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 albumsometimes dramatically sonever allowing themselves to become too comfortable in one genre or rest on any of their impressive career laurels. Its 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 chapteronly this time, theyve even managed to surprise themselves.

How does a band thats 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 altogether. This time, it started with a conversation: how could they break new ground?

The key to moving forward actually ended up coming from AFIs 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-punkall 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 moodsomething dreamy and etherealand the band members found themselves diving headfirst into influences that had always been deeply embedded in AFIs 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, its very AFIyet not quite like any version of the band youve ever heard before.

Tracklisting:

1. The Bird of Prey

2. Behind the Clock

3. Holy Visions

4. Blasphemy & Excess

5. Spear of Truth

6. Ash Speck in a Green Eye

7. Voidward, I Bend Back

8. Marguerite

9. A World Unmade

10. Nooneunderground