Ahead of next week’s release of their eighth studio album, rock icons The Used are delivering an energetic, catchy and captivating new song for fans today with “Cathedral Bell.”
The beautiful tarot card artwork was created by artist Drew Merritt (@drewmerritt).
“A door creaks, then swings shut. The music creeps in like goosebumps down your neck: “In the sensory cave that you made / I lie awake,” sings The Used frontman Bert McCracken in the new song.
“It reminds me of being a little kid,” McCracken said over the phone in an the interview with NYLON. “I had a really hard time with sleep when I was younger. I just never wanted to go to bed, and when I did, I could never sleep. It just reminds me of being young and in the dark and up way past my bedtime.”
Heartwork, the band’s eighth studio album, due out next Friday, April 24th via Big Noise/Hassle Records, arrives with the unbound spirit of the pair of platinum albums that first introduced The Used to the world, mixed with the dramatic air of their gold-certified third. The emotion, sincerity, and vulnerability found on The Used (2002) and In Love and Death (2004) is more urgent and insistent than ever on Heartwork, a diverse 16-song offering filled with double entendre upon triple entendre. It traverses a thematic gamut of self-examination, hyper-literate exploration, political pyromania, and keenly self-aware yet unrestrained whimsy.
The charged manic energy of Heartwork will ring familiar to the multitudes who have seen The Used live, whether back in the day on Ozzfest, Warped Tour or Linkin Park’s Projekt Revolution; on their sold-out co-headlining tour with Taking Back Sunday; or headlining Taste Of Chaos with support from My Chemical Romance, Rise Against, Killswitch Engage, and Underoath.
Heartwork marks the return of John Feldmann to The Used family as he is producing the album and also the head of A&R at Big Noise.
“I couldn’t be more honoured or grateful to have one of my favourite bands of all time at my record label! They are one of the most influential bands of the last 20 years and we are making a career-defining album at the minute,” shares Feldmann. “They are one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen and Bert is quite possibly the best singer I’ve ever worked with. This has been a dream of mine since I met them in 2001.”
