Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have always treated rock & roll like a half-broken religion—equal parts salvation and curse—but on Wrong Creatures they found themselves staring into the abyss a little longer than usual. The detour came with drummer Leah Shapiro’s brain surgery, which forced the band to stop moving for the first time in years. “We didn’t really know what to do with ourselves sitting still for so long,” Robert Been admits. “Once you stop moving, the demons get louder.”
The downtime bent the record into shape. Their previous LP, Specter at the Feast, was a heavy slab of grief. This time, Been says, they wanted to “kind of be a rock band again” without pretending the darkness wasn’t still there. Instead of writing manifestos, BRMC built dreamscapes—night drives, fever visions, songs that feel like they’re unraveling inside your skull. “If you paint a dark enough, pretty picture, you don’t have to hang out in the real world quite as much,” Been laughs.
That doesn’t mean the politics of 2018 were lost on him. The Bush years gave BRMC some of their most overtly political cuts, but Been now calls that approach “low-hanging fruit.” He’s not blind to polarization, he just refuses to feed it. “I don’t want to play into more of the pulling apart,” he says. “People just want to take care of their families, find a little bit of hope and a little bit of love.”
Still, Wrong Creatures isn’t exactly light fare. Lead single “Little Thing Gone Wild” is the band’s fiercest shot in years, while deep cuts like “DFF” sprawl into drug-hazed meditations—eleven-minute versions exist, locked in the vault. “It’s kind of nice having a couple bullets left in the gun people don’t know about,” Been teases.
And yes, the eternal question—whatever happened to my rock and roll?—still haunts BRMC, even if the answer is less important than the asking. “Sometimes the question is more important than the answer,” Been says. “Without that heart, the song just dissolves into another sales pitch.”
On Wrong Creatures, BRMC keep the heart beating, demons and all.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out "Echo" below.
