For more than three decades, AFI has been in a nearly constant state of reinvention. The band have made it a point to evolve with every album—sometimes dramatically so—never allowing themselves to become too comfortable in one genre or rest on any of their impressive career laurels. It’s an approach that has grown their audience but also challenged it with a sonic identity that can shift in wild, unexpected directions. Now with their twelfth album, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…, AFI are once again at the start of a bold new chapter, only this time they’ve even managed to surprise themselves.
How does a band that’s known for creative upheaval still find ways to push themselves out of their comfort zones? Typically the group would start an album by immediately throwing themselves into writing and simply letting their intuitive musical shorthand guide the process, but for Silver Bleeds the Black Sun… AFI set out to purposely change their creative approach all together. This time it started with a conversation: how could they break new ground?
The key to moving forward actually ended up coming from AFI’s collective past. “We started with something that sounded like Echo & the Bunnymen,” explains guitarist Jade Puget, who produced and engineered the album. “But eventually we ended up with this melange of death rock and post-punk—all this stuff from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that we grew up on, like Sisters of Mercy, and Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.” The goal became making an album with a singular mood, something dreamy and ethereal, and the band members found themselves diving headfirst into influences that had always been deeply embedded in AFI’s musical core, but now were being brought to the forefront.
Silver Bleeds the Black Sun… is dark and otherworldly, but also grandiose and stately, biting and beautiful in equal measure—in other words, it’s very AFI, yet not quite like any version of the band you’ve ever heard before.