PREORDER: CEO - After The Fall [CD]

After the Fall is the band's most confident record yet. It keeps their trademark heavy riffs, big grooves and melodic hooks while widening their emotional and musical range. Across 13 tracks, it confronts a world of distraction, division and loss, but it focuses on what survives: resilience, connection, faith and the will to rise again.The Path Remains was about discovering what The ceo could become, says frontman Mack Mullins. With After the Fall, we stopped searching for that identity and just became it. There's a darker thread running through this album, but it's not a hopeless record. The title is After the Fall because the story isn't the fall, it's what happens next. You get back up. Bassist Vince Hornsby adds: Nobody is boxed into a role anymore. There are some really heavy moments, huge grooves and some of the most melodic stuff we've done. It still sounds like The ceo, but it's a band following the song instead of a formula. Lead single Reality pairs an infectious riff with a massive chorus. It takes aim at the blurred line between real life and the version of it served up by screens and algorithms. It's not an anti-technology song, Mullins explains. It's a wake-up call. Don't let the feed tell you what life is. The album plays as a journey. It moves from the tension of Static, Beyond Oblivion, Spotlight Saints and The Ghost Between, through the title track, toward renewal on Rise Again, Under the Same Moon and closer Still Enough.