Fit For A King’s Ryan Kirby guides us through the creation of the band’s latest album, ‘Lonely God’, out August 01 via Solid State Records.
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In life, there’s one simple question that should underpin every decision you make. It may seem obvious, even unnecessary, but amidst the chaos of modern existence, it’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of:
Why am I doing this?
With trends to chase and outside voices crowding our heads, it’s a question Fit For A King’s Ryan Kirby has been asking himself a lot lately.
Dividing their fanbase with the melodic, arena-ready metalcore punch of 2020’s ‘The Path’, the album’s mixed reception directly shaped the direction of 2022’s ‘The Hell We Create’. A follow-up that played it safe, designed to upset as few people as possible, it landed well in the scene – but something didn’t feel right.
“Honestly, we weren’t doing what we wanted. We were doing what other people wanted,” Ryan reflects.
“That may sound odd for a band that’s been around for a while, but a lot of people only discovered us when we toured with Motionless In White, I Prevail, and Killswitch Engage. To them, we’re still a new band. It’s rare to have any success without haters, and we weren’t great at handling that. We let the noise into our writing process.”
Recalibrating their focus and rediscovering their purpose, ‘Lonely God’ marks a bold new chapter for the Texas metalcore titans. Listening back to the songs that built their legacy, they embarked on a full creative reset.
“We spent a lot of time revisiting albums like ‘Dark Skies’, asking ourselves: ‘What is Fit For A King?’ and ‘What made people fall in love with us?’,” Ryan nods.
“We used to take risks. I don’t view any album as a mistake, but I think we didn’t gain many new fans with ‘The Hell We Create’ because we stopped experimenting. Writing to avoid losing fans doesn’t help you grow. I like striving for bigger things – and that’s what this record became about.”
Twelve songs that reshape the DNA of their band while diving back into their roots, ‘Lonely God’ is the sound of five musicians working together to rediscover their ‘why’. An album that might just make you fall in love with heavy music all over again, think you know Fit For A King? Think again.
THE SOUND
With drummer Trey Celaya and guitarist Daniel Gailey playing an equal role in the album writing process for the first time, a collective goal needed to be locked down early on in the creation of ‘Lonely God’.
Five creative minds overflowing with ideas, often verging in drastically different directions, one thing everyone involved could agree on was that this chapter of Fit For A King needed to feel good. Not just sonically brutal and powerful, but evocative and emotional.
That’s how one question became their north star in the studio: Would this sound good on a night drive?
“We repeated that question over and over,” Ryan says.
“That’s how we ended up with a lot of the atmospheric, synth-led stuff. When you’re on a road trip, and it’s the middle of the night on a highway, that’s the stuff that feels good. Bands like Bad Omens, Spiritbox, and Sleep Token… They almost put you in a trance. Listening to our old music, it never really had that vibe. We wanted this album to be fun to listen to, not just heavy.”
Encouraging one another to step out of their designated roles to bring that idea to life, there were essentially no limits placed on where these songs could go. With Ryan taking on the role of the final filter, the frontman was tasked with making sense of it all, ensuring the sense of cohesion that runs through the record’s final incarnation.
From the towering melodic refrain of opener ‘Begin The Sacrifice’ to the atmospheric aggression of ‘No Tomorrow’ and the strings that swell through the pummelling core of deathcore anthem ‘Witness The End’, what binds every note on ‘Lonely God’ is a sense of sheer, unbreakable passion. Focused solely on making the best songs possible, the result is a record that fuses cinematic textures with bleak soundscapes and blistering heaviness, utilising every last drop of the band’s collective potential.
“It’s exciting to approach an album like that. We’ve teased deathcore stuff with our fans for a long time, trying to gauge if people actually want it. But this time, it was like, ‘You know what? I want it’,” Ryan shrugs
“That’s what I love about songs like ‘Witness The End’. We’ve been a band for a long time, and people have a preconceived notion of what we sound like. That song fits within the context of the album, but at the same time it’s so left field. I want to give the fans something that they didn’t even know they wanted from Fit For A King.”
THE LYRICS
Written amidst the tension of the US presidential election, and with countless other bleak realities dominating the news headlines, there are two sides to ‘Lonely God’.
The first is fuelled by frustration. Take for example the album’s title track, a scorching takedown of the groups and institutions that prey upon people’s good intentions, and society’s fascination with offering up platforms to the worst people.
On the flip side, it’s an album that encourages us to question our worth. To reflect on who and what we’re putting our trust and time into, and whether they’re truly worthy of our energy.
Exploring politics, religion, identity, and influence, the weight of the album’s dual message led Ryan to adopt a new perspective on songwriting.
“I didn’t want to write a straight-up anti-political album, so I tried to be less literal this time around,” he explains.
“I’ve never considered myself a super poetic person, but thinking like that has stopped me taking risks in my lyrics before. I wanted to be less on the nose, using cooler vocabulary and more metaphors.”
Combining personal experience with his observations on the world around him, it’s certainly less direct than we’ve come to expect from Fit For A King, but no amount of poetry and symbolism can overshadow the emotional weight of ‘Lonely God’.
