Royal Sons

The timing is probably coincidental, but Royal Sons are dropping their new album on June 27, which is a day after the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn. I bring this up primarily because the fourth track on the first side is called “Crazy Horse” but also because Matador has been a long time coming — the earliest-written song on the new album came together over five years ago, in part because the band kept missing their own self-imposed deadlines.

“We always have a deadline, and then we always end up moving it,” said lead guitarist Chad Beck, who, along with lead singer Blake Parish and bassist/backing vocalist Marcus Gonzales, had joined me on a Friday night for a few beers on a local patio — guitarist Johnny McConlogue and drummer Javier Garza were unable to make it — where we shot the shit about the band’s formation in 2016 and what had happened between now and the debut of their first album, 2018’s Praise and Warships.

“I don’t even feel like you tell me those deadlines,” Parish said.

“We did,” Beck said, shrugging. “I remember telling you, ‘Hey, we need lyrics, we need lyrics.’ ”

Parish chuckled. “Oh, I guess you did say that a couple times, didn’t you?”

They laugh about it now, but the period between the albums was clouded by a host of personal tragedies, in particular the deaths of several close friends of the band, as well as McConlogue’s mother and Parish’s father plus both of his dogs.

“We lost a lot of people in a short amount of time, like in about 18 months,” Parish said.

This was in 2021, and over the previous five years, the band had been riding pretty high. Praise and Warships had been well received, and the band’s bluesy, scuzzy psyche-rock resonated with local audiences, many of whom had been fans of In Memory of Man, the defunct hard-rock band crewed by Beck, Garza, Gonzales, and McConlogue, plus the Hanna Barbarians, Parish’s old band that had dissolved in 2016. But like every band, the 2020 pandemic hit the brakes on Royal Sons’ momentum, then the darkness of 2021 rolled around.

“I guess we got through COVID, got a few songs written, and then that’s when my dad passed, and then we had a whole series of shit, and then Johnny’s mom passed after that,” Parish said. “And then, it was just, I don’t know. … I just didn’t feel like doing it, writing lyrics.”

Devastated by all the loss, Parish dived headfirst into a whiskey bottle. “I was drinking really heavily, and I was just depressed, and so … there was about a year after my dad passed before I got sober. There were 18 months that were just really dark, and I felt really isolated.”

While the riffs still came to Beck, Gonzales, and McConlogue, Parish’s depression made creative inspiration beyond his reach, which made him feel even worse.

“When you get depressed, you also have that, like, self doubt. I was like, ‘Everything came together so smooth in the first round. Why isn’t [the songwriting] happening faster?’ ”

But a year and half after his dad passed, Parish got sober. The lyrics came back. “There were some [lyrics] about what I’d been through. You know, there’s themes about addiction and darkness and bitterness. Well, and shit, there’s some about watching a city change and the, like, ‘fuck you’ to all that … the kind of feeling of being chewed up and spit out by the music scene in a little bit of a way, by my own doing. That’s kind of what [the title track] ‘Matador’ is. It’s kind of just about, like, living too hard in that scene, and now I’m jaded, faded, wired, wasted, worn.”

The weary indifference of “Matador” is specific to the bandmembers’ disillusionment with their cumulative years of local rock ’n’ roll experience — among the five of them, it’s probably over a century — and that emotional scar tissue is marbled throughout the album. Parish’s sardonic takes on fame and authenticity (“Insert Your Popstar Here,” “Matador”) are mirrored by the hard-charging riffage and stoner-rock thunder of his bandmates, and all of that amplifier grime is rendered in crisp detail by producer Eric Delegard and mastering engineer Steve Nagasaki. Overall, Matador sounds like a deeper, angrier Fu Manchu, trading that band’s muscle-car-desert-cruise fantasies for the kind of knotty riffs borne of NorTex’s groove-metal legacy, the arrangements rendered in shades of Deep Purple and King Crimson. The record’s riffs are surprisingly knotty, the high-gain guitar assault shooting through proggy twists and turns, as well as a cover of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” on Side B. Matador is a thrilling, head-banging successor to Praise and Warships, and it’s clear that Royal Sons are back and swinging hard.

Gonzales said that Matador is the consequence of his and his band’s love for the power of rock ’n’ roll, how Royal Sons was a refuge during dark times.

“I mean, after the amount of time, that stuck with each other. … We never started thinking, ‘Oh, man, let’s just, you know, hang it up,’ ” he said. “Let’s keep showing up every Tuesday. Let’s do our practices. Let’s keep in touch, keep pushing each other.”

Even when that pushing meant trudging through the quicksand of depression, Royal Sons were there for one another, deadlines be damned. Parish was honest about that, admitting that reinhabiting those times in Matador’s songs is often emotionally rough. “But sometimes it feels really fucking triumphant to be on the other side of it, you know?”

He paused for a moment, then he referenced the bull on the album’s cover.

“The bull, it gets stabbed the whole time during a bullfight. It’s basically torture. I mean, it’s pretty easy to feel like that these days, so I definitely root for the bull against the matador.”

 

Royal Sons Album Release Show

9pm Sat, Jun 27, w/Freeze Sucka, Aurora James at Magnolia Motor Lounge, 3803 Southwest Blvd, Fort Worth. $10-12. 817-332-3344.