Motionless In White Decades album arrives after four gruelling years in the making, and frontman Chris Motionless (the band’s only original member) has landed on the cover of Metal Hammer to tell the full story. Twenty years in, it turns out the price of longevity can be steep.
In an interview described as emotional, Chris opens up about how the record pushed him to his limits. ‘I ground myself to the bone for this record,’ he says. ‘I was going into these toxic cycles of workaholism and just burnt myself out. It took a little bit of my passion away, because it felt like a job for the first time, so I definitely wanted to walk away and come back to it. That’s part of why it took so long.’
Four years is a long time in heavy music. Trends shift, fanbases drift, and the pressure to deliver something worthy of two decades’ worth of goodwill is its own particular kind of weight. That Chris came close to walking away entirely makes the finished record feel like something hard-won rather than simply released.
The Motionless In White Decades album and a 20-year journey from metalcore to arenas
The band’s trajectory is genuinely one of the stranger success stories in modern heavy music. From metalcore aspirants to an outfit capable of headlining Bloodstock Open Air next year, Motionless In White have outlasted most of their contemporaries and kept finding new audiences without softening what they do. Chris is the thread running through all of it, the only face that has been there from the very beginning.
Part of what makes the Motionless In White Decades album worth tracking is the range it seems to be reaching for. One standout moment: on the track ‘R.I.P.’, Chris duets with Skylar Grey, who has written songs for Rihanna, Alicia Keys, and Eminem, according to the record’s listing on Apple Music. It’s a collaboration that signals a band no longer content to stay within the comfortable borders of their scene.
That kind of reach-across-the-aisle moment is interesting context for a band whose fanbase has grown up alongside them. The listeners who first found Motionless In White in metalcore forums in the mid-2000s are now in their thirties; the music is meeting them somewhere new.
What else is in the new Metal Hammer issue
The cover story lands in an issue stacked with heavy-hitters. Ghost’s Tobias Forge discusses the band’s new concert film 2 Big To Rig, covering the Skeletour stage show, an incident that nearly derailed its production, and his own plans outside the band. Mastodon address the death of guitarist Brent Hinds months after his departure, explaining how new album Marrow Deep represents a deliberate move forwards rather than a pause.
Zoltan Bathory gets the Hammer Interview, tracing his route from arriving in the US with little more than a Hungarian-English dictionary to steering Five Finger Death Punch to the top. Dave Mustaine, seven years on from his throat cancer diagnosis, revisits that period in both an exclusive interview and an extract from his new book, In My Darkest Hour.
Green Lung guide readers through London’s graveyards and occult hotspots. Snot explain their return to the studio almost 30 years after the death of frontman Lynn Strait. Chad Grey shares lessons learned from time spent around a young Slipknot and a meeting with James Hetfield. Godsmack break down the making of ‘I Stand Alone’. Chilean death metal outfit Decessus, led by a beauty queen, make their introduction.
Motionless In White Decades album and the full Chris Motionless cover interview feature in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on sale now, with delivery available online.
