Over time, artists develop formulas for success. Whether rooted in superstition, repetition, or just plain knowing what works, these practices can provide a roadmap or outline for a new project. Volbeat frontman Michael Poulsen has relied on various formulas to write the songs that have earned the band more than 143 platinum and gold certifications around the globe. In addition, the Danish band has scored ten #1 songs on the Billboard Mainstream Rock airplay chart, the most ever for a band based outside North America. For their ninth album, God Of Angels Trust, Poulsen threw caution to the wind, paying little heed to traditional songwriting in the search for something more immediate and surprising.
“In the past, I’ve taken a long time to write and obsessed over so many elements of the songs before finishing them,” he explains. “This time, I wanted to make a Volbeat record without thinking too much about it. Instead of following any kind of structure I said, ‘Okay, there are no rules. I can do anything I want. I can start with a chorus or do songs that are just a bunch of verses stacked on top of each other. Anything goes.’ That was freeing for me and made it exciting to write this album.”
Following his instincts reminded Poulsen of the creative process of his early Death Metal band Dominus as well as that of the early days of Volbeat. In both situations, Poulsen cobbled together songs before he understood traditional approaches for writing music.
“Back in the day, I didn’t really think about ‘this part is the chorus, this part is the bridge,’” says Poulsen. “It was all about creating lots of great riffs and then putting drums and vocals on top. It worked then and still works now.”
Poulsen’s excitement to thwart convention is palpable throughout God Of Angels Trust, a punchy, crunchy album that’s undeniably Volbeat, yet marches to a fresh new metallic and melodic energy. The opening track, “Devils Are Awake,” starts with a thunderous, marching, syncopated rhythm before bursting into a punk riff that briefly yields to a choppy thrash rhythm before changing course again and injecting a melodic vocal and rich guitar harmony. From there, Volbeat rip, snarl, and spit fire, daring naysayers to criticize their unconventional arrangements.
Some of the more impulsive cuts are the heaviest on the album. “By a Monster’s Hand” is a mid-paced riff-fest with no concessions to standard meter, juxtaposing pummeling rhythms with point-counterpoint hooks. “Demonic Depression” barrels along to double-bass drums, and angular, incisive riffing, before diving into a melodic chorus. And “In the Barn of the Goat Giving Birth to Satan’s Spawn in a Dying World of Doom” is a crazed marriage of nods to Johnny Cash and Black Sabbath with some meandering rhythms for extra flavor.
“That’s the first song I came up with when I said, ‘let’s set fire to the rule book and avoid any normal sort of structure,’” Poulsen says. “I thought, ‘let’s just have some really cool riffs where the essence of the song should be. And since there’s no chorus, why not have a really cool line that becomes the climax of the lyrics and is also the song title?’ That way when you play live, people are waiting to sing along with that crazy line, ‘In/ the Barn/ of/ the Goat/ Giving/ Birth/ to Satan’s Spawn in a Dying World of Doom!’ It just makes everything more fun for us and the audience.”
Poulsen started working on songs for the follow-up to 2021’s Servant of the Mind in the summer of 2024. Volbeat was taking a yearlong break from touring to give Michael a chance to recover from throat surgery and to tour with his Death Metal band, Asinhell. Driven equally by his excitement to record a new Volbeat album and by his determination not to follow convention, Poulsen worked on songs for a mere three weeks with bandmates drummer Jon Larsen and bassist Kaspar Boye Larsen. Amazingly, they worked on a new song at every rehearsal.
“I would write a song on Monday and we would play it together on Tuesday,” Poulsen says. “Then, I’d write another song on Wednesday and we’d rehearse it on Thursday. Working that way I ensured that I was always in a creative bubble and didn’t leave it.
“With a lot of past Volbeat records, we spent a lot of time outside of that creative bubble, both rehearsing and preparing to tour and then actually going on tour. When the tour was over, we’d come back home and see if we could step back into that creative space. Sometimes we couldn’t and we’d have to wait until we were all back there, and that could take forever. I really didn’t want that to happen this time, so I made sure I was always working.”
Three weeks into the process, Volbeat had arranged half of God Of Angels Trust. That’s when Poulsen decided that having no rules meant he could follow his muse wherever it took him, and he veered off on a different path. He and the band still wrote and rehearsed two songs a week, but they started composing more familiar Rock songs that drew from traditional elements.
From Poulsen’s more instinctual songwriting came more anthemic, tuneful, and instantly recognizable rhythms and hooks, yielding the pain-stricken elegy “Time Will Heal,” the yearning “Acid Rain,” and the edgy, haunting dreamscape “Lonely Fields.”
“I wanted to bring in the kind of huge melodic songs that I like to write so much,” he says, “and before we knew it, we had a whole record.”
The band entered the studio with their longtime producer Jacob Hansen in the fall of 2024. As with the songwriting, Poulsen wanted to work quickly and rely on instinct, so they just plugged in and started to play. To keep the music sounding urgent and immediate, Volbeat recorded live in the studio, playing as few takes as possible before moving from one song to the next.
When it came time to add lead guitar, there was no question that Volbeat would tap Flemming C. Lund, who currently tours with the band and worked with Michael in Asinhell.
“We had such a great experience touring with Flemming on the last Volbeat tour, and he is an insanely gifted lead guitarist,” says Poulsen, “naturally when it came time record the leads on the new album he was the only one we considered, and the results were better than we could have even imagined.”
Just thirteen days after they started working with Hansen, Volbeat were finished.
“When we were recording the album, I felt like I did when I was a little kid and didn’t have enough pocket money to even be in a rehearsal room, let alone record anything,” Poulsen says. “Back then, we didn’t have the money to hire a producer or spend more than a day in the studio, so we had to record very quickly.”
As impressive as it is that Volbeat wrote and recorded an entire album in about five weeks, what’s more incredible is that God Of Angels Trust sounds as fleshed out, eclectic, and fulfilling as albums that have taken ten times longer (or more) to create. In the end, creating such a strong album so quickly was a tremendous challenge that demanded Zen-like calm, a joy for exploration, maximal creativity, and razor-sharp concentration to pull off.
“It was an experiment to see what you can come up with when you throw away the tools you’ve built throughout your career,” Poulsen says. “When those went out the window, we said, ‘Well, what do we have left? Nothing? Okay, then let’s have some fun and make it work.’ So, we just threw a bunch of things together, and in that way, it felt like we were Dr. Frankenstein putting a monster together with just a few screws here and there. And it worked.”
From the chunky, muted riffing, minor-key, doom-saturated passage and skewed, off-kilter middle-eighth of “At the End of the Sirens” to the churn-n-burn progressions of “Better Be Fueled Than Tamed,” God Of Angels Trust cleans the slate of all that came before it, and sets Volbeat on new creative path. In that respect, the album is not just an experimental, creative triumph, but also a fresh beginning – a new voice from a veteran band giving birth to Satan’s spawn in a dying world of doom.
“In some ways, it feels like we’ve come full circle,” Poulsen agrees. “If you start drawing a circle over an extended period of time, eventually you’ve going to get back where you started, and that’s how I feel now. I’ve dealt with medical operations, lineup changes and all these things, and now it feels like a rebirth. It doesn’t feel like we’re doing our ninth studio album, it feels like we’re on our first album again and there’s something really refreshing about that.”
