BLACK VEIL BRIDES from Los Angeles have released the official music video for “Born Again.” Below is the video, which was directed by Vicente Cordero of Industrialism Films.
“Born Again” is off BLACK VEIL BRIDES’ latest album, “The Phantom Tomorrow,” which was released by Sumerian Records in October. BLACK VEIL BRIDES’ third concept album and most ambitious release to date features a dozen songs, including the band’s first-ever Top 10 Active Rock single “Scarlet Cross.”
Eliran Kantor, noted for his work with TESTAMENT, HATEBREED, HAVOK, and Andy Black, to mention a few, designed the cover artwork for “The Phantom Tomorrow.” Erik Ron (GODSMACK, DANCE GAVIN DANCE, BUSH) produced “The Phantom Tomorrow,” which guitarist Jake Pitts co-produced.
Andy Biersack of BLACK VEIL BRIDES told Rock Sound about “Born Again”: “‘Born Again’ was composed later on in the process. With these people in ‘The Phantom Tomorrow’ finding what they thought would be their savior in Blackbird, we felt that we needed a song that symbolized joy and the sense of rebirth. There have been sightings of this individual throughout the plot, and there’s this old legend of the Blackbird, this thing that’s been passed down from generation to generation, and now this is ‘The Phantom Tomorrow,’ and the people in the underground are saying, ‘This is our opportunity.’ ‘We’re going to be born again,’ the crowd sings. This is our chance to get out of the mess we’ve created with the Ninth Circle and all of the rules, limitations, and requirements that they must follow. So, before you uncover this Blackbird persona, this is supposed to be a happy time on the record.”
In a 2021 interview with “Cutter’s Rockcast,” Biersack explored the lyrical themes handled on “The Phantom Tomorrow.” “It’s a theme album,” he explained. The tale is basically the concept… We have this love of making up heroes and obsessing over other people in our society, particularly now, and we have these false idols and heroes. So the story is about people putting all of their power on this mythological persona, and then turning their back on them because no one can fulfill the aspirations and ideas that you put on them. So it’s an alternate version of our own timeline in which our fascination with heroes and aspirational imagery spirals out of control and consumes our entire society.”
Andy explained how he came up with the idea for “The Phantom Tomorrow”: “I simply kind of sat down and started writing this novel in January of [2020].” When I’m writing, I also do a lot of art. I’m not amazing, but I enjoy being able to express myself in that manner. So I typed out the entire scenario and drew character drawings, and then we were scheduled to join the studio about a week and a half later, and this whole surge of this concept came to me by chance.So I gathered everyone in the studio and said, ‘Look, this is what I think we should do,’ and laid out the tale, storyline, and concepts. Because we’ve worked on concept albums previously. We’ve discovered that the ideal technique is for me to offer the band the concept and ideas for the story, and then we write as a band together to acquire tone and figure out how we’re going to get through this adventure. I’ll take those tunes and write lyrics to serve the stories and plotlines that run throughout the journey from song one to song final.
“There are horrible shackles on it,” he said, “meaning that you have to write within the framework of what you’re writing.” “But I tried to leave this one open-ended where possible…’ I didn’t want to write about things I didn’t understand; I wanted it to be about my own experience. And there’s nothing in our tale that doesn’t resemble the current scenario, whether it’s on a personal level with people I’ve met or on a sociopolitical one with the current state of the world. Because the ideas are universal, it was a little bit simpler to go through the voyage.”
BLACK VEIL BRIDES announced the addition of bassist Lonny Eagleton to their ranks in November 2019. He was brought in to replace Ashley Purdy, who had left the band earlier that month.
Eagleton previously performed on a solo tour with Biersack (a.k.a. Andy Black).