Photo by Danin Drahos
Thirty years ago, Corrosion of Conformity had it all before them. In October 1996, they released their fifth album, Wiseblood. They had a year’s touring booked supporting Metallica. The latter released Load the same year and were criticised for their change of musical direction. Wiseblood was spoken of favorably as the album Load could have been. The song "Man or Ash" even featured guest vocals by James Hetfield.
But not everyone agreed, including COC’s label. Despite the Metallica tour, and an eventual Grammy nomination for “Drowning in a Daydream”, label execs at Columbia felt the album was too “aggressively recorded”, as frontman Pepper Keenan puts it. Labels held more sway in the CD era than they do now, and the album was deprived of support. “That’s how those people in those ivory towers work,” Keenan says.
Not that COC cared. It was business as usual. The band founded in the early eighties by guitarist Woody Weatherman, bassist Mike Dean and drummer Reed Mullin had upset everyone’s expectations many times already. Being groundbreaking was in COC’s DNA. They released classic hardcore punk albums like Eye for an Eye (1984) and Animosity (1985) before Keenan joined for 1991’s more expansive Blind. But it was 1994’s Deliverance which put the cat amongst the pigeons. With Keenan settled in, they took the band’s style into a still-sharp but bluesy, Southern-fried direction. The epitome of this new sound was stoner-metal, Sabbath-meets-Skynyrd classic “Albatross”. Deliverance has now sold over 500,000 copies.
“When we wrote ‘Albatross’, a lot of people were pissed at us (and a lot of people weren't),” says Keenan. “But my point being: that was the most punk rock feeling I'd had in a long time: pissing off the motherfuckers who were running in circles. That was awesome. And then 15 years later, they think it's one of the coolest songs ever.”
Keenan joins our Zoom call from his car. He’s on the school run and places his phone so that I have a low-angle shot of his muscly forearm planted on the armrest. Woody Weatherman is in what looks like a makeshift man cave/tool shed and smokes cigars throughout. With new album Good God / Baad Man, their first in eight years, it’s plentifully evident that COC don’t give a shit what people think of them, as long as they’re pleasing themselves.
“The name of the band says it all,” says Weatherman. “We've never been worried about jumping into different genres or doing our thing. We've caught some flak back in the day, you know, hardcore dudes that were like, ‘Where's the mosh part?’ or something like that. And we're cool with that, because we like that kind of music too. But we've just always had the freedom.”
The writing sessions for Good God / Baad Man began with Weatherman visiting Keenan in New Orleans, listening to music, drinking, and playing until their fingers fell off. These visits lasted four to five days. They only had each other to answer to. The sole moments of recrimination came when their beer cans were empty. Happy, energised and feeling young again, the creativity flowed. Soon, Keenan says, they were producing “a giant blossoming flower of fucking crazy shit”.
Early on in this process they decided to split the new album that was emerging into two distinct halves. Good God contains the heavier, more austere side of their sound, and Baad Man the more playful, livin’-in-the-city side. This framework afforded them more freedom to “shift gears”, according to Keenan.
As Weatherman notes: “There's a little bit of every era of COC present on this record.”
There’s also a strong sense of moving forward: older, (somewhat) wiser and without regret. It’s in the opening lyrics of the first song, “Good God? / Final Dawn”: “A different path, another way/Regrets are none on judgement day”.
“There seems to be some type of time thing on this album where It’s like: no regrets,” says Keenan. “This is it. Let's go for it. I didn't realize that writing the lyrics, but the way people are perceiving this, we went through a lot of crap to get where we're at right now. So perhaps in a Freudian way, it was written like that. I don't fucking know. We were just trying to write shit that rips.”
Moving on from tragedy has been a sad imperative on this record. Reed Mullin died in 2020, aged 53. For this album, COC re-recruited drummer Stanton Moore, who played on 2005’s In the Arms of God. Moore is more accustomed to playing in a suit with his jazz-funk jam band, Galactic. Throughout the new record, he cuts COC’s music into fascinating and unexpected shapes. Galactic singer Angelica Joseph (aka Jelly) also provides an extraordinary guest vocal on final track “Forever Amplified” – a tribute to the fallen. She dressed in black to record it, on the final day of tracking for the entire album, and went full-on Acid Queen, in the vein of Tina Turner’s performance in The Who’s 1975 rock opera movie Tommy.