On one end of the spectrum is ‘Shelter’, a heart-wrenching cut that explores Ryan and his wife’s first-hand experience with adoption, then there’s the fictional story explored deeply throughout the music videos for ‘Lonely God’, ‘Begin The Sacrifice’, and ‘Witness the End’.
“It’s about a broken person with a lot of past demons,” the vocalist says.
“He’s asking for somebody to give him a direction to go in. Whether it’s crying out to God, or crying out for a political leader to fix things… That can open the door for evil to come in. A politician campaigning for people to join them, or religious leaders saying the church is your home, often their only motives are money, control, and growing their influence. It even applies to family and friends who abuse your trust and try to take advantage of you. There are all of these people begging for your attention, asking for you to follow them, and all it takes is one wrong turn to completely send your life into a spiral.”
“I hope these songs lead people to reflect on all the things they believe in,” he continues.
“To think about those they follow and ask, ‘Are they using me?’, ‘Are they taking advantage of me?’, and ‘Are there people that I should cut out of my life?’ It’s pretty deep to tell people to question their entire life, but I think a lot of people need to question their allegiances.”
THE COLLABORATORS
Working with metal producer extraordinaire Drew Fulk (Wage War, Ice Nine Kills) on their last three records, the band’s clean slate approach to album eight demanded a fresh studio energy. Decamping to Los Angeles to join forces with Daniel Braunstein (Spiritbox, Dayseeker), the producer brought out a new side to their creativity.
“Drew took our career to a whole other level. He made us focus on getting our big hits, and there’s a reason why he has so many number one songs on the radio,” Ryan explains.
“Dan is a different kind of producer, but most importantly he knew our band from a fan perspective. He’s been an observer for seven albums of our career, so we were able to ask what he liked from our band. He just wanted to help us write the truest Fit For A King record ever.”
“The vocals were a particularly big thing for him,” he continues.
“He told me, ‘I want to believe every word you’re saying’. He was so picky about that, and on every take, he would tell me that he wasn’t believing it until we got that one where he did. That’s why it’s been so cool to see the reactions to ‘Begin The Sacrifice’, with people saying it feels intense and filled with pain. That’s exactly what we wanted.”
With Alpha Wolf lending a hand on ‘Monolith’ and The Plot In You putting their mark on ‘TECHNIUM’, every single pair of hands that has touched ‘Lonely God’ is not only uniquely talented, but belongs to a close, valued friend of Fit For A King.
Recruiting only those who they could be sure would put in the effort and love that these songs deserved, it’s impossible to talk about the album’s collaboration without mentioning Chris Motionless. Their two bands having toured together numerous times over the years and becoming good friends in the process, the Motionless In White frontman deals out some of his heaviest vocals in years on ‘Witness The End’.
“Getting Chris involved had nothing to do with the size of their band or his profile, we just thought it would be so cool to hear Chris do a song like that,” Ryan smiles.
“We knew that his high screams would be perfect for how evil it sounds, and it was a no-brainer. It was important to us that it didn’t just feel like a Motionless In White song though, because we’ll never be able to write those half as well as they can. We wanted to do something that Chris doesn’t do in Motionless In White, a different style of heavy. He’s on both choruses of the track, plus the second verse and the bridge. You’re getting the full Chris Motionless experience. Singing, screaming, creepy talking… He’s such a versatile vocalist.”
THE ARTWORK
Having settled on an album title as visceral as ‘Lonely God’, once the songs were complete and the time to work on the record’s visuals came around, Ryan and his bandmates knew they needed something equally striking. That responsibility was given to Jackson Eudy, one of Ryan’s closest friends.
“He was the best man at my wedding, and he’s never done artwork before,” he nods.
“It was completely hand-drawn, and then we sat and worked on it together. It was so cool because we didn’t just hire an artist that tonnes of other bands have used. I had coffee with him every week, and we talked about the record and what it meant. It wasn’t just a commission check for somebody. He was so passionate that he was actually offering to do it for free! We were like, ‘Absolutely not, we’re paying you’.”
“The artwork shows a person in a throne, which is supposed to represent power. It’s the pinnacle of everything that somebody could want, to be the king or the ruler. However, the person is on fire. Power is not always what you think it is, and often you’re giving up your humanity for that power.”
THE FUTURE
After years of reckoning and relentlessly trying to prove themselves, ‘Lonely God’ feels like a dazzling moment of clarity for Fit For A King.
Following their instincts and relighting their creative fire, its creation has allowed them to rediscover why they started this band almost two decades ago. Back then, if you had told Ryan and his bandmates that eight albums in, they would feel more hopeful about their future than ever before, they probably would have laughed it off.
But now, against all odds, that’s the reality they have found themselves in.
“Writing is my favourite thing ever. I love making art, sharing it with people, and seeing how they interact with it,” Ryan finishes.
“Going forward, people will see some changes to our headline show. We’re bringing the art aspect to the stage, and we want to create a cinematic experience through our live sets. It’s all about how big we can make it, and we’re fully aware that this is just our first attempt at writing an album as a group like this. We can do so much better now, and we can start building on that. I’m so ready to see how far it can go.”
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