto it.
“If I were being honest, I would say that I would have expected this one to do it if a song were going to do it,” says Chris, “because the opening line of the song is a callback to the song that we perform for the WWE wrestler Rhea Ripley. The opening line is ‘This is my brutality’. I think fans were really excited about the crossover of her or her entrance theme now being part of a Motionless original song.”
Throughout Decades, Motionless In White trawl through their own self-written history book. That line’s not the only callback to their past. Decades is littered with them.
If it rang a bell when Chris growls ‘You’re mine motherfucker,’ on the album’s scathing, Corey Taylor-featuring lead single Playing God, that’s because it’s a reference to their 2017 album Soft. Even the aesthetic of Decades is a throwback moment, pivoting from the cyberpunk aesthetic of 2022’s Scoring The End of the World to the gorier look of their older work. It represents them honouring their past, halting the march forward for just a moment to acknowledge through their music where they’ve come from.
“This one was very different than I feel like we typically would have gone about it in the sense that there was an actual motion to try to call back to past material and include things that we felt summed up the sound of 20 years of the band,” Chris explains.
“Normally, we don't care as much about it. I think having fans be able to be like, 'Wow, this sounds fresh, but I can totally hear the influence from Devil's Night from 2012 or this song from 2010,’ is really special for us because we really put time into that, to listen to the fans and give them their moment in what they liked about the band too.”
With that in mind, they even created a moment through the heartfelt All I’ve Ever Known, to write a song from the perspective of music itself as a tribute to the art form that has given them their lives.
“It is the most universal language in the world,” Chris points out. “You don't have to understand the dialect. It's an energy. It's a force that is something that mostly every person in the world can feel, and I think that that's so powerful.”
All I’ve Ever Known was the tip of the iceberg in terms of how challenging Decades was to make, perhaps their weightiest undertaking creatively to date. Some of this stemmed from the pressure of evolving past an album like Scoring The End Of The World that gave Motionless their biggest injection of popularity to date, catalysing what had been a slow burning but healthy climb taken over years.
“As a band, you want to continuously try to improve upon your sound. When the last record did so much, you’re in this position of ‘How do we build on this? Where do we go? What does the band feel most creatively driven towards?’”
Some of this element of challenge exists simply because Chris is so scrupulous about what he’s creating. A self-confessed perfectionist, he estimates that the final chorus of Playing God was no less than the seventy-fifth draft. Some songs end up incubating for years simply because he’s groping for a sound or a feeling or an idea that he just can’t quite reach yet. One song on Decades only metamorphosed into its final form after being pinged around for a literal decade.
“The challenge is to be able to recognise when it is or isn't as good as it can be according to you. There's a song where I want to try 10 different options because I hear 10 different options. Every song is different. Sometimes you have to try and fail 50 times or 100 times, and drag everyone in the room down with you, all for the greater good. It’s a lot of searching, a lot of mistakes, a lot of failing.
“It’s very trial by fire experience,” he adds, “More times than not, the successes that we have come out of failing somewhere else.”
Decades is out now via Roadrunner.
