In the 2010s, Nails ruled the roost in extreme. From their debut album Unsilent Death in 2010 to their two-track I Don’t Want to Know You single in 2019, the name of Nails became a by-word for extreme, punishing music, five letters that conveyed you were going to get your head stomped on and left in the dust. With a body of work barely over an hour long but incendiary for every second it’s hard to think of bands whose legend became entrenched so quickly and firmly in that last decade.

Things threatened to come to a hard stop though in 2020, when longtime members Taylor Young and John Gianelli abruptly quit the band, leaving frontman and guitarist Todd Jones the sole remainder of the line-up that had put together three of the most beloved albums in contemporary heavy music. Jones stated that Nails was not done and that a new record would be on the way, but after no further word followed for the rest of the COVID lockdown period, many wondered if the band had quietly faded into history.

True to his word though, Todd Jones and Nails are back, with a new line-up consisting of guitarist Sherby Lermo, bassist Andrew Solis, and drummer Carlos Cruz, and a brand new album Every Bridge Burning. Todd is ready to divulge the story of the rebirth of Nails, and the creation of the most difficult album of their career.

The new Nails album is here, and from the outside many wondered if this record might not happen. Does this feel to you and your career like a particularly important record?

Jones - It feels very important and it’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. I had to rebuild the band from scratch, and also I had to rediscover the guitar in order to get excited about making songs for the band.

At what point did the genesis of this record really start after the previous line-up of Nails disbanded?

Jones - In the summer of 2020 I got asked to work with Terror on their record Pain Into Power, so starting in August I committed to working with them for about a year until about July of 2021. After that I really started playing guitar more for Nails and really trying to get it going, writing guitar riffs and songs. In August-September of 2022 was when I met up with Carlos [Cruz] and as much as I wanted to write a Nails record, I couldn’t really get a bulk of it completed until I had a drummer to play with.

With metal and hardcore punk music it’s music that is really driven by the energy, and I think a drummer dictates mostly how that energy is gonna go. Once I got with Carlos then I could get into a situation where I could try things out and see how they felt. So we got together in 2022 and then in October of 2023 we recorded the album.

How did you find bringing Nails songs to the table and the rehearsal room with a totally new band behind you?

Jones - Shelby [Lermo] was the first person to join me in doing Nails, and we met in the summer of 2019 when Nails and Shelby’s band Ulthar toured together. We stayed in touch, became pals, and I was explaining to him my situation regarding finding musicians to play with and I never thought he would want to, but he said he’d love to jam with me. I love his guitar-playing and his songwriting and the bands he’s in, I think he’s a great musical mind, so I got on board with him and then Carlos.

Early in COVID I was hanging out with my friend [Nails mastering] Nick Townsend at his recording studio, and his friend Andrew Solis was present and we started just playing for the fun of it with no agenda. I really took note of Andrew and how he was really able to pick things up fast, so when it was time to find a bass player I thought of him. He sadly joined after we recorded and I really wish he’d had the opportunity to give input, because I think he’d have valuable input and wish he’d had the experience of recording the record with us, but Shelby wrote a full song Dehumanized.

Looking at the other projects the other guys in the band now are also known for, there's a little bit of everything that goes into the Nails melting pot. With Nails being this fusion of styles from both the metal and the hardcore trees, was it a process of finding musicians who could navigate both sides of that together?

Jones - Yeah, it was a challenge, and the hardest part was finding a drummer. When you look at Nails, stylistically there’s two big things on the drums, which are the double bass metal stuff and then the punk rock stuff. Usually, if you’re a death metal drummer, you don’t have much interest in learning punk stylings of music, and all the punk drummers I know don’t wanna touch double bass. It’s a weird balance to find a drummer who is interested in both those things. Once we found Carlos it was like finding water in a desert.

The first announcement of the new Nails record being on the way was a photo of yourself with producer Kurt Ballou last year. Was that valuable having Kurt there who has made all of these records with you as a reliable presence on this one?

Jones - It was important to us when making the record. I’m aware that the fans of Nails, given there was such a turnover in the lineup, they’re probably cautious and wondering if this band they’ve been a fan of will continue to give them what they expect of us. Showing a picture of me and Kurt was kind of planned for that reason of reinforcing to our audience that they are gonna get what they expect of Nails, because Kurt has recorded all of our albums and so it was business as usual when it came to that stuff.

With your last album You Will Never Be One of Us being eight years ago, did you have any sense of looking at that record and thinking of it as a foundation for this one when picking back up?

Jones - I would say Unsilent Death is our foundation, and we’ve built on that as we’ve gone on. Regarding this record comparing it to You Will Never Be One of Us, I would say that whatever record we’re doing is driven around what we’re excited about at that time. On this record I was mainly focused on being simple while also being expressive in my guitar playing. On You Will Never Be One of Us we were a little more technical.

For me, singing and playing guitar on the songs on Unsilent Death is extremely fun and easy, while singing and playing guitar on the songs on You Will Never Be One of Us is much more challenging. I like it, and it’s fun, but it’s not as easy. On this record it was purposefully more expressive in the guitar playing than any other Nails record, but it’s also a little laidback in terms of the technicality of the riffing.

You have artwork from Wrest again and it also seems directly linked to the artwork of You Will Never Be One of Us with the same character appearing on both. Is that representative of a link between the albums?

Jones - Wrest suggested that the centrepiece character of our You Will Never Be One of Us record become like a theme that we continue, and I thought that sounded great. When I called him up and said I’d love for him to come back and do the cover, I gave him some direction and he used the same character. I love the artwork for our new record, it’s our best, and it’s one of my favourite things Wrest has done.

