Cloud Nothings – “Death Keeps Me Alive” [Video]

Video · Pure Noise Records

Cloud Nothings Go Full Metal on “Death Keeps Me Alive”

Dylan Baldi and company announce their tenth album What Kind of Hell Did You Survive?, due January 29 via Pure Noise Records, and the first single sounds like nothing they’ve done before.

Cloud Nothings have made nine albums across seventeen years by refusing to make the same record twice, but What Kind of Hell Did You Survive? represents something more than a pivot. “Death Keeps Me Alive” is the first thing off it, and from the opening seconds it is clear that the band has gone somewhere genuinely new: blown-out riffs, throat-shredding vocals, the kind of drumming that feels actively hostile to the idea of restraint. This is a metal record, or as close to one as Cloud Nothings are likely to get, and it sounds like they have been building toward it for years without knowing it.

The album was produced and engineered by Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets, and the fingerprints of his work with Lightning Bolt and Battles are all over the sound: massive, live, punishing in the best possible way. Dylan Baldi has cited Queens of the Stone Age, Motorhead, Earth, and Electric Wizard as direct influences, and you can trace all of them in “Death Keeps Me Alive” without any of it feeling like imitation. The song has a black metal finale, a dissonant midsection, and a hook that somehow survives both. That last part is the Cloud Nothings trick, and it still works here even with everything else turned up to an extreme.

What Kind of Hell Did You Survive? follows 2024’s Final Summer and arrives January 29. The band heads to the UK and Europe next month. Pre-orders are open now.

Pre-Order What Kind of Hell Did You Survive? ↗

1World Destroyer

2You and I

3That’s Life

4Terror Multiplies

5Death Keeps Me Alive

6Part of Something More

7You Do The Killing Too

8Die In Piece

9This World Is Shit