Tracklisting:
1. "The Sinking Night" 2:18
2. "I Hope You Suffer" 4:37
3. "A Deep Slow Panic" 4:01
4. "No Resurrection" 4:27
5. "17 Crimes" 2:57
6. "The Conductor" 3:41
7. "Heart Stops" 3:08
8. "Rewind" 4:12
9. "The Embrace" 3:25
10. "Wild" 3:11
11. "Greater Than 84" 4:17
12. "Anxious" 3:50
13. "The Face Beneath the Waves" 5:10
"I really feel [the title] speaks of the overall sentiment of the record," [Davey] continues. "The album really speaks of a burial of a silence and the burials that result from those silences of panic and anxiety and betrayal and cruelty – and a loss of self, a loss of stability."
But Burials is a change-of-pace for AFI – just not the kind Havok intended. It's a heavily layered, grandiose set that veers sharply from the raw simplicity of Crash Love. New single "I Hope You Suffer" points toward this epic new direction, layering Havok's anguished cries within a lightning storm of distortion, synthetic orchestrations, and volcanic percussion.
"To me, Crash Love is the most stripped-down record that we've made since the early Nineties, and I would say that 'I Hope You Suffer' is indicative of the overall tone of this record in being the opposite of that. I feel like Jade came with a complete piece of music with that song. Jade is really a genius with the riffs and the layers and the soundscapes, and that's what really creates the tone of that song."
"This album is very layered and very rich and far, far less straightforward than what we did on the last record, which – much like every record we create – was the result of a natural growth, a natural indication of where we are as songwriters now. This record has no chance of being anything else other than what it came to be. It was inside us in a way. I know that sounds a bit dramatic. But it's true: When Jade and I began writing – two years ago, I believe – we were immediately quite prolific. The songs just came out, and they came out in relatively similar forms to the songs that people will hear on the record."
My body is ready!
The three songs we have already are all absolutely incredible!
"It kind of set the whole tone emotionally as far as lyrics and the kind of moodiness," Puget says. "When we wrote that song, Davey was sort of in a very fragile state. My memory of that [song] is him being very emotional and his life being very chaotic. For Davey, I'm sure the lyrics were some of his rawest ones because it was so early on in the record. For me, I really loved that openness and that dark angular riffing in the verse."
Puget won't go into detail about what exactly Havok was going through at the time and won't discuss the meaning behind "A Deep Slow Panic," but he does shed some light on Burials. "The whole record and that song included is about feelings of chaos, suffocation, powerlessness, desperation, and detachment in his life that he was having at that time," he explains. "I think if you read the lyrics you can see where he was at mentally."