A lot of people will measure Nails albums by their brevity and extremity, but there are some fun surprises on this one, where for example on the song Give Me the Painkiller you are translating 80s speed metal sounds through a Nails filter. When putting those old school sounds into this ultra extreme form of music, is that a case of wanting to make things that you weren’t hearing or bringing in something that was missing?

Jones - Each Nails album is intended to be similar but I don’t look at them as a carbon copy of each other. It has to have something interesting or new about it, while still sounding like Nails and having the same direct delivery. What drives that is what we’re into at the time.

I feel like bands and their audiences grow together, where there’s probably a lot of fifteen to eighteen year olds who are going to hear Nails for the first time now and be into it, but there’s also a lot of people who have been with us since we did Abandon All Life or Unsilent Death, and maybe they were in their early twenties then and now they’re in their early to mid thirties. They’ve probably grown to become fans of lots of other music, and have grown to be fans of Motörhead and classic rock, so it kind of makes sense to me that our audience is growing with us.

A typical powerviolence or grindcore fan maybe isn’t used to hearing something like that, but I had faith in the song and that it sounds like Nails. We weren’t changing the sound of our band but just adding something to it.

One of the biggest changes from Unsilent Death to now might be vocally. How have you arrived at this more gargled, retched voice compared to the more shouted punk vocals of the older stuff?

Jones - When Nails started out and even to this day I consider myself a guitarist first and a vocalist second. I don’t practice my vocals like I practice guitar. I was learning as I was going and that’s why I think my vocals sound different on each Nails record. I would say I have found my sound and what I sound like now is probably what I’m going to sound like in the future, and with that being said, we recorded our record in October of 2023 with Kurt Ballou and when it came to recording my vocals I was not pleased with my performance. We made plans to finish up all the music, and then I would go home for a couple months, rehearse my vocals, record them in January and then Kurt would mix the record with them.

That’s exactly what we did and that was the first time in Nails history where I actually rehearsed my vocals before I recorded them. Typically, we write all the music first and once all that is done I start writing lyrics, and my work ethic with doing vocals is not as strong as it is with guitar. That’s just how it is.

It’s been over a decade now since Nails really blew up in the underground scene and looking back now on the early 2010s, it was a moment of real crossover buzz for a lot of underground and extreme bands with a bit of a media feeding frenzy. Now we are a bit of a time on from that, how do you feel that affected your band?

Jones - The press has always been very kind to our band, and always very enthusiastic. That was not something I expected and it’s a warm welcome I’m happy about. I’m just happy to be in Nails and happy that there are people who are interested, but looking back at that time, it was unexpected. Right now as you pointed out it is a new musical landscape, and I’m really looking forward to getting out there and playing shows. It seems like there’s a lot of younger folks who haven’t seen Nails who have gotten into the band since the last time we toured, and I’m really looking forward to playing to those people and seeing what that’s like. It’s very cool to me to see an influx of younger folks interested in our band, just as much as it’s cool that the people who were fans of our band have stuck with us.

Have you at all had to gear yourself up for being back in the limelight and all of the press attention that come with a Nails record?

Jones - I enjoyed not being communicated to. When you put out a record and there’s a lot of talk about your band, there’s a lot of people who reach out because they need a favour or want me to do something for them. When your record’s not being talked about and you’re off-cycle, not as many people do that, and when you added COVID to that, I didn’t hear from so many people. Part of that was a bummer but I was also grateful that people weren’t asking me to do things for them.

It sounds kinda shitty of me but that’s just how people are. It’s business as usual for me now, I’ve been doing music since I was 13 and I’ve almost been playing shows for 30 years now. It’s a different musical landscape but playing a show is playing a show, getting in a van is getting in a van. It’ll all be the same just with a new culture.

Playing hardcore for all of that time with Carry On and Terror even before Nails, what’s your ethos of longevity playing fast, heavy music?

Jones - Just loving hardcore, loving punk rock, and loving metal. I just love it and I still love those genres of music which inspire me and make me feel good. There’s all kinds of new bands that are good and I’m a musician first and foremost, so I’m just gonna keep doing what I do until I don’t love it or I can’t do it anymore. As I get older, working out is a big thing and keeping my cardio up, so it’s important to maintain being physical.

With the massive enthusiasm though greeting the announcement that Nails would be coming back, do you feel that positivity of people re-embracing you?

Jones - I’m just not a person who makes announcements when I don’t have anything to announce. I know that a lot of current bands are really into that, but if I don’t have anything to say I’m not gonna say it. During all those years where we weren’t present, I was working! I just didn’t have anything to say yet, so I’m not gonna waste anybody’s time.

But yeah dude, I felt that big time. It was awesome. It felt really good because music moves so fast and bands come and go and get forgotten about all the time, so to post that picture of me and Kurt and see people get so excited and have so much enthusiasm about it was amazing.

There is a lot of self-doubt for a musician, and going in there making a record all you can do is make the music that excites you. You do that and put it out to the world and cross your fingers. People say “I don’t make music for other people”, and that’s cool but if you have ambitions to tour that means you hope people show up to the show, so you want people to enjoy your stuff. That’s just the plain truth, so to see that people didn’t forget about us and that people still wanted it, it was a relief because there were times when I asked myself if people even cared about this band anymore.

I didn’t know that people did, but it seems like they do, so I’m happy about that and I’m gonna go on tour and connect with those people. I think going on tour and seeing people come to your shows will be the biggest gauge of how your band is doing.

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Every Bridge Burning arrives August 30th via Nuclear Blast Records. Pre-order the album - HERE

See the band's most recent list of confirmed tour dates below.