Hardcore band, THE WARRIORS, have premiered their new single, “Painful Truth”, featuring Winston McCall. “’The Painful Truth’ was the first song written and recorded for ‘Monomyth’” explains the band. “We wanted to throw all convention out the window and push the boundaries of our creativity in every respect, while still honoring the ‘old’ Warriors sound. In a sense, this song was the foundation upon which the rest of the album was built”. “Monomyth”, the band’s first new album in nearly a decade, is due out tomorrow, December 13th, via Pure Noise Records.
In the time since The Warriors released their last album, a lot has changed – not just in music, but in the world at large. But, true to their tenacious past, The Warriors’ fifth full-length album, “Monomyth” confronts these sea changes head-on – all the while not losing an ounce of the intensity that made them one of the underground’s most captivating heavy acts in the mid-2000s. The result is their most complete work to date: an album that demands your attention from its first note to its final strains, all along the way challenging listeners both musically and in message. It’s an album built for modern times, written by those who’ve carefully lived it from afar.
The Warriors are frontman Marshall Lichtenwaldt, drummer Roger Camero, bassist Joe Martin, and guitarists Javier Zarate and Charlie Alvarez.
When writing “Monomyth”, frontman Marshall Lichtenwaldt found inspiration in The Kybalion as well as the concept of the hero’s journey, analyzed and popularized by Joseph Campbell in his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (which also served as a major influence on “Star Wars” creator George Lucas). These themes are distilled into the album’s 12 songs, juxtaposed against Eastern philosophies and meditative transcendental teachings that reverberate even louder when placed atop the band’s caustic brand of hardcore.
With its focus on looking inward, “Monomyth” ultimately serves to soundtrack each listener’s own personal hero’s journey, ebbing and flowing as life does – while ultimately reinforcing a few key imperatives, chief among them the need to destroy the ego holding us back from being our best self. In the context of a 21st-century culture that finds us building façades as a form of self-survival, it feels like The Warriors have more to say than ever before.
“People tend to get sucked into this vacuum with everything that’s happening in the news” Lichtenwaldt says “It’s all just a bunch of bullshit. If we wanna talk about hardcore, we need to start thinking in terms of doing things that are actually hard: Being nice to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Being kind and compassionate to someone who hasn’t earned it. If you can do that, it causes a ripple effect that reverberates farther than you can imagine. Living for others can be the hardest thing to do sometimes. Once you do that, you start feeling more fulfilled”.
“The Painful Truth” Lyrics
It’s the beautiful life
The painful truthWalk through the flames and burn away the desires of flesh and bone from clay
Vaporings of a fool bottled in fear, night and morning with your tearsYeah! In the beginning, void
Yeah! Immortality of the soulIt’s the beautiful life
The painful truth
Such a beautiful lie
The painful truthDreams and visions form and formless
Walk now unchained from the weight and manipulations
Consecrate what you have learned, circling back
The dawn that attracts the wolfpack
