The Julies - Black Metal

After marking their long-awaited return with Always & Always, and following up with the bittersweet anthem "The Heartbreak Life," The Julies are back again—this time embracing the chaos, confusion, and comedy of personally and politically fraught times with their new single, "Black Metal."

Written during a time when apocalyptic vibes felt less like a metaphor and more like a daily reality, "Black Metal" is a smirk disguised as a noisy sigh. With its layered guitars and sardonic lyricism, the track explores the strange, ironic feeling of being so overwhelmed by doom and gloom to even make a decent joke about it. But, from the opening lyric, "Sometimes life just hits you / like a black metal lyric sheet," it's clear we're all in on the joke.

"It's kind of a song about not being able to laugh—even when you know you really need to," says vocalist Chris Newkirk. "There's something darkly funny about how ridiculous everything felt at the time. So we just leaned into that feeling." While "Black Metal" may not offer answers, it does provide a kind of therapeutic noise—the sound of laughing at the abyss, if not with it.

And although it clocks in at under two-and-a-half minutes, the song took awhile to get across the finish line. "Patrick brought a demo of the song to us at the tail end of the Always & Always writing sessions and we all loved it, but it quickly ended up stuck in a dead end," says guitarist Alex Yost. "So I handed it off to (frequent contributor and fellow Yost) Keeton who helped reimagine it for us."

Its title may suggest genre parody, but "Black Metal" is still distinctly The Julies—emotive and sparkly. That said, the band's continued foray into self-recording gives the track a rawer edge than recent releases. It concludes a short two-song series of new music the band is releasing while they wrap up their next full-length project.