Clutch Wasted Lands LP

Clutch's fourteenth studio album, Wasted Lands, is the sound of a band circling back to what they do best: high-energy, riff-driven rock. They'd actually started down a more experimental path, but scrapped it once it started feeling "weird for weird's sake," and instead leaned into an up-tempo, stage-ready sound — though they still found room to try something new, like the band's first-ever banjo part. Lyrically, Neil Fallon covers a lot of ground. In the opening track, "The Drifter Returns," the Georgia Guidestones suffer a rapid disassembly, and in the closing track, "The Message Is Clear," "every star must explode eventually." In the blast radius between these two events lives lyrical entropy that exists between the terrestrial world of Colorado's Highway 50 and the voids of interstellar space. The album was produced by longtime collaborator Machine and released on Weathermaker Music, the band's own label — just the latest proof of the creative independence Clutch has held onto since 2008.