By the time The Million Masks of God rolled around, Manchester Orchestra had already made peace with life’s middle chapters. The suburban angst, the religious wrestling, the young-father introspection — all of it found its way into 2017’s A Black Mile to the Surface. But on this one, singer Andy Hull and guitarist Robert McDowell went looking for something bigger. Something final. “If Black Mile was birth to parenthood,” Hull says, “this is birth to death.”
It’s not a concept album in the sense of plot or character — though it could be. It’s more like a dream you wake from mid-sentence, knowing exactly what it meant without being able to explain it. “We liked the idea of a guy riding around in this old drug-filled limousine from the ’80s with the Angel of Death,” Hull says, half-laughing at the absurdity. “It was just a nice pair of glasses to wear to get the initial ideas down.”
McDowell had been losing his father while the band was working on the record, and that grief — private but universal — gave the whole thing a pulse. “It’s something very painful to me,” he says. “But it’s also something everyone will go through. If this record helps even one person through that, then there’s some good in it.”
The band, now full of fathers, found themselves writing about generational echoes — how trauma, joy, and confusion all pass down like genetic hand-me-downs. “You can spend your whole life thinking it’s going to be one thing,” Hull says of the afterlife, “but whatever it is, it’s gonna surprise everyone. Even if that thing is nothing.”
There’s something weirdly comforting in that. Manchester Orchestra has always specialized in finding peace in chaos, whether through the cathedral roar of guitars or Hull’s exhausted sigh of a voice. But here, the band sounds like they’ve turned grief into propulsion — songs stretching out and bleeding into each other, all of it recorded live in a room, no safety nets. “If there was a feeling that the song needed to go longer,” Hull says, “we’d just keep playing. Don’t stop. Follow the thing.”
That approach gave Masks its strange continuity — part rock opera, part séance. Hull jokes they’re not smart enough to intentionally keep songs in compatible keys, but they often end up there anyway. “We get lucky,” he admits. “You work long enough on these songs and they all start morphing into each other.”
“Bed Head,” the album’s first single, came from a neighbor’s dream — a middle-aged guy in a cover band who described the whole thing by a fire one night. Hull asked him to write it out in vivid detail, and that dream became a song about connection, reflection, and confusion. “Most people aren’t going to know that,” McDowell says, “so they’ll interpret it their own way. That’s the exciting part.”
Still, The Million Masks of God has its narrative spine — a soul in transit, a reckoning with legacy, and one final line that hits like a hammer: All this time I thought I was right. Hull calls it “an honest wink and handshake” to the audience. “It’s like saying, ‘I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m trying to figure it out just like you are.’”
When the record ends — quietly, heavily — Hull says he loves that the media player automatically loops back to track one. “It’s another chance,” he laughs. The circle begins again.
That cyclical nature defines the album’s energy. You could call it maturity, but that sounds boring. It’s more like endurance — the kind you earn after realizing you don’t win against death, you just learn to dance around it for a while. “We wanted to make something pure that could help people,” McDowell says. “If there can be any good thing that comes from a shitty thing, that’s it.”
When they finally take it on the road, Hull promises the band will chase that feeling live, too. “We wrote all this stuff standing in a room together, so it already has its truest form. But if we can’t play it in front of people, then we’ll have to plan something insane.”
You get the sense he means it. For a band that’s made an album about letting go, Manchester Orchestra sounds like they’ve never held on tighter.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