According to Weatherman, they were “more directional” with Moore twenty years ago, but for this recording “he grabbed the reins himself”. His opening turn on “Good God? / Final Dawn”, after its elegant introduction, is pure unbridled rock fury on the kit, with his rollin’ and tumblin’ drum fills hurtling in every direction. He smoked it so hard that Keenan was compelled to throw out the guitar work he had already recorded and start again: “To double down on his fucking ass”.
Weatherman and Keenan made the effort to record demos that sounded great even without drums. They point to “The Handler” as a propulsive, wah-driven example of a song that had a lurching groove before Moore tore it to pieces. The secret of the album’s highly-structured-yet-loose feel was doing the preparation and then letting themselves fly off the handle.
“We worked a lot on this,” says Keenan. “We didn't just throw shit on the wall. It sounds like it's created manically and live and shit. But there was a lot of pre-production we did on this thing. It was by design to make it sound crude, because Stanton is such a fucking amazing drummer. My big goal was to get Stanton on a fucking John Bonham caveman kit and put fucking four microphones on him.”
Putting those microphones into place was producer Warren Riker, who Keenan had previously worked with recording New Orleans metal supergroup Down. Keenan wanted to make the best use of Riker’s “guerrilla tactics” for recording, such as throwing a SM57 mic on the floor in front of the drum kit to capture that massive sound. They deployed other methods to firmly swerve making a “digital-sounding, perfect record”.
“Clearly we’d be fools if we did something like that,” reflects Keenan.
For all of Moore’s electricity on the drum kit, Weatherman and Keenan felt Mullin’s presence recording Good God / Baad Man. They’d anticipate where Mullin (whom they affectionately nicknamed “The Mule”) might throw in a roll or lean on his surprisingly fine-tuned pop sensibilities. Keenan points to Moore’s work on the straight-up rocker “Swallowing The Anchor” as channelling Mullin.
“Reed was one of those dudes that had a swing, and it was such a foundational part of COC,” says Weatherman. “Even from the early days of the punk rock shit, he had a swing and he was a special drummer.”
On the nine-minute-plus centrepiece of the album, “Run For Your Life”, the band is channelling another musician: Neil Young. Exploring the introspective, moodier side of the band found on “13 Angels” from 2000’s America’s Volume Dealer, “Run For Your Life” finds its protagonist broken but not beaten at the bottom of a canyon: “What do you do, when you can’t break through?/You better run for your life”.
As part of their jam sessions, Weatherman and Keenan watched videos of Neil Young recording his soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 “acid western” Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp. In the film, Depp plays William Blake, named for the English Romantic poet-mystic. Blake is on the run after killing a man. The film portrays his travels and encounters in a trippy dreamworld. For the soundtrack, Young set up with his guitar and an open-backed Fender amp and simply played along to a giant screen showing a playback of the movie.
“For probably a one-month period, I was just chasing that record, flipping out,” says Keenan. “I kept following that fucking soundtrack. It's one of my favorite recordings of all time, and I wanted something of that level.”
“Run For Your Life” ends with a haunting monologue by band friend and veteran, Jason Everman, about the “visceral impulse” to live overriding his determination to shoot himself when he had contemplated suicide.
“I thought it would be important to raise awareness on something like that for anybody going through those types of thoughts,” says Keenan. “It might be the time to maybe put it out front and center.”
This kind of reckoning with oneself and others runs strongly on the first half of the album. “You Or Me” sounds like Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd colliding with Paranoid-era Black Sabbath and speaks to our caveman, survivalist impulses. Keenan says he struggled for a long time to make the words as big as the song.
“I just stripped it down to the basic principles of the origins of man,” he says. “Since the dawn of time, it's been you or me, right? It's gonna be one or the other since [Stanley Kubrick’s] 2001: A Space Odyssey, when a monkey picks up a fucking stick [bone], right?”
If this all sounds heavygoing, COC were conscious listeners would need a breather. “Baad Man” (say it in a Jamaican accent) ushers in the second half of the album in the jammy mould of "Señor Limpio" from Deliverance and “Zippo” from America’s Volume Dealer. This lets COC indulge a little in the seedier side of things, living “[d]own the devil's throat” as one lyric puts it. They continue the theme of walking on the wrong side of the tracks on “Handcuff County”.
COC’s longevity is connected to this open embrace of having no boundaries. It includes fluidity in their ranks, while the band keeps trucking as an entity – bigger than any single member. Keenan himself wasn’t involved with COC for their 2012 self-titled album or 2014’s IX. Mike Dean has been replaced by Bobby Landgraf on bass (I highly recommend Landgraf’s insightful and easygoing YouTube content made whilst working as Rex Brown’s bass tech on recent Pantera tours).
