MACHINE HEAD FOUNDER ROBB FLYNN WALKS US THROUGH EVERYTHING THAT LED UP TO THE BAY AREA METAL VETERANS’ 10TH ALBUM, OF KINGDOM AND CROWN, PLUS HIS EFFECTS, THE BURN MY EYES 25TH-ANNIVERSARY TOUR — AND WHY HE THINKS MACHINE HEAD ARE THE GRATEFUL DEAD OF METAL
BY GREGORY ADAMS
IT’S A GOOD THING
Machine Head founder Robb Flynn has the gift of the gab. When Guitar World catches the Bay Area metal veteran over Zoom, he’s sitting in his home studio, seven hours deep into a hefty day of promo surrounding his band’s 10th full-length, Of Kingdom and Crown. As it stands, he’s supremely amped to get into the details of the album — which further expands Machine Head’s propensity for ground-fracking grooves, harmonic-accented madness and darkly melodic hooks — but he also admits up front that he’s more than ready to shift the focus off of himself, at least for a bit. You see, on top of playing with Machine Head, Flynn hosts a podcast called No F’n Regrets, with which he gets into long-form, career-arcing, occasionally gut-busting conversations with friends like Meshuggah’s Mårten Hagström and Biohazard’s Billy Graziadei. In this particular case, he’s readying himself to speak with Oceano vocalist Adam Warren once our time is up.
Since founding Machine Head in 1991, Flynn has commanded crowds with a rich and oaky baritone speaking voice, which nevertheless rises toward an aggressively vein-popping, in-song bellow. It was Hatebreed vocalist and podcaster Jamey Jasta who egged him on to start No F’n Regrets, suggesting Flynn’s low-end register would be ASMR-style ear candy for listeners. More than 130 episodes later, though, Flynn’s realized that self-restraint leads to increasingly stellar episodes.
“If you let people talk, they’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know,” he suggests. “One of the things I learned early on is that there’s a natural tendency to want to talk about [yourself], like, ‘This is what I’m doing!’ But if you can push that down and continually go, ‘No, what are you doing? Tell me about that,’ you can get some great shit.”
In a sense, Of Kingdom and Crown is another way for Flynn to let someone else do the talking. The album is sung and screamed from the perspectives of two characters living within a dystopian wasteland “where the sky is always crimson red.” The first, Ares, loses the love of his life and goes on a vengeful killing spree; the second, Eros, becomes radicalized following the overdose death of his mother, and likewise goes on a murderous rampage. Though
