Volbeat return with new album in June and share new single ‘By a Monster’s Hand’

Michael Poulsen (vocals, guitar), and Jon Larsen (drums), and Kaspar Boye Larsen (bass) — are thrilled to announce their ninth album God Of Angels Trust. This album arrives on June 6 via longtime label Vertigo/Universal.  The album will coincide with plenty of touring on the band’s “Greatest Of All Tours Worldwide”.

Yesterday, the band shared the first taste of new music via the video for the first single “By a Monster’s Hand.” The song is a mid-paced riff-fest with no concessions to standard meter, juxtaposing pummeling rhythms with point-counterpoint hooks. Watch the video, which splices footage of Volbeat in their most natural state of performing, all the while following an ominously unsettling and familiar face, below.

The video was produced by Ghost Atomic and directed by Adam Rothlein, the same team that lensed videos for prior Volbeat hits “Shotgun Blues,” “Die To Live,” and “Leviathan.”

With God Of Angels Trust, The Danish band — which has scored ten #1 songs on the Billboard Mainstream Rock airplay chart, the most ever for a band based outside North America — has thrown caution to the wind, ignored comfort zones, and paid little heed to traditional songwriting in the search for something more immediate and surprising.  

The end result will thrill Volbeat‘s dedicated legion of fans. “In the past, I’ve taken a long time to write and obsessed over so many elements of the songs before finishing them,” says Poulsen. “This time, I wanted to make a Volbeat record without thinking too much about it. Instead of following any kind of structure I said, ‘Okay, there are no rules. I can do anything I want. I can start with a chorus or do songs that are just a bunch of verses stacked on top of each other. Anything goes.’ That was freeing for me and made it exciting to write this album.”

Poulsen‘s excitement to thwart convention is palpable throughout God Of Angels Trust, a punchy, crunchy album that’s undeniably Volbeat, yet marches to a fresh new metallic and melodic energy. 

Poulsen started working on songs for the follow-up to 2021’s Servant of the Mind in the summer of 2024. Volbeat was taking a year-long break from touring to give Michael a chance to recover from throat surgery and to tour with his death metal band, Asinhell. Driven equally by his excitement to record a new Volbeat album and by his determination not to follow convention, Poulsen worked on songs for a mere three weeks with bandmates drummer Jon Larsen and bassist Kaspar Boye Larsen. Amazingly, they worked on a new song at every rehearsal. Three weeks into the process, Volbeat had arranged half of God Of Angels Trust. That’s when Poulsen decided that having no rules meant he could follow his muse wherever it took him, and he veered off on a different path. He and the band still wrote and rehearsed two songs a week, but they started composing more familiar rock songs that drew from traditional elements. 

The band entered the studio with their longtime producer Jacob Hansen in the fall of 2024. As with the songwriting, Poulsen wanted to work quickly and rely on instinct, so they just plugged in and started to play. To keep the music sounding urgent and immediate, Volbeat recorded live in the studio, playing as few takes as possible before moving from one song to the next. 

When it came time to add lead guitar, there was no question that Volbeat would tap Flemming C. Lund, who currently tours with the band and worked with Michael in Asinhell. A mere 13 days after they started working with Hansen, Volbeat were finished.   

As impressive as it is that Volbeat wrote and recorded an entire album in about five weeks, what’s more incredible is that God Of Angels Trust sounds as fleshed out, eclectic, and fulfilling as albums that have taken 10 times longer (or more) to create. In the end, creating such a strong album so quickly was a tremendous challenge that demanded Zen-like calm, a joy for exploration, maximal creativity, and razor-sharp concentration to pull off. 

“In some ways, it feels like we’ve come full circle,” Poulsen explains. “If you start drawing a circle over an extended period of time, eventually you’ve going to get back where you started, and that’s how I feel now. I’ve dealt with medical operations, lineup changes, and all these things, and now it feels like a rebirth. It doesn’t feel like we’re doing our ninth studio album, it feels like we’re on our first album again and there’s something really refreshing about that.”

Pre-order here.

TRACKLIST:
1. Devils are Awake
2. By a Monster’s Hand
3. Acid Rain
4. Demonic Depression
5. In the Barn of the Goat Giving Birth to Satan’s Spawn in a  Dying World of Doom
6. Time Will Heal
7. Better Be Fueled than Tamed
8. At the End of the Sirens
9. Lonely Fields
10. Enlighten the Disorder (By a Monster’s Hand Part 2)