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I think that comes from me being the class clown, but it’s also a coping mechanism. There's a concurrent thing, while we're dealing with really sad topics or very important topics, there’s always a tablespoon or so of tongue-in-cheek-ness to it. “So we put this song out and of course there’s all these keyboard warriors going, ‘The plague never went away-look at China!’ Dude, I know. It’s like the extreme metal version of therapy, but in a very pessimistic way.” So that's where this song actually came from. I saw this analysis from the therapist, and one of the things he said, which still rings true today at age 45, is, ‘Travis sees each day as an opportunity for failure.’ That really bummed me out, because I realized I'm still that way. It was the ’80s, with Ritalin hysteria and all that, and I was diagnosed with ADHD. I was hyper and distracted, and they were trying to figure out what was wrong with me. “I was looking through some old paperwork from when I was in kindergarten and doing bad in school. It’s neat to be able to collaborate with your sister on a death metal release.” Then I did all the synthesizer stuff myself. For this, I wanted her to sound robotic, like a computer, and she completely nailed it. Within six months, she’s making insane money, makes her own hours, and I couldn’t be more proud of her.
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She comes home, trying to figure out what to do for a job, and she just wakes up one day and goes, ‘You know what? I’m going to get into voice-over.’ And she did. She’s awesome-she quit her job and sailed the Pacific Ocean with her husband for about a year. I didn't go into this going, ‘I'm going to be all Johnny Poetic’-it just ended up being this way, and I had a lot more fun with it.” This was also the first song where I started getting poetic in the lyric writing, which I didn't really see coming. It’s another way of explaining the human condition. “This started out as a song about being very angry at certain people in our lives, but it took a different turn. So the song is basically just saying, ‘Chill out. People are staying on their own side and not really wanting to hear anybody out. But that’s not what’s happening right now. You have to take everything into consideration. I can’t be considered a bleeding-heart liberal, though-I just have too many fucked-up ideas and thoughts on life. I don’t want to get into politics or anything, but I think it’s fair to say that I’m left-leaning. “I actually went into this one wanting to call out people like myself. So the song is basically talking about what’s happening on the album cover.” It’s not even a real word, I don’t think, but any idiot can look at it and figure out what it means: the destruction and death of a planet. With ‘The Geocide,’ I was thinking it’s weird that no one’s ever used it before. I have an ongoing list of probably 150 song titles that aren’t even used yet-I’ve had it for years. “I came up with the title before we even had the song to go with it. It’s by far the best intro we’ve ever had on an album.” The lady at NASA was super cool and we got everything cleared. It’s the 55 languages of planet Earth, taken from the Golden Record that’s on the Voyager space probe that was sent out in the late ’70s. We had to get clearance from NASA to use the sample that’s in this. At the end, it cancels out-the End Transmission-because we’ve been destroyed. The transmission is meant to symbolize humanity’s place in the universe. “The intro music is a collaboration we did with Riccardo Conforti from a phenomenal band called Void Of Silence from Rome. It’s an extremely pessimistic and sad record.” Below, Ryan takes us track by track through Death Atlas. “This album is about how we’re an extremely destructive species,” Cattle Decapitation vocalist Travis Ryan tells Apple Music. As longtime critics of human behavior, Cattle Decapitation once offered a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Humankind: The greatest natural disaster of all time.” Such is the theme of the San Diego death metal squad’s eighth album, Death Atlas, an interlude-laden extremity featuring contributions from an international cast of musicians including Riccardo Conforti of Void Of Silence, Laure Le Prunenec of Igorrr, Dis Pater of Midnight Odyssey, and, naturally, Jon Fishman of Phish.