“I have to look at it like this, sometimes, as an outsider as well,” says Keenan. “It's almost bigger than the sum of its parts. It's almost like it's just a mantra. It's a train of thought. Or it's a way of life. Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. That kind of shit. It's just an exploratory way of living. That's the way, as I get older, that I perceive it.”
And so their catalogue endures, and grows in stature. One of COC’s most political songs (the first Keenan sang for the band), “Vote With A Bullet”, is now 35 years old. In the last couple of years it has become more relevant and dangerous than ever, in what Keenan describes as the “primitive times” we're living in.
COC won’t be pigeonholed. Whether it’s the shuffling acoustic, whiskey-soaked lament of “Brickman”, or the smouldering, Eastern-flavoured instrumental “Bedouin’s Hand”, Good God / Baad Man is defiantly varied. COC have shown once again that conformity sucks, especially when it comes to their own music.
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Good God / Baad Man, the new album from Corrosion of Conformity arrives April 3rd via Nuclear Blast Records. Order the album - HERE
CORROSION OF CONFORMITY 2026 TOUR DATES
4/07/2026 The Masquerade – Atlanta, GA *
4/08/2026 The Pyrle – Greensboro, NC *
4/09/2026 Starland Ballroom – Sayreville, NJ ^
4/11/2026 The Palladium – Worcester, MA ^
4/12/2026 Kodak Center Theater – Rochester, NY ^
4/14/2026 The Factory – Chesterfield, MO ^
4/15/2026 Manchester Music Hall – Lexington, KY ^
4/17/2026 VooDoo at Harrah’s Kansas City – North Kansas City, MO ^
4/18/2026 Anthem at Hard Rock Sioux City – Sioux City, IA **
4/19/2026 The District – Sioux Falls, SD ^
4/21/2026 Mesa Theater – Grand Junction, CO ^
4/22/2026 Metro Music Hall – Salt Lake City, UT (COC only)
4/23/2026 Treefort Music Hall – Boise, ID ^
4/24/2026 Cargo Concert Hall – Reno, NV ^
4/25/2026 Sick New World – Las Vegas, NV Festival Date
4/27/2026 Sunshine Theater – Albuquerque, NM ^
4/28/2026 The Horseshoe – Midland, TX ^
4/29/2026 The Aztec Theatre – San Antonio, TX ^
5/01/2026 Vinyl Music Hall – Pensacola, FL ^
5/02/2026 The Signal – Chattanooga, TN ^
5/03/2026 The Orange Peel – Asheville, NC ^
5/05/2026 Phoenix Concert Theatre – Toronto, ON *
5/06/2026 Fairmount Theatre – Montreal, QC *
5/07/2026 Le Poisson Rouge – New York, NY ***
5/08/2026 Underground Arts – Philadelphia, PA ***
5/09/2026 Mr. Smalls Theatre – Millvale, PA ***
5/10/2026 The Roxy – Lakewood, OH ***
5/12/2026 The Machine Shop – Flint, MI ***
5/13/2026 The Pyramid Scheme – Grand Rapids, MI ***
5/14/2026 Outset – Chicago, IL ***
5/15/2026 Cannery Hall – Nashville, TN ***
5/16/2026 Tipitina's – New Orleans, LA ***
WESTERN US + CANADA DATES
7/06/2026 Scout Bar - Houston, TX
7/07/2026 Granada Theater - Dallas, TX
7/08/2026 The Far Out Lounge - Austin, TX
7/10/2026 The Nile Theater - Mesa, AZ
7/11/2026 The Regent Theater - Los Angeles, CA
7/12/2026 The Glass House - Pomona, CA
7/13/2026 Great American Music Hall - San Francisco, CA
7/15/2026 Hawthorne Theatre - Portland, OR
7/16/2026 The Crocodile - Seattle, WA
7/17/2026 Rickshaw Theatre - Vancouver, BC
7/18/2026 Knitting Factory - Spokane, WA
7/19/2026 Shrine Social Club - Boise, ID
7/21/2026 Federal Theatre - Denver, CO
7/22/2026 Bourbon Theatre - Lincoln, NE
* w/ Whores
^ w/ Clutch, JD Pinkus
*** w/ Whores, Crobot
