Engines Of Change: Ten Things That Inspired Warbringer’s New Album “wrath And Ruin”

Thrash royalty Warbringer’s seventh full-length, Wrath and Ruin, releases today. It’s hard to believe that it has been 17 years since the band regaled us with their 2008  debut War Without End. It’s an album that holds a special place in the thrash metal scene in a time when bands like Municipal Waste and Skeletonwitch were also coming out of the woodwork, signaling a new wave of heavy that wasn’t death metal, but more of an ode to the past. Warbringer retained a certain metallic purity, being less about melody and more about raw aggression, something that holds true for the band until this day.

Vocalist John Kevill has put together a list of 10 things that helped to inspire the new album: a combination of real-life circumstances on both a global and personal level and several pieces of literature as well. Kevill goes on to speak about his financial struggles including the callousness of a particular landlord whose business practices, while legal, were far from any level of ethical; truly a sign of the United States of America in 2025. Read on below and check out what he had to say in more detail before you check out their latest record.

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1) Technofeudalism

This is a term I’ve seen thrown around by economist types (in particular this one guy, Yanis Varoufakis) describing the modern economic and power system that’s morphing into existence out of the digital economy. It goes along with this more oligarchic, less egalitarian world we are moving into. This theme is big on the record, and ties into the album cover as well as the song “The Sword and the Cross.” To me this is about a future where technology makes people less free, and there’s a full reversion to a sharp divide between lords and peasants, which I think we already mostly have.

2) Neuromancer by William Gibson

Read this during the years before we made this record, and it definitely struck me. The song “Neuromancer” is from it (cool title, I think). The novel has a really dark cyberpunk setting, and a lot of the stuff Gibson writes has the effect of feeling like one’s soul is getting sucked into a colorless digital void. The song is particularly about the character “Wintermute,” a sentient AI trying to break out from its prison, so it infiltrates the main character’s thoughts and dreams and hijacks a person’s body to get them to free it. Pretty creepy stuff. Super dystopian and I think also very prescient for the direction modern civilization is heading.

3) My old landlord during Covid

So putting out “Weapons of Tomorrow,” being grounded and unable to tour it, all while stuck at home, made for a tough period for myself and my wife. We were living in a granny flat behind a house at that time and paying rent on it to the guy who owned the house, but didn’t live there. As I had lost all the work, I would have been doing on tour for the record we had geared up to release for the better part of a year, I was poor as hell at this time. There was some kind of rent increase freeze done by some government decree, and when this was announced, our landlord decided to increase our rent by the maximum amount he was legally allowed to, immediately before the freeze came into effect. On top of that, he was required to give us 30 days’ notice of this, so he served us the papers at midnight exactly 30 days before, down to the minimum second. We were already paying an unreasonable amount to begin with. This kind of stuff got me feeling very resentful and contributed to the vibes in songs like “A Better World” and “Cage of Air.”

4) Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

During this same period I was reading some economic and social theory stuff, including this one from 2009, written shortly after the huge financial crash and subsequent bailout of 2008. This event really screwed things up for people of roughly my age, and in hindsight, was one of the signals that our country had become a full-blown oligarchy. It talks about the idea that people can’t even imagine a different system than the one we have, that we are kind of stuck as a society in an endless loop of the present, except a little worse every year. It has some stuff about postmodernists that I half understand, but also sometimes it is pretty direct in how it makes its point.

The part that got me the most is about mental health- how if you go in and say you’re depressed, they’ll say it’s because you have low serotonin (or something) because there’s something wrong with your brain chemistry, so here’s a drug to help treat your problem. If the problem with mental health is individual, why do so many more people have these kinds of problems than they used to? Sort of an “it’s not the fish, it’s the water” interpretation of this issue. That resonated with me as I was going through a pretty depressive time around then, and I went to a therapist and had basically that experience. This stuff made it into the lyrics on “A Better World,” which tried to capture some of the ideas from here into a song.

5) A lecture on the early middle ages

When I was getting my history degree, I had a professor of medieval history (Clementine Oliver) talk about how a castle in the early middle ages was more offensive than defensive- it let the lord who owned it ride out with his knights and control the surrounding area, and be immune to reprisal. That they were bases to subjugate the area before they were bastions to defend it. I thought that was really interesting and had a grim aspect to it, so that was in my mind when writing “The Sword and the Cross”

6) Modern imperialism

The US post 1991 is the most powerful empire to ever exist, yet it isn’t usually called or considered an empire. There’s been nearly nonstop involvement in some global military affair for the better part of my lifetime, and immense spending on weapons, while people live worse and worse here. It goes on day by day and it’s basically normal and largely unrecognized. This idea and feeling became “Strike from the Sky”

7) AI and algorithms

I think our current era shows many of the effects of the level of social control offered by these technologies. The fact that we all live in the curated digital ecosystem of information we do, and that it’s basically owned by the techno feudal lords, raises interesting questions for our own inner thoughts and emotions- to what extent are those things engineered? At least to some degree, I think. Songs like “Cage of Air” get into this. The general sentiment of things turning into some dark cyberpunk fantasy seems not so farfetched today, I think.

8) A Poem by a WW2 General

“Through a Glass, Darkly” is based on a poem by the same title by a US WW2 general, George Patton. Apparently he believed that the guy we know as George Patton from WW2 was in fact the reincarnation of an eternal warrior who had fought and died across all the battlefields of time. The poem describes being an ice age hunter, dying at Crecy in the middle ages, riding in Napoleon’s cavalry under Marshal Murat, etc etc. It’s a pretty cool theme and idea.

9) Blade Runner 2049

The vibe in general from this film is apt for the record, there’s a particular scene that I showed to Carlos Cruz to help write a musical part in “Cage of Air.” It’s the part where you are looking at a lush and beautiful forest, but it is revealed to be a hologram, and fades away, revealing a sterile grey room. The middle/end section of “Cage of Air” is written to try to get this effect musically, which I think it does.

10) Hive Cities from Warhammer 40k

I sent some images of these (among other things) over to Andreas Marschall for the album cover. These are cool sci fi concepts- they are these massive sprawling megacities with several billion people living in them at once. The land around is full of ash wastes and industrial pollution. People live their whole lives toiling in sub-levels of the hive and never see the sun. The lords live in glorious spires above the clouds, some unfortunates live in the lawless and dangerous under hives, where there is nonstop sci-fi gang warfare. Pretty cool concept I thought and fitting for the ideas on the album.

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Wrath and Ruin released today via Napalm Records.